How to stop a herd of rampaging elephants with DIY chilli bombs: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV 

By Christopher Stevens for Daily Mail

Published: 19:26 EST, 5 August 2015 | Updated: 20:32 EST, 5 August 2015

Earth's Natural Wonders

Rating:

Horizon: The Trouble With Space Junk 

Rating:

The foxes are playing havoc in our garden again. It’s not just the mess, the smell and filthy great holes under the fence — it’s the racket.

The vixens wail like souls in torment and the squabbling cubs make a chattering, squealing noise that is downright demonic. When they wake the neighbourhood at 3am, it sounds as if there’s a horror movie happening on the back lawn.

There’s no point calling the city pest controllers. Urban foxes have lived on these streets since the Thirties, raiding dustbins for the past 80 years — you could literally wait a lifetime for the council round here to get anything done.

But thanks to Earth’s Natural Wonders (BBC1) and a Masai farmer called Richard, I might have a fast-acting solution that is also highly entertaining.

In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya, Richard’s job is to protect his village’s crops at night from herds of hungry elephants. They blunder through fences, scoff what they fancy and trample the rest.

Thanks to Earth’s Natural Wonders (BBC1) and a Masai farmer called Richard (pictured), I might have a fast-acting solution that is also highly entertaining

Thanks to Earth’s Natural Wonders (BBC1) and a Masai farmer called Richard (pictured), I might have a fast-acting solution that is also highly entertaining

In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya, Richard’s job is to protect his village’s crops at night from herds of hungry elephants

In the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya, Richard’s job is to protect his village’s crops at night from herds of hungry elephants

The locals can’t shoot them: elephants are quite rightly a protected species. And it’s dangerous to chase them away: the herd, grumpy at having their dinner disturbed, simply turn around and chase the villagers instead, causing much more damage.

Night-vision cameras caught the chaos of an elephantine cavalry charge. The technology has become so sophisticated that it appeared to be happening under floodlights.

During the now obligatory segment at the end of the documentary, explaining how the footage was shot, the camera crew recorded their own shock and excitement after the charge. They had been so close, within feet of the herd, that for a few seconds all of them believed they might be trampled to death.

You’d think that a force of nature that wild and powerful couldn’t be stopped by anything smaller than a howitzer. But Richard went to market with a pocketful of Kenyan shillings and bought some fire-crackers, a pound of chilli powder and a few packets of condoms.

Like a boy making booby traps, he poured the powder into the prophylactics and stoppered the ends with the miniature fireworks.

TOURIST TURN-OFF OF THE NIGHT: 

The hotels in Le Treport have grotty flock wallpaper, the chalk cliffs are black with mould and there’s a serial killer hiding in a farmhouse attic. Despite its arty style, the French crime drama Witnesses (C4) won’t sell many holidays in Normandy.

The next night, the elephants came back and were met with a barrage of explosions that rained hot spice on their sensitive trunks, as Richard hurled his home-made bombs. Bellowing and snorting, the beasts galumphed for the hills.

Earth’s Natural Wonders was packed with stories like these. The photography was as spectacular as the settings, but it was the anthropology, not the geography, that made this show such thoroughly good viewing.

Men climbed hundreds of feet on ropes hanging from cave roofs in Borneo to collect birds’ nests for soup, a delicacy in China. On flimsy rafts in a bay off Papua New Guinea, where the waters are a mile deep, fishermen fed buckets of sprats to whale sharks, paying homage to their ancestors.

One junk-hunter was so gung-ho that he’d built a space harpoon to drag debris out of the sky. That would probably work on foxes, too. But it might be a bit drastic.

One junk-hunter was so gung-ho that he’d built a space harpoon to drag debris out of the sky. That would probably work on foxes, too. But it might be a bit drastic.

The narrative switched back and forth, one minute soaring with condors above the Grand Canyon, the next edging towards a crevasse on a Nepalese glacier. Every minute was absorbing.

That wasn’t true of Horizon: The Trouble With Space Junk (BBC2), though the raw material of this documentary was thought- provoking. Outside the Earth’s atmosphere, where the satellites orbit, are tens of thousands of debris fragments, travelling at more than 10,000 mph. Even a fleck of paint, if it hits the space station or an astronaut, will have the impact of a Magnum bullet.

The danger is that these collisions, known as ‘red conjunctions’ in Nasa jargon, will create more and more high-speed litter, until every telecoms network and weather-watching system in the sky is wiped out.

It’s an ominous idea. But it’s also a basic one, and within 15 minutes this programme had said all it needed. The next three-quarters of an hour were repetitive and padded, just more scientists repeating what the others had said.

 

 

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