Graham Higgins Illustration

Last night the BBC showed one of their late-night children’s documentaries, Hot Planet, outlining the major themes of global warming and climatic instability as a briefing for the imminent Denmark Summit.

You could tell that these were serious issues because the facial expressions and hand-language of the presenters, Professors Iain Stewart and Kathy Sykes would have been visible to a viewer from a weather balloon.

The factual content of the show could have been comfortably covered in four pages of New Scientist or fifteen minutes of Newsnight but Hot Planet managed to stretch this out to an hour with a combination of filmed and animated illustrations and shots of the presenters advancing on the viewer reading a SCRIPT written to be READ to CAMERA and UNDERLINED with mime.

HERE, I brandish an invisible Hot Pork Pie; Now, two pies; HERE, I catch an imaginary telephone directory; where there are TWO possibilities, I do the info-hokey-COKEY, using both hands to throw the BABY out with the BATHwater to left… and then RIGHT.

To illustrate the disastrous cumulative effects of carbon build-up, Prof. Sykes had kayaked across the Atlantic and trekked to Utah in order to be filmed abseiling down a cliff composed of the porous rock which could be used to store carbon dioxide, so that once she was at its base she could point out that the gas wouldn’t be stored in the cliff (points to the vertical rock in right frame – ‘cliff’) but in the ground (points down to ‘ground’, out of frame) hundreds of feet below us.

‘Hundreds’ is what scientists call a Big Number and the professors alerted you to Big Numbers by a combination of narrowed eyes and display-behaviour using their highly-evolved prehensile eyebrows.

Professor Stewart was mainly based in a darkened bunker surrounded by illuminated projection-screens, chewing the script like Highland toffee, though he like David Cameron before him had trekked to the Arctic to illustrate the effects of carbon-emission on the polar icecap in a way that satellite images of its receding mass clearly couldn’t. He accompanied a scientific team in a helicopter, hunting and tranquilising polar bears to be fluid-sampled and painted with a serial number visible to ariel survey.

The distinction between presenters and civilians was most clearly illustrated when Prof. Kathy turned up in Spain (walking, sailing and cycling, obviously) to observe a huge shiny solar energy plant and interview its director, Dr. Luis Crespo. He stood with linked hands, quietly proud of the achievement. In medium-shot she stood close enough for tight-frame, nodding encouragingly while he spoke before replying in bursts of close-up semaphore ( hokey-cokeying ‘so you can have energy during the DAY and at NIGHT’).

In a final section concerning the nightmare scenario of a three-degree rise in global temperature, Professor Stewart was joined in the bunker by Professor Peter Cox, sharing the gesticulation tasks required to summon up the prospect of titanic tipping-points in the delicate eco-structure.

In summary, according to interpretations of archeological records, the most recent decades have produced the most radical temperature and carbon dioxide peaks in history. Unchecked, the effects of natural and man-made factors will set in motion dynamics leading to flood, drought and tornado, deforestation and crop failure, migrations amongst a world population whose demands for energy are already in danger of outstripping supply and the toppling of a global economic system balanced on rapacious consumption of available fuel sources.

After an hour of hand-waggling and gurning on the dangers of profligacy, I wonder if I was the only viewer to wonder whether this catalogue of evidence and speculation might not have been compiled by pooling reports from the countries cited rather than flying presenters and crew out to bring back five minutes of content?

To take just one of the eco-platitudes peppering the script, here was an opportunity to use new technology to make the OLD, wasteful ways of making documentaries a thing of the PAST.

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One of the routine questions in hospital paperwork is ‘Faith?’.

My answer is really ‘all of the above’ or maybe ‘some of most of the above’, but to save debate I tick ‘None’.

Picking over the ‘poetry’ files yesterday I stumbled on this sketchy answer to the puzzle of faith without divisive doctrine.

do you believe in

Do

Is faith a thing you do,

Hike from the common to the foothills

Of perfectsense? Is it a thing you find or

For the real deal, does the faith find you?

You

Or one. The simple first person;

Pronoun, in the present tense.

It’s the day job; when you meet yourself

In sleep you hardly know yourself in any sense.

Believe In

The lethal one.

It mostly comes to

Naming names

Speaking the right lines.

God

The maximum optimism

Permissible in light of the facts

As we understand them.

I believe in optimism.