I think David Attenborough might be trying to pressure me into having a baby. I’m only sort of joking. In recent years demographers’ warnings about plummeting birth rates have led to a global surge in “pro-natalist” policies encouraging women to have more children. Hungary, for instance, is trialling lifelong income tax exemptions for mothers of two or more. And now, in the BBC’s prime Sunday night slot, comes a new series by the nation’s silver-voiced godfather celebrating Parenthood.
Nominally about animals, not humans, it kicks off with a mother gorilla (a fairly anthropomorphic choice) cradling her days-old baby in one large paw, while Attenborough’s hypnotic voiceover tells us: “Success for her and indeed for all parents has perhaps the greatest of consequences: it ensures the future of life on our planet.” Hmmm, not sure we’re really talking about gorillas, are we Dave?
To be clear, Parenthood doesn’t sugarcoat parenting — in episode one there’s an unusually graphic shot of a mother lion gored to death by a water buffalo she’d been hunting for her kids’ lunch — but the film-makers deftly convert its challenges into heroism. We get shots of a bristle-chinned Tanzanian hippo mamma waddling out from the safety of the swamp for a lion-menaced night-time hunting trip, and an Indonesian Banggai cardinalfish — one of the show’s few dads: I wonder if they considered calling it Motherhood but decided that wasn’t feminist — spitting out its newly hatched young from the safety of its mouth after four weeks of fasting, in a deeply weird and weirdly touching display of love. Parenting, so the show tells us, requires courage, sacrifice and mettle. Your country’s birth rate needs you.
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But there’s an irony to Attenborough, whose work over the years has become increasingly focused on environmental damage, encouraging us, whether consciously or not, to have kids. There’s plenty here about the way humans are destroying animal habitats, from an octopus caught in a plastic tube to an overfishing-induced plague of sea urchins devastating Californian kelp forests. More and more humans, history tells us, is a recipe for more and more damage.
Sorry, that’s quite a gloomy note to end on. Did anyone catch the cricket on Monday morning? Watching a gladiatorial, one-armed Chris Woakes marching out to face the India attack was my TV highlight of the week by far.
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