There was a moment during Panda Babies (ITV) when I worried what my life has become. On screen, vet Steve Leonard was explaining that panda mothers usually lick their cubs’ bottoms to help them defecate. In this panda nursery in China he visited, where abandoned cubs are raised by humans for release into the wild, that is not possible. I’m not sure why. Probably health and safety. Or maybe vets just refuse to lick pandas’ behinds because they have become so stuck up as a result of media notoriety. If so, what happened to their sense of vocation?
Instead, medics tap cubs’ tummies to achieve the same effect. Tap, tap, tap went the nurse on Ying Hua’s stomach. The director, understandably, ramped up the jeopardy. Would it come? Tap, tap, tap. Would it? Heavens yes. It was coming. Oh yes. It was coming.
“Here you go: panda poop,” said Steve. And then he addressed Ying Hua in the mutually degrading, sing-songy voice that humans of certain vexing dispositions use on presumed lower life forms: “Is that nice? Does that feel better? Good girl! You can have a sleep now.” I know Steve is right and panda cubs are the cutest things in the world. But really? Watching pandas be manually stimulated by humans? This is what I’m doing now?
You too probably had existential misgivings if you were reduced to watching pandas overcoming natural obstacles on New Year’s Eve. What have you become? Back in the day, you used to go partying and make out with humans, some of them sexually attractive. Last night, you were just looking for something to keep you going until it was, please God no, time for Bryan Adams to rock you into 2016. Didn’t you?
That said, there’s something puzzling about New Year’s Eve telly. Why, when nobody, if they’re honest, wants to go out, paddle in Trafalgar Square, or pay £20 to stand in a rubbish pub waiting to sing Auld Lang Syne, are schedules full of repeats, unwatchable specials with unspeakable hosts and constipated panda cubs? It’s like TV is saying to us: “I know you don’t want to go out, but I need some me time. So jog on, yeah? Laters.” But TV shouldn’t do that. Doesn’t TV realise that if it carries on this way, we will start cheating on it, not just with Netflix and YouTube, but suitors of questionable legality?
Pandas, like the human spirit, are endangered. Only 1,600 or so live in the wild. And those raised in captivity often struggle to reproduce, despite Viagra, suggestive videos and their keepers shouting enthusiastic, if probably incomprehensible, advice from the other side of the cell bars.
Apparently, female pandas have what experts call a “two-day sex window”, and this window is reduced further by the fact pandas spend 13 to 16 hours a day eating bamboo. Unless pandas eat bamboo while mating (and who among us, if we consider ourselves considerate lovers, does that?), then there’s scarcely any time to get it on.
No wonder that Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, gifted to Nixon by Mao in 1972, spent a decade failing to breed in Washington zoo. I know it’s fashionable to mock panda sexual prowess, but would you have been able to perform with the world’s media drumming its fingers? Of course you wouldn’t. And, anyway, stop looking so superior – what are you doing home alone on New Year’s Eve watching baby pandas being toilet trained, if you’re so clever?
Worse, when pandas do get pregnant, they often give birth to twins but, Steve explained, half the time they abandon the weaker-looking sibling. Many of the cubs he saw were raised by foster mothers in Chinese nurseries. China is thus heroicallyfighting against panda extinction and if it wants to borrow my Marvin Gaye records to help, it only needs to ask.
In one scene, three men went into a cell and milked a mother panda. They distracted it with honey and expressed some milk for a needy baby into a test tube. Let’s pause to salute these heroes. While we’re sitting on our sofas, they’re risking life and limb, tweaking potentially angry mother bear’s nipples in order to save an endangered species.
The last time Emily Bishop had a decent storyline in Coronation Street (ITV) was so long ago that Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing were in the news. That was in 1978, when she was grieving over the killing of her lay preacher husband Ernie by armed robbers as he filled wage packets at Baldwin’s Casuals denim factory. I know most of you weren’t around then and/or couldn’t care less, but, trust me, it was heartbreaking.I still miss the appealingly awkward, if unbecomingly coiffed, love of Emily’s life.
Now, 38 years later, she’s got another storyline. Even as you read this, she’s doing a reverse Paddington bear, flying off to darkest Peru for a charity fundraising adventure, despite the mithering of her lodger Norris. “Maybe I’m too old to be heading off to the other side of the world,” she said. Nonsense, said Rita sagely – and not just because when Emily goes to Peru, Rita becomes the longest-serving female character in the soap. At least until Emily flies back.
What’s Emily leaving behind? A lot of unanswered questions, that’s what. Will Carla ever stop looking mardy? Will my autocorrect stop questioning my use of mardy? Or mithering? Will Ken, or the British nation, get over the death of Deirdre? Will Fiz and Tyrone’s daughter survive the cancer operation? Can Tracey have the evil gene removed somehow?
Fly away, Emily, from all this nonsense. Fly to Peru. There’s time for adventure, even in your ninth decade. There is more to life than watching Panda Babies. Or let’s hope.
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