Julie Davidson is gripped by the raw emotion on display at London Zoo.
MY, IT'S been an action-packed week, crackling with drama and taut
with tension. What provided your most gripping moment? The serial killer
season, which opened with Melvyn Bragg's review of the career of Dracula
on The South Bank Show? Sue Bourne's sado-masochistic film Exposure
(Cutting Edge, C4), which demonstrated the creative effect of
keel-hauling on middle management?
My own most gripping moment arrived when the time came to transfer
Tai, one of London Zoo's four elephants, from Regent's Park to Chester.
The nervous big beastie indicated its reluctance to be backed into a
transporter by shaking her head violently. A team of men tugged
impotently on the rope tethering her rear leg, but the person most at
risk was Tai's dedicated keeper, who snuggled up to her massive cheek
and sweet-talked and cajoled her into reverse.
This episode from BBC2's series The Ark probably lasted only a few
minutes but seemed to make you hold your breath forever. You expected
the behemoth to resort to bedlam and flatten everyone in sight. Why
didn't she? Her co-operation was exclusively held in place by the will
and skill of her keeper, who was required to trust Tai as much as she
trusted him. When the tail-gate was finally closed on the animal, Brian
Harman turned away from the camera and released a few sobs. He said what
we all say when we lose a beloved pet: ''It's like losing a member of
your family.''
The elephant, of course, was not Harman's pet but that increasingly
controversial creature the zoo animal, neither tame nor wild, its
instincts confused by its uneasy dependence on human beings. The
contradictions in this relationship were perfectly expressed by the
female orang-utan when she, too, became a victim of London Zoo's
cost-cutting pruning of staff and stock. Her transfer was made easier by
a tranquilliser dart which, before the sedative took effect, the
obliging ape plucked from her hide and handed through the bars to her
keeper.
Indirectly, and with great delicacy, Molly Dineen's films of the
crisis at London Zoo explore our own confused feelings about animals.
But no attitudes are struck, and neither are sides taken when the
beleagured zoo management is abused by apoplectic Fellows of the
Zoological Society at their AGM. Dineen's expressive but non-judgmental
tactics represent the best kind of documentary film-making, and if The
Ark is informed by a very gentle melancholy then that seems proper
comment: zoos, whether strapped for cash or not, are melancholy places,
where aspiration and exploitation collide before the unfathomable eyes
of captive beasts.
Monday's Cutting Edge was a television experience which took you
through much the same emotions, if not discomforts, as the 24
participants in one of John Ridgway's highly physical management
training courses: disbelief, resentment, tolerance, enthusiasm,
competitiveness and mild euphoria. You start by thinking: this is quite
mad. How can mature people in possession of responsible jobs let
themselves be bossed and bullied by macho strangers, told to line up
like children, jump into freezing water in their underwear and climb
mountains in 80 mph gales?
But there is method in Ridgway's madness. Having taken the team by
surprise with the ''short, sharp shock'' of their introduction to his
survival course, he rendered them biddable. Most of them, anyway. And
viewers, too, soon found themselves joining in the spirit of things.
Come on, Simon, you can do it. You may be suffering from exhaustion and
incipient hypothermia (at what point, you wonder, do Ridgway's
instructors pull the plug on an exercise?) but you can still be dragged
to the top of Arkle. Buck up, Eric, you can only overcome your lifelong
fear of heights by climbing that 70-foot mast. And what about that
non-swimmer -- steered under the keel of the ketch by his team-mates
while another member of the team refuses to take the plunge? What a
hero, what a wimp!
By the end of five days the company men and women are feeling pretty
pleased with themselves. They have even demonstrated their independence
of mind (as a team) by refusing to follow Ridgways' instructions for
their final challenge. This, they argue, persuades them they have
exercised the kind of judgment which makes them good business managers.
''There is a point where you don't do something totally stupid'' -- they
have been told to abandon ship and swim to a nearby island -- ''like a
business decision we won't jump into if it's stupid. It was bloody
brilliant.''
Nothing was said about all the other stupid things obediently
performed which, to my mind, dimmed the lustre of this particular piece
of joint decision-making. But by now most of the team were converts.
Eighty-three per cent said they thought their own staff would benefit
from the course. Naturally. They wanted to hand their punishment on.
IMPROBABLE though it may seem to the rational mind, this kind of
exercise in ''team building'' seems to get the results desired by the
corporate intelligence. At least for a time. But as with any enterprise
which drills people into behaving collectively in situations which
sometimes challenge their individual better judgment, it has resonances
of more sinister consequences. Wasn't there a Prussian princeling who
boasted to foreign visitors that his soldiers were so well-disciplined
that if he asked them to march over a cliff they would obey him? So he
did and they did?
''My revenge has spread over centuries,'' threatened Christopher Lee,
the most magnificent Dracula of my lifetime, ''and it has just begun.''
According to one of Melvyn Bragg's contibutors, Bram Stoker's enduring
invention was concocted out of the Victorians' repressed sexuality (the
eroticism of vampire imagery is pretty blatant), fear of syphilis and
horror of the possible ''tainting of the blood by immigrants from the
East''. Equally inventive, the cinema has made the sanguinary count a
romantic hero in Francis Ford Coppola's re-telling of Stoker's novel,
which was the excuse for The South Bank Show's entertaining if somewhat
earnest Dracula special.
As promised, Viewpoint 93's programme on real-life serial killers,
Murder in Mind, was a sober affair, eschewing prurient detail and
concentrating on the recent science of offender profiling. This aspect
of forensic investigation must be among the least dramatic. It holds few
surprises. Serial murders are typically committed by white males over
the age of 25 who are socially isolated and whose childhoods have been
disturbed. Is it flippant of me to suggest that the common sense of
routine human experience might have told us that anyway?
I'm not sure that the interviews with Denis Nilsen and other serial
killers added much to the programme, other than confirming what we
already know about men who behave monstrously: they seldom look or sound
like monsters. For that reason, Central's documentary might be accused
of gilding an otherwise serious-minded lily. Nor do I understand why
they persisted in describing meetings between various international
police forces as ''secret'', when they were being very publicly filmed
by Mike Morley's cameras.
These caveats apart, the production treated its subject with more
restraint than the Home Office has shown; even if the whole grisly theme
was rendered risible later in the week when Henry Lee Lucas, ''America's
most notorious serial killer'', told ITV's Storyline that he hadn't
killed more than 300 people after all, but had been made to feel ''like
a movie star'' with every false confession. And I believed him.
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