Tuesday - Pay Tv

The Age

Thursday January 24, 2008

Brad Newsome

Crime Scene Wild

Animal Planet, 7.30pm

It's distressing to watch at times, but the first episode of this new series, about the traffic in endangered species, is a truly courageous feat of documentary making. The episode is about ivory, so the CSW team is in Cameroon on patrol with a squad of wildlife police whose job is to protect the endangered forest elephant. Incredibly, the wildlife cops are unarmed, so although they work hard to track down a team of poachers via the bones of a recently killed elephant, and a bloke caught with a chunk of elephant meat ("a pygmy gave it to me"), at the first sound of gunshots they take off back to base to write a report. The documentary crew, however, tracks down the poachers and convinces them to let them film the hunt. After making their kill, the poachers lounge around eating elephant meat and talking about how little money they make (about $40 a tusk) but how they can still bribe prosecutors when they get caught. The poachers explain that they have orders for 20 elephants, and with five other groups in the same small area having similar orders, the forest elephants seem, well, doomed. Elsewhere, the CSW team does some excellent hidden-camera work in a Chinese factory that carves elephant tusks into hideous decorations, and at London's Portobello Road market, where vendors have plenty of advice on how to smuggle ivory through Customs. While China's increasingly affluent population is often blamed for fuelling the trade in endangered species, this program reminds us that there are still plenty of people in Britain and America (and, presumably, Australia) who are happy to pay upwards of $50,000 for a single elephant tusk. Disgusting.

Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation

Lifestyle, 8.30pm

Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, left, have sorted out Britain's bras and knickers, so now they're on to the blokes. They've decided that there are six male body types - man boobs, beer belly, short legs, thick neck, broad shoulders and skinny - and they set about laying down style rules for each. Turns out that many of Britain's blokes haven't bought so much as a T-shirt for themselves in years, so a bunch of them are given some tough love ("You've got amazing-coloured eyes but you look like you've crawled out from under a stone") and sent out to buy some new clobber. Essential viewing for the fashion-challenged fella.

Killer Jellyfish

Animal Planet, 8.30am

It's about time this was back on. It's a fascinating documentary about the irukandji, a near-invisible, fingernail-sized jellyfish that has been killing people in Queensland. Though related to - and deadlier than - the bigger box jellies, the irukandji is small and stealthy enough to sneak under the radar and through the stinger nets.