57 channels and nothing on (well, apart from a sleeping badger)

Chances are it will be getting only a few more viewers than the BBC Parliament channel, but Autumnwatch Live Badgers is worth a look. It’s on one of those new-fangled tucked-away digital channels – Freeview 301 – from 5pm until midnight each evening this week. Potential viewers should be warned, however: on the evidence of an hour or so’s mid-evening viewing yesterday, and a couple of late-evening check-ins, not a lot happens.

From soon after 8pm until 9pm, very little was to be seen other than infrared footage – appropriately almost black-and-white – of the rear end of a male badger as it slept in some straw in its sett. A couple of times the coverage switched to outside, where a rootling-about badger was to be seen – but soon it was back to the underground somnolence. The effects microphone must have been turned up, as small snoring noises could be heard – and the bottom-of-screen caption occasionally read “Listen out for him snoring”, in case you had it on mute. The “him” appeared to be a badger going by the name of Scarface – either that or they had recruited Al Pacino to do the sound effects. “Looks like Scarface sleeping off all those nuts,” read the caption. Well, yes. It made for curious mid-evening viewing. Your correspondent occasionally channelhopped across to ITV1 to check on progress in the Marseille–Arsenal game – where nothing much was happening, either. Then it was back from Arsenal and Arsène to the badger’s arse in South Devon, for another session of gentle straw-rustling and quiet sleeping noises. In an effort to liven things up a little, every now and then the single-camera feed switched to a quartered screen showing four different angles on the unbudging badger’s posterior – the kind of televisual trickery used in 24 or Spooks, but rarely seen in anything as action-lite as this. And you know what? It was great. The obvious gag is that Live Badgercam is an improvement on the regular Autumn/Spring/Lambwatch witterings of Kate Humble, Simon King and, in days gone by, Bill Oddie. But there isn’t really the need to be flippant: it’s an interesting and very Reithean use of modern TV technology, and also retro in tone, harking back as it does to the soothing interludes of the potter’s wheel. Right enough, the potter’s wheel didn’t tend to run for hour after uneventful hour – and in that respect Live Badgercam sometimes feels more akin to the test card. (Checking again just before Newsnight, there was still nothing happening, still the almost-static coverage of the puffball-like rear end of Scarface.) But there is something very relaxing and reassuring – especially at the end of a long and hasslesome day – in being able to turn on the TV and watch a badger half-embedded in straw, breathing and snoring its untroubled way through the evening. It’s the TV equivalent of those Brian Eno ambient music CDs, and it would be oh-so-easy to quietly doze off on the sofa in front of the snoozing badger, in a human-meets-melinae holistic haze. The risk with nothing-happens programmes such as this is that they stray into KitKat advert territory – turn your back for just a minute, or go through to put the kettle on / wash the dishes – and all manner of entertaining liveliness breaks out in your absence, only to stop again seconds before you return. (In the case of the KitKat advert, it was rollerskating pandas.) But with a programme such as Autumnwatch Live Badgers, it’s arguably worse when something exciting or even mildly interesting happens. It jars, and interrupts the mood; half a minute of the active outdoors badger was nice to see, for sure, but it was even nicer to then get back and see what Scarface was – or, more to the point, wasn’t – up to. Live Badgercam isn’t the first time this kind of sooth-TV has appeared on the BBC red button channels, however. To watch the tennis coverage – the US or French Opens, for example – or the snooker from Sheffield, is to find that when the tennis players have finished their match, or the snooker players have gone off for the mid-session interval, something curious happens. Whereas the regular channels provide rather predictable punditry chaired by Sue Barker or Hazel Irvine, on the hidden-away alternatives all that happens is that the commentators go off for their cups of tea while the producer leaves a camera gazing down at the empty venue, with the effects level set just high enough to pick up the quiet hubbub of the audience as they shuffle about, get up and stretch, or start to gather their belongings ahead of the journey home. As with the snoring badgers, there is something profoundly soothing about this intervalcam, and whoever dreamt up leaving the coverage running in slumber mode is to be applauded. It’s never going to be to everyone’s taste, of course – comments about watching paint dry would be hard to refute – but not all TV needs to be thrilling or interesting. There is merit in occasional quiet boredom, too. (Your correspondent writes, admittedly, as someone who during the snooker coverage a couple of years ago found that he started to actively prefer the mid-session hubbubcam to the normal commentator coverage of the frames themselves.) So tomorrow evening, tune in and see what’s happening in badger land. It might be all-action, with Scarface and his chums roaming the countryside in search of nuts or grubs or whatever it is they eat. Or there might be a dramatic attack by badgers-cause-bovine-TB activists armed with shovels and snares as they attempt to enforce a cull. But then again – and very likely, on last night’s evidence – there will just be Scarface in his scratcher, not doing anything other than enjoying some peaceful evening sleep for hours on end, as the camera quietly looks on. And good luck to him: keep calm and carry on is a lesson we could all do with heeding, after all.

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