“Life” on Discovery: Better than watching sports?

Chances are if you watch sports you own a high-definition television. In fact, watching a game without one almost seems pointless. The blood, the sweat, the tears, the lovely bouncing breasts of a female tennis star, all right there in your living room. What could possibly be better? Well, I’ll tell you. Nature documentaries. Specifically, Life, the BBC’s follow-up to the award-winning Planet Earth, now airing in Canada on the Discovery Channel.

Just like Planet Earth, Life is filmed with “revolutionary high-speed cameras, taking the viewer to seemingly impossible locations while capturing rare footage of the world’s most interesting and elusive creatures.” Okay, I took that from the back of my Planet Earth DVD box. All I can tell you is it’s awesome. If you enjoy being ice-level with Sidney Crosby, imagine being on an ice floe with a polar bear. And if you think Lebron can soar, wait until you ‘witness’ a chameleon’s tongue shoot out of its mouth at 15 metres a second.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hker4oggABY&feature=related

Life is broken into ten 50-minute episodes, each showing extraordinary examples of the lengths living things go to stay alive. The series covers plants, reptiles, fish, birds and pretty much everything else, but the one I’ll be talking you through is the episode devoted to primates. Why? Because everybody likes monkeys. Or, as the incomparable David Attenborough puts it, “In the great tree of life, one branch of mammals has a particular fascination to us, as we belong to it…primates.”

(If you’ve never heard David Attenborough, just know that by comparison his voice makes Morgan Freeman sound like Mike Tyson.)

The show begins in the harsh remote scrubland of southern Ethiopia. Attenborough informs me that while Hamadryas baboons live in groups of up to 400, there is no single leader. Instead, baboon society is comprised of dozens of small harems, each governed by a male.  So, I’m thinking, “Hey, that’s a pretty advanced society,” when out of nowhere a male walks over to a female and chomps into her neck. Attenborough calmly adds, “Strict discipline is essential if order is to be maintained.” And…that’s why being called a baboon is an insult. These guys don’t mess around. Let’s just say they won’t be starring in a Telus commercial anytime soon.

After watching these wife-beating baboons, we move to the Japanese Alps to check in on the most northerly dwelling monkeys in the world, the Japanese macaque. It may be minus 20 degrees Celsius outside, but these snow monkeys could care less. They have a thermal hot springs that runs a blissful 41 degrees. I mean, you’ve never seen monkeys this relaxed. It’s paradise, except for the part where everyone isn’t allowed in. Suddenly, they cut to a shot of a bouncer macaque forcing others out of the spa as Attenborough explains, “These youngsters born of the right bloodline don’t know how lucky they are for this is a very divided society for those that have and those that have not.”

This is when I want to throw something at the TV. “There’s plenty of room in there,” I shout, “Let them in you assholes!” These privileged monkeys are relaxing poolside while others freeze to death. (There even looks to be a Paris Hilton macaque in the corner playing with her cooch.) I find it obscene and endlessly aggravating until I remember walking right by a homeless guy earlier that day. Damn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNCp9JVgOnI&feature=related

Feeling ashamed, I follow Attenborough to the Congo to look in on some silverback gorillas. These big Mormon bastards, the largest of all primates, live in stable family groups with one male watching over his five females and their infants. To maintain his huge size, the male has to eat 30 kilos of plants and termites a day. So, while the kids play, all he does is eat and eat and eat. It’s great TV. Then, after beating his chest a bit (a sound that carries up to a kilometre), the male suddenly collapses for an afternoon siesta. He’s literally out cold. “Wow, the resemblance to us humans is startling.”

Waking from a nap of my own, I find myself in Madagascar observing four male ring-tailed lemurs. They resemble construction workers, each transfixed on one female lemur, who Attenborough tells me, has released a scent telling the males she’s in heat. Attenborough continues: “but she’ll only be sexually receptive for 24 hours.” (Kiefer, get your agent on the phone!) Well, you can imagine what happens next. All of a sudden these two males look like they’re in a Mexican knife fight, creating a Bugs Bunny type dust cloud with their scuffle. While this is all going on another male puts some wrist gland perfume on his long tail, sneaks over, and wafts it toward the female. Next thing you know they’re sneaking off to go bang in a tree. Now that’s a smooth operator. I think it’s safe to say we all knew a guy like that in high school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eY2ZTKKkpY&feature=related

Later, we’re taken to the Sumatra Rainforests where we meet the Italians of the jungle — orangutans look after their children for nine years, longer than any other primate but ourselves — before heading to Africa’s Cape Peninsula where a gentler, kinder baboon species has learned how to judge the ocean’s tides in order to feed on mussels and shark eggs. Finally, we finish up our tour of primates in Guinea where chimpanzees have mastered the use of tools. Using twigs like surgeons to carefully collect, then eat ants, chimpanzees exhibit remarkable hand-eye coordination and intelligence. They also show compassion as one male chimpanzee is filmed lending a female his nut cracking tools. While a Hamadryas baboon probably would’ve met this request with a bitch-slap and a ring-tailed lemur would’ve only shared as a way of getting laid, this male chimp showed genuine kindness, one of many behavioral characteristics they share in common with us higher primates.

Attenborough then wraps it all up, concluding,”We are the most inventive and innovative of all primates. Just one branch of a large and extended family. A family which has refined the ability to develop and pass on individual learning to the next generation…. A family which we share so much.”

While it will come to no one’s surprise that we share certain characteristics with monkeys (well, maybe Sarah Palin), watching just how similar we are proves to be endlessly fascinating. Perhaps even more remarkable, is how Life turns what many would think would be a boring episode on plants into an entertaining learning experience where insects become prey (venus flytraps) and birds become junkies, hooked on the plant’s sweet, sweet nectar.

Watch Life on the Discovery Channel at 7pm on Sundays. But only if you have HDTV, or at the very least, some weed.

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