A screen crawl on the AM news informed me that Steve Irwin (Croc Hunter) is dead. The NYT web site says that a stingray pierced his heart with its barb. My condolences to his wife and kids. He was always in the middle ground for me as a tv wildlife presenter – not overly offensive, but the crazy aussie persona didn’t wear well. As a bitchy aside – the guy I find completely beyond the pale is Austin Stevens – ‘Snakemaster’? – jeebus. Take a look at his page on Animal Planet (I’m not going to link – you’ll have to find it yourself) and contrast/compare with illustrations in It’s a Man’s World. The only thing Mr. Stevens is missing are zombie Nazis hassling women in their skivvies knickers. The Stevens show (one of two that I watched – the other was on the King Cobra) that really tore it for me was when he went anaconda wrasslin’. We are supposed to believe that he happened upon an anaconda, jumped into the water to grab it and thrash around in a very manly fashion, and the equipment needed to do a Matrix-bullet-time stop action pan just happened to be set up in place? Again, jeebus.

Which brings me to my point(s). We are comfortable with meta-info and moving through the fourth wall in much of the rest of our entertainment (and our world for that matter). Why hasn’t someone put together a wildlife show (or ‘adventure’ show, or ‘hunting’ show for that matter) that looks at how one gets hold of 5 minutes worth of good lion on zebra action footage? Presumably, the show would need to commit to some level of fair chase – setup shots with the host in Costa Rica followed by a quick trip to the local zoo for shots of the snake may be more than the audience can handle. Let’s get the whole production crew involved – let’s try to show the level of effort required to get some real semi-staged (i.e. getting the snake out where it can be filmed) footage of the host near a critter. My strong suspicion is that wildlife photography is like many other endeavors where one is at the mercy of Mom Nature – lots of preparation, lots of sweating and/or freezing and/or getting bit by bugs, and very little of the thing itself (though that very little is, both by itself and because of the level of prep and discomfort, incredibly satisying). Twenty nine minutes of sitting in a blind, thirty seconds of almost getting the shot and thirty seconds of payoff won’t cut it, but I’m sure there is a ton of good material in any shoot – hassling with customs, competion between camaramen for the money shot, dealing with the interpersonal stuff that sometimes comes with boredom, bugs, etc. My guess is that the folks running the cameras, schlepping the bags, making the phone calls, may not be as telegenic as our host – good – maybe we’ll even get to see a woman in the woods occasionally.

Animal Planet – you can contact me by clicking the envelope icon on the top right of the page >grin<.

The genre where the fourth wall has alway driven me crazy are climbing shows. OK – I accept that you are way the heck up on the side of the Trango Towers or sumpin’, but who is holding the camera? Are they using the same climbing techniques? If so, isn’t that part of the story? If not, isn’t this a bit of a farce?

I wish I had a way to wrap this rant post up in a nice bow – I don’t – I’m off to run the dogs…