CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Let this be a warning to parents… you’re never out of the woods!
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New Lives In The Wild
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The British Tribe Next Door
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New babies ought to come with a melodramatic health warning: ‘Parents beware! You may think you can cope with the sleepless nights and the endless worry . . . but just wait till they grow up!’
Ben Fogle could hardly hide his horror, as he returned with a tenth series of New Lives In The Wild (C5), at how 24-year-old university dropout Annalisa had turned her back on her middle-class family.
Now she lives in a shack in the Swedish forest with no electricity or water and only a stove for heat.
‘She’s young enough to be my daughter,’ he kept muttering. When Annalisa told him how she had lived rough on the streets for years, giving her mum and dad no way of knowing if she was alive or dead, Ben looked like he was suppressing an inner scream.
Ben Fogle (right) could hardly hide his horror, as he returned with a tenth series of New Lives In The Wild (C5), at how 24-year-old university dropout Annalisa (left with her son Nico) had turned her back on her middle-class family
This show has evolved to become the best documentary series on Channel Five. It began as a bit of a boy’s own romp, as adventurer Ben roughed it in island huts and mountain caves with a succession of bearded hermits, real-life Robinson Crusoes — most of them stark mad, like Aussie Dave Glasheen whose harem of wives were all plastic mannequins.
Gradually, Ben turned his attention to survivalists and refugees from the rat race, whether they were beach bums in remotest Peru or backwoods bear hunters in the Canadian Yukon. His questions became more sensitive, less gung-ho, as he saw that many of his hosts were trying to run away from some trauma in the past — and had dragged it with them instead.
Ben no longer envies everyone he meets. Some of them, such as Annalisa, leave him genuinely anxious for their safety.
After years of living in squats and doorways around Europe, Annalisa was sleeping in the back of a Transit van when she called her long- suffering parents in Italy to tell them she was pregnant. They sold their holiday chalet to give her some money, which she spent on her half-derelict Swedish barn.
She scavenges food for herself and her toddler Nico, now 22 months, from bins behind supermarkets. Annalisa claims this is her protest against capitalism and a wasteful consumerist society. Naturally, she takes only organic produce, with no added chemicals: it’s so important to eat healthily when you’re feeding your baby out of a skip.
Once, all Ben’s sympathies would have been with this wild woman of the woods. Now, he couldn’t help feeling for her parents: ‘I can’t imagine they were particularly happy with the whole thing,’ he said, his voice straining with understatement.
Thanks to their daughter’s semi-celebrity, Scarlett Moffatt’s parents are living in a Namibian desert village with the Himba people, on The British Tribe Next Door (C4)
Annalisa, however, didn’t see it that way. She was glad, she said, to have given mamma and pappa the chance to be so generous towards her and ‘become the truly amazing people they are’.
Thanks to their daughter’s semi-celebrity, Scarlett Moffatt’s parents are living in a Namibian desert village with the Himba people, on The British Tribe Next Door (C4).
BIG CHILL OF THE WEEK:
Nightly temperatures have plummeted, so it must be time for Chris Packham and pals to don warm coats for Autumnwatch (BBC2). Michaela Strachan says she wears hot water bottles under her jumpers. I don’t blame her.
There’s no mud hut for them, though, in this ridiculous format. The production crew have built a replica of their English terrace house and filled it with all their possessions.
It’s a tawdry excuse to gawp at traditional African culture while having a giggle at Scarlett’s attempts to dig a well and her dad’s failed efforts at herding.
I suspect that, when the TV cameras aren’t around, the Himba prefer jeans and T-shirts to loincloths.
Their head man, Mboki, insists his people exist without money, which makes me wonder how Channel Four are paying them to pretend they’ve never seen a TV screen before.
Maybe their agent negotiated the deal in cattle.
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