Friday 5th
EARTH’S GREATEST SPECTACLES, BBC2, 9pm
This new series aims to show us nature in all its glory. It starts in New England during “the fall” when millions of leaves transform from a nice, ordinary green into flaming reds, orange and bronze. “There’s nowhere else on Earth quite like it,” says the narrator and you’ll be persuaded to agree.
But the programme doesn’t just sit back and gawp at the foliage – in the days of the internet, Google Images can serve up that experience – instead, we are turned away from the simple beauty to look at the “battle raging” between the trees and the animals, and to consider autumn as the tourists rarely do.
The first warrior into battle is the moose. In winter, every other creature is in hibernation but he is too big and so continues to feast on leaves – but the trees fight back, trying to stop their leaves from being stripped by releasing foul-tasting tannin.
Having fought off the moose, the sapsucker bird enters the arena to fight. As snow melts, water runs down through the trees bringing sugar with it. It soaks the bark and this “liquid energy is the life force of the entire forest.” The sapsucker wants to help himself and does this by drilling into the bark which leaves the tree damaged and pockmarked.
It’s clear there is a battle raging in the pretty New England forests.
LENINGRAD AND THE ORCHESTRA THAT DEFIED HITLER, BBC2, 11.35pm
There’s a romance to the famous tale of the Titanic’s orchestra which continued to play as the ship went down, but the Leningrad orchestra have an equally heroic story. The 1942 siege of the city killed 750,000 and in the midst of the horror, starving musicians gathered to play Shostakovich’s latest symphony, its sheet music having been smuggled into the city after its composer had been evacuated, and the performance was played on loudspeaker as an act of defiance.
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