Charles Moore
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Another British characteristic is the infuriating TV documentary. We now lead the world in documentaries which are vehicles for the presenter to show off his courage, humour, sensitivity, rudeness, ignorance etc. One such, which I watched in preparation for Turkmenistan, was called The Happy Dictator, and concerned Turkmenbashi (as he called himself), the late President of Turkmenistan and his personality cult. What it was really about was Waldemar Januszczak, who presented it. Look at me, he seemed to say, here I am in Ashkabat (the capital) and I am not allowed to make this film so I am shooting it with a hidden camera and amusingly drinking vodka with Turkmenbashi’s head on it in my hotel room and generally being disrespectful and unshaven. My heart went out to the dignified Turkmens being guyed by this oaf and my head longed for more actual information about the place. A documentary should let its subjects speak. The presenter should be heard but not seen.
In this respect, Molly Dineen’s The Lie of the Land was the model. It followed the work of West Country livestock farmers, huntsmen and the flesh men from the hunt who deal with fallen stock and are increasingly asked to kill healthy calves because there is no market for them. The men all spoke feelingly as they did their jobs, filmed without silly tricks. The film brought out their dignity and allowed them their voice. It also made good points about how regulation bears much more heavily on British farmers than on their rivals, and how the hunt ban prevents necessary control while other policies contribute to unnecessary slaughter. As if to reinforce the criticism of hypocritical public opinion on these matters, the disembodied voice in the trailer said: ‘The programme contains stark images of animal slaughter which some viewers may find upsetting.’ One premise of this excellent film, however, was false. It said that in the 1970s, households spent a third of their money on food and today the figure is less than 10 per cent. This was presented as being a bad thing, responsible for the death of calves. If you pursue this logic, you get to the Arthur Scargill position about British coal, which was that no British pit should ever be closed unless it was geologically exhausted. The fact that we spend proportionally less on food is, on the whole, a good thing: it shows that we have become more prosperous and have more choice in our lives. It is not our collective job to maintain farmers as producers of expensive meat. If we were to do so, as once we did, there would be good Molly Dineen documentaries about how white men got rich on subsidy while developing countries were kept out of world markets. The way country life is diversifying as subsidy alters and diminishes is not all bad. There is more enterprise than there used to be, and the Countryside Stewardship Scheme which encourages wide headlands has made hunting almost as unimpeded as it was in the 19th century.
Sir David Attenborough has called for a national inventory of moths to be held on 11 August. It is an excellent idea, although July is generally the month for the biggest catch. First thing every morning between March and November, my wife sits on the steps to our garden and counts the moths that have entered her trap in the night. She has identified about 400 varieties over the past few years, not including micro-moths. On the whole, her results do not show the decline about which people worry. This week, she found the increasingly rare White Ermine. Some moths — the Scarce Bordered Straw, the L-album Wainscot — are becoming more common and, rather like the human British population, there are ever-larger numbers of immigrants. The Convolvulus Hawk Moth is one, The Vestal another. The European Corn Borer (sounds like a Liberal Democrat MEP) is now so settled by the Thames that it can no longer be counted as an immigrant. For identifying your moths, my wife says that much the best book is Bernard Skinner’s Moths of the British Isles, and the best way of finding them is to buy a moth-trap from Watkins & Doncaster, of Hawkhurst, Kent. Moths, famously, are attracted to light, which is how the trap entices them. No one really knows why this attraction is so strong, since it appears to bring them no benefit. One theory about moth decline is that it is caused by growing light pollution, which prevents them getting on with their business. In a small way, I fear, our mothtrap does that too, though I should explain that all the moths caught are released once identified. So no animal was harmed in the production of this column.
A reader follows up my recent discussion of the use of first names with this from John Buchan, after he had served as governor-general of Canada: ‘You have to know a Canadian really well to discover his surname.
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