Elephant Film - BBC 2, 8pm tonight

I heard Martyn Colbeck interviwed on Radio 4's Midweek this morning (yup, late for work again!). Sounds a fascinating documentary with lots of emphasis on their emotional lives, rather than the more common aggression/sex/hunting that some documentaries tend to focus on. He's worked in conjunction with Cynthia Moss but don't know if she's included in this documentary. Hope so!


Scabbed off the Radio Times site:


Natural World
8:00pm - 8:50pm
BBC2
VIDEO Plus+: 201555
Subtitles, audio description, widescreen

Eye for an Elephant

Apparently, the Masai believe that elephants are the only animals to have souls. Having watched Martyn Colbeck's film, you may feel the same, as he delicately unravels the weird subtleties of African elephant society. At times you feel sure you can read the emotion in the elephants' body language as they grieve, collaborate, fight or greet each other. Colbeck's in a good position to chart the soap opera of elephant family life: he has filmed them for 15 years, often the same Kenyan family group. He's so close to them that he's able to let us in on rare events such as fighting males, a night-time birth and even a bizarre kidnapping incident. We learn, too, that elephants have an equivalent of crying: glands near their eyes stream at moments of high emotion. Colbeck also takes us on detours to observe desert elephants in Namibia and forest elephants in the Congo jungle. It all makes for captivating TV, though, for all the marvellous footage, it's often Colbeck's black-and-white still photographs that are most powerful.