Tonight's TV
Bear necessities
Natural World: Spectacled Bears - Shadows
Of The Forest (BBC2, 8pm); Waking The Dead (BBC1, 9pm)
ANOTHER reputation bites the
dust. I thought Paddington Bear
was a nice furry little fellow who
liked marmalade. Apparently he's
a killer who attacks and eats cattle.
Natural World offers what narrator
Stephen Fry calls "staggering revelations"
about this "shy, mysterious beast" - the spectacled
bear of South America.
The best known one is Paddington, the popular
figure from deepest, darkest Peru who
made his debut in a children's book in 1958.
In reality, little is known about this bear.
Sorry, make that was known for efforts are
being made to find out about the habits of
this creature whose marking round their eyes
have earned them the name spectacled bears.
With their forest home fast disappearing,
it's a race against time to discover things
about this bear in order to help protect it.
Armando in Ecuador has devoted 12 years
to finding out more about these animals, fitting
some with electronic collars to determine
how much ground they cover.
Biologist Rob Williams is a birdwatching
tour guide from England who married a Peruvian
girl and settled in that country, running
a reserve with his father-in-law, where
rescued bears - from factories, sawmills, the
circus and private homes - are cared for.
He too studies the spectacled bear. Remote
cameras triggered by infra-red beam have
been place by pools of water in the rock where
bears visit at night.
The study is slow, but has produced remarkable
film of them making their beds up
trees. The sight of a bear building a "nest" of
twigs and branches halfway up a tree is not
something you expect to see.
More disturbing are facts emerging about
their eating habits. They were widely believed
to be vegetarian, eating mainly plants
and getting protein from a few termites and
beetles.
Now there's contradictory evidence that
they have a taste for raw meat. Photos of cows
with injuries, people say, consistent with
being attacked by a bear are shown. Eyewitnesses
in a remote Venezuelan community
have seen cattle attacked by bears.
Armando finds a bear gorging on a dead
cow. Narrator Fry wants us to find this shocking,
declaring it "turned every we know about
bespectacled bears on its head - this bear has
a taste for raw meat too".
Some experts refuse to believe the evidence,
saying these attacks are isolated instances.
Fry, however, is determined to make
us think that Paddington has turned into a
meat-crazed bear. "Is this where Paddington
sharpended his marmalade spoon into a
butcher's knife?," he asks surveying the scene
of the crime.
Talk of crime brings us to Waking The
Dead, whose latest two-parter - concluding
tonight - is even madder than usual. When
grumpy boss Detective Superintendent Peter
Boyd says of a corpse, "So this is a Jewish gay
guy Sam Cohen who ends up as a neo-Nazi skinhead George Andrews", you know that
the writers are making things even more
complicated than usual.
This cold case team wouldn't have a clue if
faced with a simple crime of passion. They
need to be confronted with a series of clues
as obscure as anything found in the Times
Crossword to be able to think.
A mummified body is found at the bottom
of the air conditioning shaft in an underground
car park. The body was beaten before
being dumped, says forensic expert Dr Eve.
And time of death? 15 to 20 years ago.
The suspects are gathered - a victim of domestic
violence, racist skinheads, a candidate
for the Democratic Nationalist Party,
young Muslims and a Catholic priest.
Boyd isn't impressed with the latter. A
"self-righteous bloody bigot" he calls him.
The detective is struggling with his own
demons, namely drug addict son Luke. Work
comes first - there are suspects to be intimidated,
colleagues to be shouted at and mysteries
to be solved.
What, for instance, is the significance of
the pieces of a photograph of the minister's
brother found down the throat of the mummified
body?
It's a mystery we can rest assured Eve and
his team will solve. Perhaps they might like
to apply their brains to discovering if the bespectacled
bear really is a meat-eater.
9:35am Tuesday 6th May 2008
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