There’s only one way to find out

Here's a post from Special Guest Shouter James Bainbridge (JRWB)...

Television has had a long love affair with the concept of making people live as things that they’re not: Iron Age roundhouse dwellers; the Victorian upper class; Second World War evacuees. Because TV is older than any of us, it’s grown a bit obsessed with seeing how us cosseted modern folk would cope with rationing. It wants to see how we’d get on with woad. Wants to stick cameras on us, and film us crawling up chimneys, weeping because it’s confiscated our iPod.

Like most things, these mongrel forms of Big Brother meets historical reenactment, vary in quality. One of the most surprisingly fascinating pieces of television for me this year was BBC2’s The Victorian Farm; a programme that by all reckoning should have been painfully and sentimentally dull. Yet through the casting of some quite ordinary-seeming agricultural historians to undertake the pretend time-travel, through the unflinching respect with which they ate offal and ploughed with horses – what emerged was a very likeable, educational treat. Television should be commended for showing us the constantly cheerful historian Ruth Goodman demonstrating how she constructed her sanitary protection out of moss.

It was with such optimism that I tuned in to watch last night’s My Life as an Animal (BBC3). I like things in which ordinary modern folk live as things that they’re not. That’s what I like. I liked seeing that Ruth Goodman stitching braces by gaslight, I’d like this. Surely.

The programme, which claims to try to answer the question “do we truly understand animals?” suggests that “there’s really only one way to find out.” By that it means it will take two ordinary modern folk and through a series of dangerous and humiliating rituals (eating from buckets, drinking from troughs, sleeping in fields) make them “live as an animal” for four days.

I’m no animal psychologist, but I can’t help thinking that there might be other ways. In fact, having watched last night’s programme – in which two people were kicked and bitten by horses, fighting for raw vegetables with their teeth – I left feeling I understood less how people might resemble horses, and more how television could resemble the cruel inventiveness of a war crime.