Wild Weather
Rating: 
The World's Most Extreme Rivers
Rating: 
Telly celebs are like soap bubbles. They shimmer with gaudy colours, they defy gravity, and then they vanish with a silent pop.
No
one is immune, not even the presenters of the BBC’s biggest grossing
shows. Top Gear, for instance, has been shovelling lorryloads of cash
from overseas sales into the Beeb’s coffers for years, but thanks to a
series of seemingly racist schoolboy jokes that turned into
international incidents, the series could be cancelled at any moment.
And
if that happens, its stars will go out like lights, too. Jeremy
Clarkson doesn’t believe that’s possible — he’s blithely confident of
being most important man on TV for ever.
Richard Hammond has a taste for pop science, and a knack for explaining complex patterns of physics or chemistry
His
junior presenters, James May and Richard Hammond, are less cocksure.
Both have been trying out their own solo projects, as back-up. May has
done a series of laddish documentaries: his problem is that he always
looks like Clarkson’s stand-in, apeing his delivery. He has failed to
develop a style of his own.
Hammond
is doing much better. He has a taste for pop science, and a knack for
explaining complex patterns of physics or chemistry. His face adopts a
look of boyish glee every time he discovers how natural phenomena work,
and he manages to imply that he’s a dunce for not knowing in the first
place.
This
made his new series, Wild Weather (BBC1), entertaining as well as
educational. Like a third-former on a school geography field trip, who
has downed a jumbo can of high-caffeine energy drink on the coach, he
ricocheted around, squeaking with excitement.
On
top of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, said to be the windiest place
on earth, he tried leaning into a gale, and went skittling into the film
crew after his hat was blown off.
He
came up with an intriguing explanation for why it’s always windier on
hilltops than at sea level: the atmosphere is more tightly compressed
between the land and the next layer of atmosphere, called the
troposphere. In other words, the wind is being squeezed by the sky.
That
sounds like a tale to please a child, similar to Spike Milligan’s
theory as to why raindrops are small: they’re falling through tiny holes
in the clouds.
But
Hammond seemed more sure of his facts when he investigated a tornado of
flame, called a firewhirl. Setting out baking trays filled with fuel on
the bare earth, under the blistering sun of Western Australia amid a
plague of flies, he set a blazing pillar roaring into the sky.
Tornados
of dust and debris, and waterspouts at sea, are frightening enough. The
firewhirl looked like a biblical scourge, sent to destroy whole cities.
His new series Wild Weather (BBC1) is
entertaining as well as educational. Like a third-former on a school
geography field trip he ricocheted around, squeaking with excitement
His face adopts a look of boyish glee
every time he discovers how natural phenomena work, and he manages to
imply that he’s a dunce for not knowing in the first place
Many
people must have tuned in to Wild Weather simply because they were Top
Gear fans, and Hammond had a duty to feature something with wheels,
wings or a jet engine.
What
he chose looked like Darth Vader’s helmet, though in fact it was a U.S.
tornado hunter’s car, an armoured vehicle capable of clamping itself to
the tarmac if struck by a 300mph vortex.
It
was half science lab, half Panzer tank — but even that would not have
withstood the worst conditions captured in mobile phone footage on The
World’s Most Extreme Rivers (More4). Scariest of all were the pictures
of a Pacific tsunami hitting Japan’s east coast.
Entire
towns were demolished, as trillions of gallons of seawater rushed over
the land in moments. Streets of houses were picked up and swept away
like twigs. The narrator didn’t explain why this came under the heading
of rivers, but the show had given up any pretence of serious analysis
from the start. Also classified as ‘rivers’ were the Panama Canal and
Antarctic pack ice.
It
was all cobbled together from news reels, TV stock and old
documentaries. The only moments that made dramatic viewing were DIY
shots — first, from the digital video lens on a canoe that was sucked
into a whirlpool on the River Congo during a white water expedition, and
then from the phone pictures of flash floods.
Everyone
is a cameraman these days. If you’re unlucky enough to get caught in a
natural disaster, don’t forget to film it on your mobile.
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