Month: August 2014

Tropic of Cancer; Dolphins – Spy in the Pod

Tropic of Cancer is one of Simon Reeve’s travelogue series. In this one, originally from 2010, he travels around the world following the line of the Tropic of Cancer which is the northernmost boundary of the tropics. He starts in Mexico, then across the Atlantic to the north of Africa, followed by bits of Arabia then the south of Asia, finally ending up in Hawaii. Reeve’s programmes all have something of a similar style to them, and this was no exception – he shows you something beautiful, then explains how we (mostly the Western world, sometimes all of humanity) are fucking it up. Beautiful meaning sometimes the landscape, sometimes the wildlife, sometimes the people. But there’s always a dirty secret just around the corner. As styles go, it works for me – if you never saw the downsides it wouldn’t be a true picture of the place, ditto if you never saw the good things.

For all each episode was full of things to see or to think about I’ve ended up not quite sure what to say about it. Partly because it covers such a wide cross-section of the world, so it’s hard to be concise about it. He travels from jungles to deserts, from people living in abject poverty or war-torn regions to people living in luxury. He managed to film in at least a little bit of every country along the way, except for China which wouldn’t grant him entry. The only other country not to let him in was Burma, and he sneaked across the border there anyway to talk to some of the people being oppressed by the Burmese government. Even Saudi Arabia let him in, escorted by a suitable local guide (he always did have a local guide to show him places, but the Saudi one seemed particularly well chosen from a perspective of how her government wanted the country to be represented).

A good series to’ve watched, even if it’s a little dated now (it’s pre-Arab Spring, so the visits to Libya and Egypt were notably out of date).

Dolphins – Spy in the Pod is one of a collection of documentary series using cameras disguised as bits of the environment to get more candid footage of wild animals than you do when you have a cameraperson about. We’ve previously watched Polar Bear – Spy on the Ice (post) and Tiger – Spy in the Jungle (post). This is the weakest of the ones we’ve seen, sadly – too much “teehee look how clever we are, and aren’t we funny” and anthropomorphising the cameras. It felt less like candid footage of wild dolphins and more like dolphins curiously inspecting the weird plastic nautilus or turtle or whatever. We did watch both episodes tho, so it did OK as lightweight fluff entertainment.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Travels with Vasari – Andrew Graham Dixon goes round Italy following the footsteps of Vasari who wrote one of the first art history books in the late Renaissance.

Episode 1 of Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief & Morals in the 18th Century – Suzy Klein talking about 18th Century British music and how it impacted and was impacted by the history of the time.

Episode 1 of Melyvn Bragg’s Radical Lives – two part series consisting of two biographies of notable English radicals.

Episode 1 of Tropic of Capricorn – Simon Reeve travels round the world following the Tropic of Capricorn.

Episode 1 of Lost Land of the Tiger – three part series about looking for tigers in Bhutan.

In Our Time: Strabo’s Geographica

Strabo was a Greek scholar who lived in Rome (and other parts of the Roman world) from the 1st Century BC to the 1st Century AD. During this time he wrote his Geographica which was a large work describing the “known world” of the Romans. Discussing it on In Our Time were Paul Cartledge (University of Cambridge), Maria Pretzler (Swansea University) and Benet Salway (UCL).

They started the programme with some context for both Strabo and the world he lived in. He was born in what is now Turkey in around 64BC, which at the time was a part of the Greek world. He lived through a time of great expansion of Roman territory, and the change from Republic to Empire. Not long after he was born the Romans expanded eastwards past his homeland, when he was around 30 Egypt became a part of the Roman empire, and Julius Caesar’s first campaigns in Britain were within his lifetime too. So this is a time when the geography of the Roman territory was changing rapidly, and also a time when a lot of Greek intellectuals like Strabo were incorporated into Roman culture. We don’t know much about Strabo himself, Cartledge (I think) noted in passing that we don’t even know his full name. Strabo means something like “squinty eyed” and would once have been a nickname, but got incorporated into Roman names as a cognomen. Strabo first came to Rome when he was around 20 for his education, and also spent time in Alexandria which was one of the other major intellectual centres of the classical world. As well as the Geographica Strabo is known to have written a history – which has not survived. It was also an ambitious work and it updated a previous work to bring it up to the “present day” of Strabo’s time.

