Wild Scandinavia, BBC Two, review: an hour of unadulterated Nordic phwoar
Remember those barnacle goose chicks that were featured in an episode of BBC nature series Life Story in 2014? Hatched atop a high Arctic cliff to avoid predators, they soon made a flightless fall of more than 100 metres to their parents below. These death-defying stunt artists were not re-featured in Wild Scandinavia (BBC Two), but their human mimics were.
Meet the Norwegian base jumper Hege Ringard, who clambers to the tops of fjords, checks the antics of the wind whipping through waterfalls, claps twice and calmly, meditatively leaps. She has the advantage over the goslings in the form of a lilo-style flying suit and a parachute. And instead of blind terror, she experiences what she calls “this sweet soft emotion”.
Natural history programmes such as this three-part Nordic tour find no end of marvels to gawp at. In the aquatic opener these included a lion’s mane jellyfish with its thicket of tentacles, a sea cucumber feeding its own ravenous maw, white-tailed sea eagles scrapping over their catches like dogfighting biplanes. Most eye-popping of all were the male puffins sparring in the snow with the aggression of territorial walruses.
But this series, in the anthropological style of National Geographic magazine, sees homo sapiens as part of the panoply. How sapiens it is to leap off a high cliff in a self-inflating duvet is a discussion for the pub. Meet also the gnarled captain of a trawler who, like a figure from a Nordic myth, explained that “you need to be at one with the ocean”.
The most remarkable human to feature was Audun Rikardsen, a scientist and photographer whose study of a pod of orcas has revealed remarkable use of echo location to entrap herring in what’s known as carousel hunting. Killer whales are regular guest stars in documentaries narrated by David Attenborough but it’s good for once to see the people who do the research not relegated to the 10-minute making-of section at the end.
The narrator here was the Anglo-Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson, deploying a super-cut glass accent that slipped gracefully into musical Scandi whenever she talked of Odin and smorgasbords and friluftsliv, the Norwegian word denoting passion for the outdoors (coined, says Google, by Ibsen).
The Norwegian outdoors is easy to be passionate about. In one glorious section, fishermen in yellow sealskins combined to stack cod on giant wooden racks to dry in the salty winds of Lofoten. It was a mesmerising image you’d gladly watch on an endless loop.
