Swim The Channel: Last Night's TV reviewed

EVERY summer, until at quite an advanced age, my dad would take part in a swimming race across Lake Geneva.


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Swim The Channel (BBC4)

It was an eight-mile stretch and one year he did it there and back, making his mileage not that far off a Channel crossing. 

Like a Channel crossing, his was between two countries (France and Switzerland) and yet, somehow, the glory never sticks to these lake swimmers as it does to those who Swim The Channel (BBC4).


Down on the seafront at Dover, Freda, Barrie and Irene braved the English summer as they supervised, fed, greased and nagged the year’s crop of hopefuls. In their kagoules and folding chairs there was an air of endurance about them as if they, too, were taking part in a test. Mike Oram, who piloted the accompanying boat, made no secret of it.

“It’s the pilot’s swim,” he said.

“The swimmers are just another engine.” In that peculiarly British way, Mike and Freda and the others made out that their passion was a bit of an irritation they’d gladly be rid of. As they checked weather reports and fielded calls from eager, anxious would-be swimmers, though, it was clear they loved the drama.

Echoing Mike’s comments, the swimmers often faded into the background in this film. We saw three very different people set out for very different reasons. Two made it across the Channel but the most driven of them, sadly, had to turn back. The real energy, though, came from the boat and the shore.

Mike liked to say that it changed you forever, that swimmers became different people once they set foot on the other shore. He never explained why and we didn’t spend enough time with the swimmers to know if it hadhappened.

It felt as if, with their tidal charts and their sacred pub wall (where every Channel swimmer writes their name), Mike & Co were the guardians of a mystery, the priests of a strange sea cult. 

You were left wondering if the same peculiar passion existed among the folk of Calais or Boulogne – and feeling pretty certain it didn’t.

One of the main by-products of watching anything involving Professor Brian Cox is feeling very stupid afterwards and his new series,Force of Nature with Brian Cox (BBC1) is no exception.

In this case, though, there’s a nagging doubt that perhaps a very simple thing is being presented in a needlessly complicated way. 

Last night we saw the ever-youthful prof explore an Indonesian volcano and a fabulous sea-cavern underneath the Dominican jungle.

Later on he took in a Maasai blood-drinking ritual and a Japanese squid-fishing expedition.


Force of Nature with Brian Cox (BBC1)

While capturing all these stunning natural wonders, Brian was under constant pressure to somehow relate them all back to physics. So, for example, the volcano was all about the interaction of sulphur and oxygen and the forest sea-cave was all about the unique properties of water. 


Or it might, perhaps, have been down to the way a nature film was clogged up with unnecessary, vague, confusing stuff about carbon molecules. When you’re gazing up at the stars who cares about the periodic table?