The Geographica is about 17 volumes, and as I said in the opening paragraph it covers the “known world”. The Romans were aware that the Earth is a globe, and Pretzler said that they were even fairly close to being right about the size of the world (although I think she implied that the calculations used were wrong but they got to the right answer anyway). So they were aware that there was a lot of world unaccounted for – their known world was about a quarter of the globe. There were different theories at the time about what else was there – one was that there was ocean filling the rest of the space. This lead some Romans to be dubious about the existence of Britain even after Julius Caesar had campaigned there – it wasn’t logical, because it was off the edge of the land. And Strabo wasn’t convinced by reports from an explorer of islands to the west of Britain – what we now know as Ireland and Iceland.

The first couple of volumes are introductory in nature. This is, in fact, where most biographical details about Strabo come from. The text also says that Strabo is very widely travelled and knows much of the world first hand, but Pretzler explained that this was a standard thing for geographers and historians of the time to say. It was intended to give them some authority but wasn’t necessarily true. She said that you can make some reasonable guesses about which bits were first hand and which weren’t – in part because the first hand bits are so much more vivid (and accurate). In these introductory chapters Strabo also explains the many sources he has consulted – I think they said it was a couple of hundred, of course only a few of these are his major sources. He also takes the time to write about Homer’s geographical knowledge in the Iliad and the Odyssey. These volumes of the Geographica also go into the theory of geography of the time, and the mathematical principles behind drawing maps.

The remaining volumes cover the actual geography – not just the physical geography but what we would now call political and social geography: what the countries/provinces are, what the people are like. The text was organised following the then current convention of moving around the coast of the Mediterranean from Spain to the east of the sea, and the back westwards along the north coast of Africa. Obviously to fit in the whole of the known world of the time Strabo also needs to take a couple of detours – one when he fits in Asia Minor up to around Afghanistan, and one to cover India.

The contemporary audience for the work would’ve been fairly wide. Cartledge said that it was written in a style that would be accessible to the general literate & educated population of the time. Strabo himself made the assertion that he intended it to be of particular use to generals and politicians. Remember this was a time of expansion for the Roman Empire, and although we know in hindsight that it had reached its furthest extent during Strabo’s lifetime that wasn’t clear at the time. Strabo was making the point that if you know the geography & the sorts of peoples living in each part of the world then you can better plan your conquests, and your ruling of the territory afterwards.

After Strabo’s death the Geographica isn’t cited much for the next few centuries – in part because the conventions of the time were not to cite recent works. People were keen to root their new works deeply in the classical past, and Strabo was too recent. I think the experts thought he was probably read by these later authors just not referenced. The only mentions of Strabo’s work from that sort of era are by Josephus, the Jewish Roman historian. Strabo’s Geographica was rediscovered in the Renaissance, and had an influence on map making for a couple of centuries after that. One of the experts (possibly Salway?) was saying that even into the 18th Century there would be maps made, for instance of Africa, where the coasts were done with the new modern mapmaking methods, but the inland regions might come straight out of Strabo.

Secrets of Bones; Tales from the Royal Wardrobe

Secrets of Bones was a 6 part series of half hour programmes about skeletons, presented by Ben Garrod. Each episode covered a different aspect of the way that skeletons are vital to vertebrates. The series looked at both the commonalities between the vertebrate skeletal structure, and also the ways that skeletons are adapted to the life style of the particularly organism. For instance when talking about bone structure Garrod highlighted how the mix of mineral and organic material makes bone particularly suited to holding organisms up in general. And he also talked about how bird bones are particularly lightweight as an adaptation for flight.

Garrod was a very enthusiastic presenter, clearly in love with his subject and able to convey that to the viewer. I was also impressed that it didn’t feel dumbed down at all. It was perhaps a little repetitive at times, but given how information dense the short episodes felt it might’ve been necessary to recap at the end just to stop one from getting lost. Worth watching.

Tales from the Royal Wardrobe was another one-off programme about royal history presented by Lucy Worsley. As with Tales from the Royal Bedchamber (post) it was a history of the English (and then British) monarchy from Tudor times forward, this time viewed through the lens of what clothes they wore and how this affected public perceptions of them. And it was a splendid opportunity for Worsley to dress up in a variety of historical outfits! 🙂 She stopped short of dressing up as the Queen or Princess Di, however – but we did get that far towards modernity in the clothes that were discussed.

It was a fun programme, I think I always enjoy watching Worsley’s programmes. I do wonder how many times she can repeat this particular formula before it goes stale, tho – two might be enough.

Other TV watched this last couple of weeks:

Episodes 3 and 4 of Tropic of Cancer – repeat of a series where Simon Reeve travels round the world visiting the countries that the Tropic of Cancer runs through.

Episode 1 of Dolphins – Spy in the Pod – slightly disappointing documentary series about dolphins.