Wild Burma: Nature's Lost Kingdom – TV review

For a long time, Burma has been pretty much off-limits to everyone, including scientists and wildlife film-makers. Now, for the first time in more than 50 years, a team has been allowed in to find out what treasures are there, and to make this three-part documentary, Wild Burma: Nature's Lost Kingdom (BBC2). Exciting, huh? Well, yes and no.

Yes, because the country has a lot more untouched forest than anywhere else in south-east Asia, forest that is home to rare and exotic species. These people are going in to catalogue it, to make a list to present to the Burmese authorities in order to try to protect these forests, at a time when the country is about to start changing very quickly. So it's also dead important ecologically.

But as a film it's disappointing. Certainly this first one, which focuses on Asian elephants, is. The problem is that elephants are very hard to find in dense jungle, and most of the film is about looking for elephants. So Gordon Buchanan goes up a tree to spend a couple of days on his little platform, waiting for elephants, while Justine Evans looks elsewhere, for evidence. Of which there is plenty: nice, fresh dung; broken vegetation; villagers' stories about encounters with elephants. Just no actual elephants. And even when they do find some, really close, you can't see them because the jungle is so dense.

Wait, there they are! Elephants! A whole bunch of them, with babies, too, which means they're breeding, of course. They are quite far away though, the pictures still aren't the best, and then they're gone. All that searching, an hour of TV, just for that?

It's brilliant news that they are there, doing well, breeding, and I hope it persuades the Burmese government to immediately declare the area a national park. But as an armchair consumer of high-tech 21st-century natural history television – animal porn, basically – I'm not feeling completely satisfied.

I am, however, looking forward to the massive snakes and tigers in the next episodes; I'm not going to give up yet.

http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/wild-burma-natures-lost-kingdom-tv-review/