On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television NATURE WALKS BY MARVIN KITMAN Have you ever noticed how much walking is done on television? Phil Donahue is always strutting around like a nervous peacock on his syndicated talk...
...McCullough in the forest could be the "Man from Glad" or any other tall white-haired person who happened to be among the trees...
...Phil Donahue is always strutting around like a nervous peacock on his syndicated talk show...
...His shoes were two feet long, counting the flippers, sohewasn'tshown gaiting very often on land...
...he wanted Nature to happen to him...
...1 can envision a beautifully produced, multipart PBS series, funded by a respectable oil company and narrated by a spellbinding TV personage—somebody who really moves around, like Oral Roberts or Reverend Terri Garr...
...A great gray owl, the phantom herself, watched intently throughout from an adjoining tree...
...In the public TV documentary world, however, "thenar-rator lope" is flourishing...
...At CBS nowadays, interestingly, newspeople have returned to their former standing poses while trying to look as tense as the young Dan Rather...
...The Wailing Wall, for example, could be flashed behind Abba Eban in Chromakey...
...My favorite move is when lie walks into two time or temperature zones virtually at the same moment...
...It has become a tradition of these costly major multipart epics for the narrators to amble as they speak, preferably in foreign lands...
...It's as if the big-time hosts took classes together at a Ministry of Silly Walks...
...Jolly good of you to come by...
...The best thing about Bellamy in terms of television was his frequently being photographed in his bathing suit—say, while wading through garbage in the lake where he theorized it all began, "it" being ichthyostega, the first fish that ever crawled out of a lake...
...There was a ladder available, presumably left over from a previous expedition—unless they grow naturally in this heavily explored environment...
...Nod...
...Our guys are too tired to walk," CBS News Vice President Robert Chandler explained to me in a discussion of important industry trends...
...The antithesis of Professor Sagan, the glamour boy of the galaxies, Atten-borough doesn't roll his eyes like a Bette Davis of the astro sciences...
...Who could forget Professor Carl Sa-gan's dramatic hikes on PBS' Cosmos (1980), with those pompous silhouettes of his pensive face against the Milky Way...
...Heat least squinted when he talked...
...They became the first "walking heads," descendants of the " talking heads...
...Jacob Bronowski, host of the Ascent of Man (1975...
...But the home of truly important "walk-abouts" is public television's blockbuster documentary series...
...Here I am freezing my cojones off in the Antarctic with the penguins,' he might start out one paragraph, and then wind it up getting prickly heat with the salamanders selling magazine subscriptions in the tropics...
...He is one of only two walkers— the other being David McCullough of Smithsonian World—who do not even employ stuntmen doubles...
...TV news has long been teaching us more about architecture, especially of the 1930s Works Progress Administration period when the majority of today's public buildings were erected, than about what is taking place inside our government edifices...
...Maybe he was attempting a remake of Star Trek...
...I listened to his "billyuns and billyuns of facts," as he put it, but with all the smiling and flashing lights and prancing I had a hard time figuring out what his series was ultimately about...
...No, he has to be outdoors, on his feet, in front of a building, ruin, wall, desert, mountain...
...Of course, we can never know for sure whether any of the hosts are truly where wethinktheyare.Allthose scenic sights could be evoked in New York at the Ed Sullivan Theater...
...Speaking of Darwin, I wonder how come there has not yet been a creator-of-the-world series based on the views of the other side, of the creationists...
...He'd fling himself into the water hoping to eventually crawl out the way the ichthyostega did...
...And he is the exception that proves the rule...
...Following a brief discussion of the owls' regurgitation habits—more than I ever wanted to know about how they spit up bones and other excreta, which are then compacted into those famous owl pellets—Attenborough embarked on a journey into the trees...
...Certainly we have gone through legendary feats of walking over the years...
...I initially came upon the British university zoologist of BBC fame two years ago on CBS Cable...
...Louis Rukeyser is constantly shuttling from set to set on WNET /13' s Wall Street Week, for no other apparent reason than that the sets have to be used...
...Actually, I can think of only one host this past winter who did not walk—Abba Eban on WNET/13's series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews...
...No doubt jogging will be next...
...Nor does he indulge in corny theatrics and visual cliches...
...Chrysler's Lee Iacocca is kept moving while he does his company's commercials, whether the setting is a highway or a factory, presumably to keep the spots interesting...
...Still, he was great walking and talking underwater...
...Walking around on location was not pro forma for Bronowski, it was integral to his method...
...Shortly after dropping in on the Finnish great gray owl, Attenborough barged into the abode of a North American black bear...
...Just as McCullough has hung over the Panama Canal on a cherry-picker, Attenborough has gone skin-diving and dangled precariously from a 200-foot tree in the jungle before soaring four miles into the sky in a balloon...
