Victor Lewis-Smith is the generally disliked and universally derogatory TV critic from the Evening Standard in the UK. While I feel that he "didn't get it" he does make some valid points. Here is a copy of his review of the programme from yesterdays Standard. I didn't ask his permission before I reproduced his work!
No More Heroes Any More
Victor Lewis-Smith, Evening Standard
Wednesday, 15 November 2000
As I was telling members of the Alzheimer's Society on Remembrance Sunday, there's no such thing as disability, only opportunity. Musician with Parkinson's Disease? Then learn to play the theremin, and you'll soon have the world's widest vibrato. Farmer suffering from double incontinence? Then plant mushroom spores in your bed, and you'll soon have a fine crop of shitake to sell. And after the deserved success of the Special Olympics for the physically disabled, isn't it time to stage a similar event for the mentally disabled? That might sound tasteless, but surely TV audiences would be amused by the sight of, say, a bunch of the cerebrally challenged performing competitive jumps off very tall buildings while wearing crash helmets in the hilariously naive belief that this will somehow keep them from harm when Mr Skull says howdydoody to Mr Concrete.
I was about to copyright my idea for the Mentally Disabled Olympics but, having watched last night's Cutting Edge (C4), I realised that someone must have beaten me to it. The documentary chronicled the antics of a trio of Base jumpers, practitioners of a sport that's so idiotically dangerous and pointless that Darwin would surely have pointed proudly to it as incontrovertible proof of his theory of natural selection. A cross between sky-diving and Russian roulette, it's not exactly banned in the UK, but that's only because (as with Queen Victoria and lesbianism) its existence isn't even acknowledged by polite society, and although it has about a hundred dim but enthusiastic followers in this country, they're all so dedicated to their sport that their number is steadily dwindling. Let's put it this way. If I tellyou that one bonehead described his pre jump emotional state as "this empty void" (as opposed to "this full void", I suppose), and that the narrator declared, without discernible irony, that "Base jumping is an underground activity", then you'll get some idea of the truly arctic conditions to which the intellectual temperature plummeted last night.
To be fair, the Base jumpers did have parachutes on which, in theory, they could float down gently to earth. But, to be fairer, a parachute isn't much use if you're hurtling down the side of a kilometre-high cliff at 120mph, bumping into every projecting bit of granite as you go, which is what happened to quite a few of the athletes we saw. "We're not doing it to look cool on TV," said one, "that's 100 per cent the wrong reason", which was probably just as well (given that several had been killed by the end of the programme, and it gets pretty cool down at the mortuary), and they claimed that it was only a rush of adrenaline that they sought, but two nagging questions kept passing through my frontal lobes as I watched. If the rush was really what they craved, why didn't they just inject themselves
with adrenaline? And if they didn't want to be admired for what they called bravery (but which looked to me uncannily like foolishness), then why had they agreed to be filmed for Channel 4?
The film was breathtaking in every sense, skilfully directed and shot, and truly capturing the sense of raw excitement and danger that surrounds the sport. But the production team was clearly in awe of the jumpers, and presented them to us as something akin to superheroes, without ever seriously questioning the wisdom of their activities, as a balanced documentary surely should have done. By way of a denouement, we saw a global gathering of the Worldwide Base Tribe (aka the Mentally Disabled Olympics) in Norway, during which the phrase "he was a very experienced Base jumper, I can't imagine what went wrong" was uttered, and several competitors were removed on stretchers or in the pine boxes without the handles on the inside (to join another who'd shuffled off his mortal coil some time earlier), and I have to concede one thing. When it comes to voluntarily removing oneself from the human gene pool, Base jumpers make members of the Euthanasia Society look like a bunch of nervous amateurs.
Attempting to make an hourlong film about a bunch of suicidal boneheads is one of the most dangerous televisual sports on earth, and director/producer Lol Lovett succeeded brilliantly on the technical side, with creative lighting, camerawork, pacey editing and some spectacular post-production effects of colourising and frame-rate manipulation. But he was less successful at balancing the difficult equation between praise and disdain, and the feeble cries of "be safe!" as a group of jumpers leapt into thin air somehow seemed inadequate, given the perilous nature of what they were doing. Indeed, I haven't heard
quite such an understatement since Emperor Hirohito of Japan spoke to his people in 1945, just after the atom bomb was dropped. "It would appear," said the Emperor as he reluctantly
surrendered, "that the war has developed, not necessarily to Japan's advantage."
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