Thursday, May 1, 2014

they pay me for this?!


Today was a long and hectic day (yawn!) but also my last day at work for ages!  Yippee!  I think I've only got one shift between now and the 19th.  Heaven :)

That said, I have been enjoying work this week.  Monday was one of my best shifts of all time - getting paid to watch David Attenborough shows from the 1950s ALL DAY.  They were absolutely amazing.  Obviously David Attenborough is always great, but it was also really interesting to see how much attitudes towards conservation (and fags) have changed over the years.  The series I was working on were called Zoo Quest and it was basically David Attenborough travelling around, capturing wild animals to take them back to London Zoo, or sometimes buying them from locals for a few boxes of cigarettes.  As well as capturing and taming an orang-utan and trapping a komodo dragon, at one point he dug up and ate 88 turtle eggs!

Zoo Quest was almost as much a travel show as a nature show, it seems, and I really enjoyed the Balinese music and dancing in the clip above.  Skip to 18 minutes in if you'd like to see that.  David Attenborough's reaction to it (in his description at the end of the clip) was really sweet and naive.  I can't imagine anyone getting away with that sort of reporting nowadays.

The series are part of the BBC4 Collections, full-length programmes from the BBC archive being made available online.  We'd already watched a few of the post-war architecture ones that Janet Street-Porter selected and I'd highly recommend them too.  There are all sorts of programmes, though, and it seems like they are adding more all the time.  You should go and check it out.  TV had a lovely pace in the olden days :)

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