Blue Planet II: episode two offers a peerless insight into what lurks in the deep - review
The problem for a critic watching Blue Planet II (BBC One), as with almost all of David Attenborough's work over the past two decades, is that it's playing a different sport from most of what makes it onto our screens. The writing, the music, the production, the scale, the thousands of hours of work by the most talented cameramen in the world. It's like having Botticelli stop by the village life-drawing class, or Lewis Hamilton turn up for stag-do go-karting. There's not much to learn from comparisons. In fact, it's tempting to give it one star, to teach it a lesson about reviewability.
The second episode of this second series focused on The Deep. "We know more about the surface of Mars than about the deepest parts of our seas," Attenborough intoned over the opening credits. The crew launched little submarines from a specially designed boat to film at the bottom of the ocean, starting in Antarctica.
We met fish with huge fangs, fish with transparent heads, fish that walked, shrimps who live their whole lives encased in coral. Ocean-floor corals older than the pyramids. Squid hunting in vast packs. Flabber was gasted, gobs were smacked, jaws dropped. Actually in one instance, Jaws dropped, as six-gill sharks assembled around the sunken carcass of a sperm whale, eating for what might have been their first meal of the year. Once the sharks had cleaned the flesh, zombie worms arrived, using acid to burrow into the whale's bones.
If there is a criticism, and finding one is like fishing for seahorses in a storm, it's the environmental tut-tutting. You can hear the shift in Attenborough's voice as he draws himself up for another sermon about the destruction we are wreaking on the planet. But has anyone ever watched an episode of Blue Planet, Life or Planet Earth without having the urge to rush out and dedicate their lives to environmental work?
The final sequence here revealed the creatures that thrive around undersea vents, where water is super-heated by the mantle. Crabs use hairs on their legs to feed on hydrogen sulphide. Shrimp skirt temperatures that would melt lead. Some believe these geysers hold the secret to all life on Earth. For now, this geezer holds the secret to all life on Earth.