DO you remember how unbelievably good David Attenborough’s nature documentaries used to be?
We’d see amazing creatures do amazing things and then Dave would climb inside a termite mound and explain in great detail how this complex, billion-strong society functioned. Before he rushed off to converse with a gorilla.
He made it fun to learn things, and we learned so much.
Sadly, however, those days are gone.
Today, Sir Attenborough is too old to appear in the films and I’m afraid he doesn’t even write the script any more. He just reads out words that have been written by a team of vegan communists who have only one thing on their minds. Climate change.
I’ve been watching Frozen Planet II and it’s a joke, because we learn nothing at all. We see some dramatic footage of a polar bear and before we are told anything at all, we are warned that because of human activity and capitalism and Donald Trump, the poor bear’s habitat is disappearing.
Then we are off to Asia where, in the snowy mountains, we find a tiger.
Why is it up there? What drove it from the jungle? No idea. All we found out is that thanks to global warming, it will soon be wiped out. Like the emperor penguins and walruses and baby seals.
Then we saw a big chunk of glacier fall into the sea and were told that global warming was respons-ible for this.
Really? So what used to happen in the olden days when glaciers reached the ocean? They became unicorns?
At one point, they found a gang of beluga whales which were swimming around in a tiny hole in the ice.
They couldn’t reach open water because get-ting there under the ice would cause them to drown.
These creatures, then, actually need global warming. But did Sir Dave’s commie backroom team mention that?
No. They did not.
It’s for the same reason, they’ll never tell you about the long-tailed tit which is thriving in the UK now the spring is so much warmer than it used to be.
Around the world it’s the same story — with wild boars, and domestic cats and Brown Argus butterflies and rattlesnakes and trumpeter swans and octopuses and starfish. They all benefit from a warmer world.
But those producers we see at the end of Frozen Planet, with their pigtails and their Glastonbury hats, are not interested in that message at all.
So they keep banging the “climate change is bad” gong.
When I first began to notice this stuck-record commentary, I decided to get my own back. Every time they mentioned global warm-ing, I’d turn my central heating up a notch.
But that’s too expensive, really.
So I’ve turned it into a drinking game. Every time climate change crops up, I have a beer.
It’s the only way to make this half-arsed twaddle tolerable.
How could anyone abandon these poor pups?
LIKE everyone in the country, I was mildly interested yesterday while watching footage of Florida being washed away.
Then shocked and appalled to see that photograph of those six fox-red Labrador puppies which had been abandoned in Kent.
I have two fox-reds like that and simply cannot understand what was going through the head of the man who dumped them.
In a crate. At the side of a busy road.
Quite apart from the barbarity, six dogs like that have to be worth, at least, £3,000.
GONE KITS UP
AS I’m a bit of a country bumpkin these days, I was rather looking forward to a trip to London this week.
I was due to have lunch with a friend and then, in the evening, there was a boys’ night that I hoped would get messy and interesting.
Sadly, however, as I left the house, I didn’t feel terribly well.
Fearing that I may have Covid, I went to our medicine cabinet, grabbed a testing kit and set off, figuring that I’d ram a stick up my schnozzer if the symptoms got worse.
Over lunch, they did, so afterwards I went to my flat, looked in my bag and found that I’d actually grabbed a testing kit for colon cancer.
I therefore missed the boys’ night.
Even though it now turns out I don’t have Covid. Or any kind of unpleasant tumour in my bottom.
Limit's crawl wrong
SOME socialists decided this week that serious traffic accident injuries in Edinburgh had fallen by a third because the city-wide speed limit had been lowered from 30mph to 20mph.
Right. So it stands to reason that if you lower it from 20mph to 10mph, they’ll fall by a third again.
But if that’s what’s wanted – zero injuries – why not go the whole hog and reduce it to 1mph? Or 0mph?
This whole 20mph debate is nonsensical.
People have to move about and, when they do, accidents happen.
T’was ever thus.
Far more interesting is the news that, in Britain as a whole, 30 per cent of all car drivers and passengers who die in road accidents are not wearing a seatbelt.
How is that possible? Every car I’ve driven for the last 20 years goes berserk if you don’t do up your belt. So how are people ignoring the racket? And more importantly, why?
The AA says a national seatbelt campaign is needed. But it should be careful when choosing who should front it. Because, last time round, some bright spark went for Jimmy Savile.
SO, Sir Starmer wants to form a nationalised British energy company for British people. Oooh, exciting.
Will it be like British Rail and British Leyland?
Will we go back to the days when you could only buy a gas cooker from the nationalised gas board and electric oven from the nationalised electricity board?
Because those were great days. Strike-free days. Smooth days.
No, hang on, they were terrible days. Because no one in history has ever said: “This government-run operation is tremendous.”
I mean, look at the NHS today. It’s just a massive collection of buildings where health and safety officers can have meetings. A British Energy company would be exactly the same.
That's cheek mate
THE world of chess has been rocked to its foundations as various top players, including Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, accuse one another of cheating.
Now, I know these guys are basically supercomputers with eyebrows – their brains burn 500 calories an hour during matches – but I couldn’t understand how you could cheat at chess when you’re sitting on a stage being watched by a live audience and a bank of TV cameras.
Well, it turns out that people watching on camera feeds are asking computers to figure out the next move then transmitting that information to a receiver hidden on the player’s body, using morse code.
I figured, however, there’d be a simple solution to this.
Make the players compete in the nude.
But even this wouldn’t work because, according to Elon Musk, the receiver isn’t “on” their body. It’s “in” it.
This will certainly cause me to pay attention the next time we record Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
I always have one ear out for suspicious coughing and now I’ll have to watch the contestant to see if they are squirming around in their seat, and occasionally going a bit cross-eyed.