...It is because all the early hosts of such programs were eaten, a usually reliable source tells me, that they now feature narrators we never see...
...Occasionally, when whatever he was informing us about either was not where it used to be or didn't exist any more, he had to go to a museum to shoot and you could see how displeased he was...
...Nobody can tell me the one-eared toads or three-eyed chimeras or rare big lummoxes haven't adjusted to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Nature Unit from Bristol, thus allowing it to get as close as it has for shows like Bellamy on Botany...
...One minute we see him in a red windbreaker in the Arctic, the next minute he is outside downtown Miami in a safari shirt...
...He is a calm, obviously very intelligent, charmingly witty fellow who performs great feats on his feet...
...Consequently, Bellamy disappeared from the screen, illustrating the survival of the fittest principle of Darwin and Mobil's Herbie Schmertz...
...See "Lost in the Sands," NL, September 17, 1984...
...But Attenborough on a walk in the woods looks like Attenborough...
...She was suckling her young...
...I will never forget her, half asleep, looking at him: "Oh, it's you Attenborough...
...Fighting a wind or at water's edge, his leonine mane pressed back, Sagan had an eat-your-heart-out-academia-I-am-so-photogenic-you-could-die look about him...
...The use of doubles, admittedly a little-discussed aspect of the public TV host business, should not come as a surprise: Clearly Alistair Cooke could not be expected to sit in that chair for 13 weeks without relief...
...Incidentally, Bellamy on Botany never caught on in the United States...
...Attenborough also has a long way to go to catch up with Bellamy on Botany...
...The American public probably thought the series was about Lord Bellamy of Upstairs, Downstairs exhibiting his butterfly collection...
...A host can't simply read a script or talk extemporaneously from a seat in a studio...
...You never knew with Bellamy when he would say something startling, such as "And here we discover that the water is very cold...
...This incredible spore, without which the origin of eating in the Free World would not have been possible, he would say, "could only have originated in the town of Glockenspiel in Germany...
...Attenborough's quirky style has a high mobility factor...
...Talk about invasion of "priwacy.' There he was in his miner's cap get-up shining a lantern torch into Mama Bear's cave and telling us that she "will go months without urinating or deefecating...
...Who is this weirdo from outerspace...
...He didn't succeed...
...I would bet the animals have come to recognize his step already as he thrashes around in the bush—much the way they have adapted to film crews in general...
...she seemed to be asking, "Is this the Streethawk I've been hearing about...
...Here I am in Finland,'' he really said in the third episode, "the home of the breathtaking great gray owl, the phan-tomofthe north...
...It was hibernation time...
...Another interesting gait one cannot forget or neglect belonged to Jacques Cousteau...
...He was a participant rather than a guide...
...I dare say he stunted the growth of the several kingdoms whose domains he invaded...
...The directors seem to think educational TV is more exciting when they have flown someone around the world to drop him into the picture for a few words...
...Anyway, I got to like watching this bearded, knobby-kneed redhead trot through the bush, the milk-white skin of his paunch jiggling above the waistband of his trunks...
...At some point a broadcasting pioneer thought it would be creative if the reporters didn't just stand there in the snow or rain but walked up and down, too...
...The latest shot in the arm, or leg, of walking was David Attenborough's return to TV as host of PBS' The Living Planet: A Portrait of the Earth (February through March, Sunday, 7:00 p.m...
...But I hear they walk around a lot in the studios, pacing back and forth wondering if their boss Melville Bell Grosvenor will pick up their options...
...Even better, he gave the impression that where he was had to be the most important place on earth...
...Most of these are about sharp-toothed creatures—sharks, tigers, polar bears...
...I can assure you, though, that Atten-borough is a top-notch explorer-naturalist...
...True, series without walking heads do exist, notably the National Geographic specials...
...This going-on-location custom probably dates back to the early TV news shows where reporters stood before office structures or courthouses holding ice cream-cone microphones...
...He was speaking of extinct species, and his show was infinitely superior to Live on Earth or any of the other series beating the well-worn "eevolution" trail...
...EST), the most comprehensive view of everything since Mel Brooks' History of the World Part 1.1 first noticed Attenborough's talent for roaming during his previous PBS smash nature series Live on Earth (1981), dedicated to the whole story of the 3,500-million-year development of life, or what the British call "eevolution...
...Moreover, since it is assumed viewers generally are not bright enough to know when a camera is panning and therefore cannot distinguish this from a person moving, hosts have been taught a common way of signaling the end of their perambulations: clasping their hands together...
...what may be missing from David Attenborough's work is the passion of Dr...
...Before climbing up to a nest, he donned his crash helmet and goggles as he talked and walked along...
Vol. 68 • March 1985 • No. 4
