Monday, October 13, 2008
Red in tooth and claw
I have been enjoying "Big cat live" week on the BBC, rife with malapropisms and onanistic, self-congratulatory non-celebs as it is.
The Beeb's online content is inaccessible from outside these isles, sadly, so little point in embedding footage in this page. With the live webcams offering little other than up-to-the-minute coverage of Lions sitting on their lazy backsides and Hyena and Jackal cubs, highlights of cats were almost exclusively archive footage, of which the show has compiled a fairly impressive array during the more than ten years since its first showing:
Leopard brings down wildebeest in the midst of a stampeding herd. Having choked the life out of her victim with a throat hold, looks momentarily torn, then dashes back into the middle of the stampede and jumps on ANOTHER wildebeest, to the audible delight and disbelief of the presenter.
Highlights of bad English included one of the commentators repeatedly attempting to use "galvanise" as an intransitive verb, before forgetting what he was trying to say midway through a sentence, eventually concluding that certain cheetah cubs, which were being discussed, weren't young enough yet to be named.
In truth, I remember that the original "Big cat diary" was considerably better in theory than in practice. The programme improved over the years, but I found it much more agreeable in the weekly format than in the current daily format: in classic BBC sports-commentator fashion, the presenters insult the intelligence of their audience with continuous repetition of fairly easy-to-grasp stuff, which I find easier to stomach once a week than every evening.
Of our own wildlife situation, Joe observes that we have birds nesting just outside our kitchen door. My thoughts turn immediately to the danger posed to these by our pair of cats.
Joe's thoughts are evidently not too far removed from my own:
"I daresay I'll be scraping them off the kitchen floor at some point."
He shrugs, then goes to brew some more coffee.
The Beeb's online content is inaccessible from outside these isles, sadly, so little point in embedding footage in this page. With the live webcams offering little other than up-to-the-minute coverage of Lions sitting on their lazy backsides and Hyena and Jackal cubs, highlights of cats were almost exclusively archive footage, of which the show has compiled a fairly impressive array during the more than ten years since its first showing:
Leopard brings down wildebeest in the midst of a stampeding herd. Having choked the life out of her victim with a throat hold, looks momentarily torn, then dashes back into the middle of the stampede and jumps on ANOTHER wildebeest, to the audible delight and disbelief of the presenter.
Highlights of bad English included one of the commentators repeatedly attempting to use "galvanise" as an intransitive verb, before forgetting what he was trying to say midway through a sentence, eventually concluding that certain cheetah cubs, which were being discussed, weren't young enough yet to be named.
In truth, I remember that the original "Big cat diary" was considerably better in theory than in practice. The programme improved over the years, but I found it much more agreeable in the weekly format than in the current daily format: in classic BBC sports-commentator fashion, the presenters insult the intelligence of their audience with continuous repetition of fairly easy-to-grasp stuff, which I find easier to stomach once a week than every evening.
Of our own wildlife situation, Joe observes that we have birds nesting just outside our kitchen door. My thoughts turn immediately to the danger posed to these by our pair of cats.
Joe's thoughts are evidently not too far removed from my own:
"I daresay I'll be scraping them off the kitchen floor at some point."
He shrugs, then goes to brew some more coffee.
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you should be able to post content through BBCs youtube page... I believe that they do have one for those of us not on your isles.
# posted by 
: 11:50 AM
: 11:50 AM
The Beeb's stuff can only be embedded through their own homepage, and most of it can't be accessed from outside the UK, which used to really cheese me off when I wanted to listen to football commentary.
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