“A PROGRAMME looking for hope.” Not your average TV documentary, then — and, moreover, one that deliberately takes over territory normally considered proper to religion: Panorama: Can Science Save the World? (BBC1, Monday of last week). The context is apocalyptic: the catastrophic effects of global warming experienced around the world in increasingly frequent extreme-weather events, killing and destroying the fecundity of land and ocean.
Even reducing to zero the nearly 40 billion tonnes of annual carbon-dioxide emissions for which humankind is responsible, there remains surrounding our planet the huge, lethal, blanket of the stuff which we’ve built up since the Industrial Revolution, and especially in recent decades. We were whisked around the world to marvel at some of science’s extraordinary strategies for eating away at this baleful legacy.
In Iceland, volcanic heat powers huge filters that extract carbon dioxide and then lock it into basalt; in Arizona, they have developed artificial trees that trap carbon just like real trees, but at hugely enhanced volumes; in Australia, they spray microscopic water droplets into the sky, building cloud cover that reflects back the sun’s harmful rays. All these and many other techniques actually work, and could, within a lifetime, restore pre-industrial carbon-dioxide levels.
But, to succeed, all need to be scaled up exponentially, requiring the billions of dollars of investment that we currently spend on carbon-emitting, profit-driven processes. The incoming US President, of course, champions fossil fuels, considering human-driven global warming a hoax: the programme’s “hope” felt to me more like fond fantasy.
Technological advance is surely the villain menacing the drama series The Listeners (BBC1, from 19 November). The pylons marching over brooding moorland; the mobile radio masts springing up everywhere — aren’t they the source of the hyper-low background hum, regularly breaking out into more interesting thuds and beats, that is driving the sensitive, charismatic teacher Claire bonkers, especially as no one else can hear it?
Slowly, she finds other souls who share her affliction forming a cult-like group around a creepy guru. Parallels with religion are everywhere, starting with the accusations of mental illness for anyone claiming so anti-social a revelation — just like, say, believing in the existence of God. It’s a decidedly patchy affair, at times affecting and engaging, but increasingly, alas, plain loopy and unreal.
In Moonflower Murders (BBC1, from 16 November), is the clue to solving a young mother’s disappearance hidden in a crime novel (author now deceased)? The fun lies in the intricate format, as it jumps between telling the story and dramatising the novel. The same actors play related but contrasting characters in both. Our minds are enjoyably befuddled as we try to work out which reality we are watching — then we remember it’s all actually fiction.
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