Natural World: Penguin Post Office (BBC 2) Rating: *****
Natural World: Penguin Post Office shows the bird's breeding cycle over a summer on the tiny British outpost of Goudier Island
Wildlife documentaries are often criticised for being twee, crammed with adorable fluff-bundles and doe-eyed darlings. They make us imagine the wilds are teeming with creatures that yearn to curl up on our sofas and snuggle. Remember
March Of The Penguins, cinema’s 2005 surprise success? Narrator Morgan
Freeman convinced us that they were seabird saints - moral guardians of
the Antarctic.
All over America, evangelical churches ferried parishioners to the pictures in busloads, to celebrate the pious, monogamous penguins who mate for life. So it came as a bombshell to learn in Penguin Post Office (BBC2) that Morgan got it badly wrong. These birds are nothing less than sleazy gangsters in feather tuxedos. They’re thieving, sex-mad chick-murderers and they stink to high heaven.
At least no one is going to accuse director Andrew Graham-Brown of being twee.
His
team filmed the bird’s breeding cycle over a summer on the tiny British
outpost of Goudier Island, 700 miles south of Argentina, where
volunteers man the planet’s most southerly gift shop and Post Office.
Once,
this was a whaling station, and the evidence is still there of hardy
seamen stranded for years at a time at the end of the world - images of
Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe in flimsy negligees are painted lovingly
on the walls.
But now it’s a busy tourist stop-off.
Cruise
ships bring 18,000 visitors a year, and they send nearly 80,000
postcards from the red Royal Mail postbox. ‘It’s kinda relaxing,’ smiled
the postmistress, on sabbatical from her job teaching at a U.S. school,
as she franked each stamp by hand.
This would be an icy idyll, if it weren’t for the 2,000 gentoo penguins. The
tourists thought they were cute, but after a week of living cheek by
beak beside them, you’d be begging the courts for a seabird Asbo. They steal incessantly. It would be safer to hand your house keys to a junkie than let a gentoo anywhere near your rockery.
The penguins in Natural World are 'nothing less than sleazy gangsters in feather tuxedos'
Given
half a chance, any gentoo will be having a fling with a neighbour, and
they don’t care who finds out. Penguin morality would make a rabbit
blush.
Domestic violence is rife. Husband
and wife stab and peck at each other, jealously bickering about
everything from their ramshackle stone nests to whose turn it is to sit
on the egg. Chicks that stray from the nest will be viciously battered to death: penguins appear to enjoy violence.
On top of all that, the human volunteers have to spend every morning with a broom and buckets of hot water, knee-deep in rank droppings on their doorstep. Graham-Brown couldn’t have done a better hatchet job if he’d caught penguins dealing drugs to the cruise ship visitors.
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