Survival of the wildest

TV REVIEW: Charles Darwin and the Tree of LifeBBC1, Sunday, Teens in the WildRTÉ1, Monday, Boys and Girls AloneChannel 4, Tuesday

THESE ARE chilly days for us walking, sliding, sneezing, slumped-in-front-of-the-telly descendants of mound-shaped stromatolites. I’m just grateful that the evolutionary process has got me far enough beyond the spherical microbe stage that I am able to chuck the dregs of the morning kettle across the windscreen before I battle the blizzard to get the uniformed, wheezing stromatolitettes into school. Those of you with motor cars that automatically de-ice while brewing up a cappuccino and decoding the trajectory of the Japanese yen, laugh while you still can – this Siberian chill isn’t just confined to the weather.

Anyway, I'm not going to talk about weather conditions, oh no, unlike Newsnight, which took a break from reporting on the collapsing world economy long enough for a harrumphing Jeremy Paxman to get damned sniffy about the millions of Britons who stayed home to have snowball fights this week, rather than rush into the city to get depressed about their dwindling pension funds (an indication of an upsurge in sanity, I'd say).

And the same could be said for us here on our shivering little patch of greenery – apparently, one in 10 of us didn’t make it into work last Monday. Understandable, really; boiling up snow and ice to make hot, beefy Bovril is no picnic, but somebody’s got to do it.

I hope, however, that all those confined to their duvets had set their recorders to Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, David Attenborough's visually stunning film, screened as part of a season of programmes celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Attenborough, now in his 80s, walked us backwards, so to speak, on a journey through his own lifetime and then hopscotched all the way back to Darwin, evoking the bearded scientist in his cottage garden as he slowly developed his evolutionary theory while categorising the armies of insect and songbird corpses gathered on his epic voyage with HMS Beaglein the 1830s.

Quite aside from the programme’s fascinating depiction of Darwin and his pioneering research (which didn’t land him in the good books of the vicar), this was also a nostalgic portrait of Attenborough’s own absorbing and productive career. Beginning with depictions of the biblical creation story (painterly but a bit hard to swallow), Attenborough went on to plunder six decades of archive from his own work to illustrate the thinking behind the theory of natural selection. Every step of the way, it was a riveting, beautiful journey.

Traversing the globe in belted safari shirts, from the cacophonous Amazonian rainforest to the lush Galapagos Islands (where he knelt in hushed awe at the feet of a giant turtle), Attenborough’s focused and remarkable career began, he told us, with a boyhood fascination with geology and natural history, and hours spent climbing over ancient rocks in Leicester, hunting for fossils and making museums of his own finds.

THE SENSE OF WONDERand purpose that appears to have illuminated Attenborough's young life was patently missing from those of the disparate group of six male teenagers rounded up for Teens in the Wild. Bored out of their wits, stressed, wild, under-achieving, volatile, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, and carrying the tragic woes of inertia and indifference on their slouched, Nike-clad shoulders, they were clearly in need of guidance. Step up to the plate, Dr David Coleman, RTÉ's sanguine clinical psychologist, an entirely likeable man with intelligent-looking eyewear and a reputation (from his last TV outing, Families in Trouble) for taming hyperactive Irish tots and restoring calm to households straining under the weight of unruly children.

His current sinecure sees Coleman take the aforementioned bunch of teenagers to Connemara’s Delphi Mountain Resort in the wilds of the wonderful west, to bounce them around on bungee ropes and encase them in rubber wetsuits for three long therapeutic weeks, in order to bring a bit of positive thinking into their lives. But breaking in this uniformly dour lot seems a far hoarier and hairier task than his previous challenge, and makes subduing a bevy of tantrum-threatening ankle-biters look like a piece of Smartie cake.

“I’ve never seen so many trees in my life – it’s depressing,” said one miserablist boy encased in a nylon hoodie and wreathed in post-pubescent angst.

To a man, the teens were outraged at the removal of their mobile telephones and their cigarettes, and by the end of episode one Coleman had had to relinquish one of his charges and was struggling to hang on to the remaining five. It’s vaguely interesting fare, especially if, like me, you have a burgeoning pre-teen in your midst and you are standing looking into the ravine of adolescence. God, it looks deep.

IT'S ONE THINGto ask teenagers to relinquish their mobile phones and a couple of crushed Marlboros; it's another entirely to cajole 20 boys and girls aged between eight and 12 into waving goodbye to their parents for a fortnight, in order to participate in an adult-free reality-TV series.

In four years of TV reviewing, I don't think I have ever been as angry, outraged or upset by a reality programme as I am by Channel 4's controversial new four-part series, Boys and Girls Alone. As I write, suppressed fury is denting my keyboard at the thought of this voyeuristic entertainment masquerading as a sociological experiment, supposedly designed to show us that our children can't cope because they have been "mollycoddled" by us 21st-century parents.

In order to illuminate this thesis, the producers behind this damaging and degrading piece of television placed the 10 girls and 10 boys in two separate holiday villages, leaving them to live independently in various cottages, cooking and cleaning for themselves and organising not just their sleeping arrangements but a mini-society.

This Lord of the Flieswith hand-held cameras amounts to technological abuse of the dignity of a bunch of vulnerable children (and the only word worth remembering here is children). The cameras follow them around as they create mayhem, bully each other and variously starve and cry and beg to go home, while their TV-worshipping parents listen to and watch their offspring's anxiety, despair and wild excitement on monitors in a studio beyond the gates. There are, apparently, security staff on hand in case the children attempt to wipe each other out with the garden hoe or drown each other with the water pistols.

More upsetting, though, than the vicious bullying, the exhaustion and the tears of frustration and confusion from the young participants is the parents’ desparate adherence to some ghastly principle that if the man from the telly says this is a good thing to do, we’ll do it – and gee whiz, with a bit of luck we’ll all end up on Richard and Judy.

I can’t watch any more of this series. I just don’t get my kicks from observing children being psychologically damaged and publicly humiliated in the name of entertainment. This time, Channel 4 has definitively pushed the reality-TV envelope somewhere where the sun don’t shine.

The patient's progress: A quest for an answer to Alzheimer's

In Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer's(BBC2, Wednesday), the Discworldauthor declares: "I want to make Alzheimer's sorry that it caught me." Pratchett (right), described as one of the most active and creative minds of his generation, was, a little over a year ago, at the age of 59, diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.

"This is not how I envisaged my 60th year," mused the multi-million-selling author as he was driven through London to do a breakfast TV slot and chat to the nation about the state of his fecund brain.

"Before you can kill the beast, you must name it," added Pratchett to the camera crew he had invited to spend a year with him as he negotiated a path through life with the insidious, progressive and as yet incurable disease.

On diagnosis, Pratchett had pledged $1 million to Alzheimer's research, and his investigations revealed that some scientists appear tantalisingly close to the possibility of a medical breakthrough. Given his largesse, the writer was a welcome visitor to a state-of-the-art lab where bunches of hapless fruit flies had been given the disease, and then cured.

The determinedly sharp and humorous Pratchett was curious as to how one could tell if a fruit fly had Alzheimer's – did they have difficulty finding their car keys?

His strangely reassuring and highly watchable search for answers concludes next week.