KEY POINTS:
On the news, on TV3, the other night, a British journalist went to Beijing to have a look at how China was gearing up for its Olympics.
We were shown footage of the main stadium, dubbed the "bird's nest" and held to be a marvel of modern engineering and architecture. You could hardly see the thing through the smog.
A bloke then went for a jog, through the smog. It was more of a cough than a jog. Point taken: there's a lot of bad air in China.
You wouldn't think so if you'd watched the first episode of Wild China on Saturday on Prime: made by the BBC with help from China's national broadcaster who, presumably, would like to be able to send that smog recording British telly lot for a spot of re-education.
You might not be inclined to book your tickets to the Olympics if you'd seen the telly news item. Wild China, on the other hand, is beautiful, exotic, and enticing.
There are astoundingly gorgeous, strange landscapes and weirdo animals - including a giant endangered salamander that makes a sound like a distressed baby.
The salamander is protected but, this being China, it probably makes that distressed noise when its being put in the pot. It is considered delicious. I'd rather eat smog, personally, but there is no point getting all uppity about what other people eat if you have ever eaten a crayfish that has been boiled alive.
And, come to think of it, you don't get a much weirder looking thing than a crayfish. A mate of mine, who likes his tucker, once wondered what the Chinese did with the good bits of the animal.
He went to China recently and I wanted him to pose this question to his hosts, but he chickened out. One glimpse of the slimy salamander would have shown him that, with some animals, there are no good bits.
There are good bits in Wild China: the landscape, the weirdo animals. It is enticing, in the same way glossy tourist brochures are enticing. I'd advise watching it with the sound off. The narration, by Bernard Hill, is typical of many wildlife docos: jauntily dreary. On young monkeys at play: "Like so much monkey business what starts out as a bit of rough and tumble gets out of hand."
And lecturing and banal: "If we show the will, nature will show the way." Tell that to the salamander on the dinner plate.
Still, as a promo for China, it works wonderfully well. I am tempted to book a flight there immediately if only so that I never have to watch another episode of Trade Wars (Mondays, 8pm, TV2). It is what passes, I suppose, for innovative reality telly making, which means that it is jauntily dreary.
There's a running joke whereby the three expert blokes, a builder, a PI, and a mediator, retire to an outdoor dunny on the door of which is hung a "meeting in progress" sign. They then appear, Tardis-like, in a flash living room to discuss the meetings they've had with disgruntled home owners. You know the ones. They sit next to you at work. They are you.
These tales of woe are tedious enough when they're your own. One woman had had her bathroom done up. Coming up: "This woman goes crazy on her toilet." I was going crazy on my couch watching the builder bloke, wearing beret and stripy shirt, with easel, pretending to paint a picture. "Aah, the Renaissance", the narrator cooed, "the Age of Enlightenment. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa ... Michelangelo created David ..." The builder bloke said, voila!
Which I doubt very much is what Michelangelo said when he knocked off his David, given that he, and Da Vinci, were Italian. "Appalling," said the builder bloke, over and over, as he examined a project gone wrong. I can think of another French word to describe this project gone wrong.
