TV catch-up

It's been an interesting few weeks on the box, but let's start with the footy. England versus Switzerland. It wasn't a vastly taxing match for the nerves, this 2-1 win, with England's profligacy being the main niggle (and almost being made to pay for it by the Swiss in the last minute of second-half injury time). Humour alert! After a tepid opening half hour, in which neither team had opened the scoring, John Motson brought up the curio that Ron Greenwood's first England match in charge was England vs Switzerland and that was a 0-0. At this point, Mark Lawrenson, usually as pleasant as dragging a cheesegrater down a blackboard, chimed in with "Not one of the neetral, then." Very witty, to riff on the political status of the Swiss.

A few oddities elsewhere. Talking about some financial crisis for ordinary people on the BBC Ten o'clock News, we had a right old Colemansballs. The reporter said, quite straight-faced, "I've been across the country talking to people whose lives have been turned upside down, not once, but twice." So surely they should be the right way up now?
Then last night, the last article on Newsnight regarding sustainable fashion was bizarre (or slipshod). There were shocking facts such as last year not only did the British but 2 million tonnes of clothing, but that 1.5 million of that went ot landfill, that 60% of the under 25s don't care where or how their clothing is made and that the textiles industry is as polluting as the chemical industry. But what really stood out for me, is that the researcher for the ambient soundtrack had raided the entire Suede backcatalogue, starting appropriately with a song about fashion, but then taking any of the corkscrew melodies by the band, regardless of relevance.

Finally, David Attenborough's swansong (or maybe, in this case, croak chorus), Life in Cold Blood. The title's suggestiveness, is deconstructed, even obliterated, by Attenborough in the first five minutes, making it apparent that it was coined just to make a splash in the TV scheduling lists. Once again, we have Attenborough, the voyeur, with his nature pornography. He is tasteful in his descriptions, such as 'copulation' and 'union', but it's a relief that he doesn't take anthropomorphism too far. An examination of the social habits is, as unsual, fascinating, such as the duel between the tortoises, but trying to integrate dinosaurs into a contemporary nature programme was a bit of a mistake, especially after Walking with Dinosaurs has covered most of that ground, despite the stunning CGI. One of the most amusing quotes was about these lizards that bake in the sun, and those with the biggest, most heated rock piles attract the females. Attenborough's team remove the rock pile to another spot of a (in Attenborough's words) "sex-starved" lizard. At this point, all the female lizards skedaddle to this new hang-out, to which Attenborough comments "So, the females do indeed go for the males with the hottest rocks." Well, fashionable diamonds are a girl's best friend. The likes of P. Diddy are justified in nature.