Saturday, August 10, 2013
Sri Lanka: Elephant Island, BBC Two, review
Presented by Martyn Colbeck, the mild-mannered wildlife cameraman, Sri Lanka: Elephant Island focused on the lesser-known Asian elephants of Sri Lanka, as opposed to the more charismatic African variety.
Take an African elephant; reduce the tusks until they are either non-existent, or resemble two little pencils; shrink the ears until they are a pair of fluttering rags; dome the forehead and arch the back; and you'll have yourself a Sri Lankan Asian. Think Nigel Lawson before and after his diet, and you'll be along the right lines.
To begin with, it was all a bit underwhelming. These Asian beasts don't fill up the screen as well as their African cousins, and sort of grunt, gruffle and squeak around in a not particularly compelling manner. After all, how many documentaries have we seen about elephants? One would have expected it to contain a) scenes of bathing, b) a bit of an elephant funeral, and c) the birth of a calf. And one would have been exactly right on all counts.
But the narrative of the individual elephants was highly engaging. Much of the programme was filmed at the Elephant Transit Home, a conservation centre in the southern Sri Lankan bush, and we got to know "the gang" (as Colbeck insisted on referring to the orphaned elephants) pretty well. In particular, the story of Namal, a runty, two-and-a-half-year-old calf with an amputated leg was rather beguiling. As was the vignette of the male bull elephant paying his respects at the corpse of one of his friends.
Best of all were the little, whimsical asides exploring other animal behaviour. There was a delightful sequence on the scourge of the mosquito, which showed a variety of different animals, from buffalo to monkeys, having a good old scratch; and another showing storks catching fish. A heartwarming, quirky and informative bit of diversion of a Friday evening.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2fc86011/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctvandradio0C10A227880A0CSri0ELanka0EElephant0EIsland0EBBC0ETwo0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
