Britain's Lost World

This weekend I caught episode 1 of Britain's Lost World on BBC 1 where "Historian Dan Snow, naturalist Steve Backshall and wildlife enthusiast Kate Humble set out to solve some of the mysteries of St Kilda in Scotland's Outer Hebrides".

St Kilda is a place that's fascinated me for a while and I hope to sail there soon, possibly next Summer, so what it revealed was interesting: the problems of the puffins with the sand eel population (about which I knew a little already), the drop in fertility on the main island and the more on the history of the island and its people.

It was a potentially great programme ruined for me by the production.

For a start they were playing it up as a "lost world" which they were off to explore. No mention that the National Trust for Scotland are there every Summer with paid staff and volunteers working on the island, or that the MoD maintain a permanent presence there. Not so "lost" then.

Did the three of them really sleep in individual tents? Where was the rest of the production team sleeping?

And then there was Dan Snow "discovering" history by looking at names of places. The programme was implying that he had made these discoveries at lightning speed since his arrival, but surely he was just reading out research that had long since been done?

By now the pretence that they were doing the discovering was wearing a bit thin and the sudden appearance, with no explanation of where they'd popped up from, of two NTS researchers to discuss soil contamination and the puffin problem did leave the premise looking pretty broken.

The other thing that left me spitting blood was that they placed Steve Backshall on another island in the group (after some theatre about a sinking rowboat which I could have done without) but then the weather turned bad and they couldn't get him off ... so they had to call in the Coastguard helicopter!!! Who paid for the cost of that flying out and back I wonder? And whose lives were put at risk but it being off station sorting out this mess?!

Not impressed by that at all.