Oceans BBC2, 8pm OCEANOGRAPHERS will hate Oceans. This is because the show's presenting quartet provide much less than a deep and revealing dive beneath the surface of the last true wilderness on Earth. Rather, the Oceans foursome dip their tootsies prettily into the foaming brine's top three inches and then waggle them about a bit while uttering such non-scientific imprecisions as "Gosh, yes!", "Ooh!", "So lovely!" and "Awesome".
In addition, they perhaps undermined their credentials as ecological explorers by flying a noisy, exhaust fumes-emitting remote control mini-helicopter at a group of sperm whales. They were trying to sample the whales' breath for bacteria commonly transmitted by whale-watching humans. Whoops.
So how should us non-boffins regard Oceans? Frankly, the new eight-parter is a glossy pile of aquamarine-coloured rubbish, all shoals of colourful fishy-wishies, pink coral reefs and eddying azure currents: TV as coffee-table book.
Then again, it does offer arresting sights, especially for male viewers.
One such vista was accompanied by a segment of voice-over which urged us "west to the Bay of Conception with Tooni Mahto".
Tooni Mahto! Gosh, yes. Ooh!
Drooling menfolk will melt at her very name, for Tooni Mahto is a posh and pulchritudinous popsy with an anarcho-punk nose-ring and dreamy upper-crust drawl.
Tooni Mahto has smooth tanned skin - and, by golly, we didn't we get to see it. For when not in a bikini, Tooni was in a strappy top or enveloped in a skin-tight diver's suit west to the Bay of Conception with Tooni Mahto, indeed.
More seriously, Tooni Mahto is a marine biologist, too. I mean, she knows the collective noun for a bunch of dolphins, a pod, and other stuff. She also has a penchant for the exclamatory, gasping un-boffiny things such as: "I can see squid! Loads of them! Ooh!"
When Tooni dived with a sea-lion colony, one became a close admirer, making her delightedly trill: "He's one of the males, and he's certainly coming round to check me out!" A chap?
Hanging round Tooni? No surprise there. Gosh.
Tooni went on to add impossible glamour to collecting sea-lion droppings and sluicing them through a sieve: "I'm doing the scientific equivalent of panning for gold!" When the narrator of Oceans wasn't luring us with prospect of swimming with Tooni in the Bay of Conception, he was trying to engender a false sense of emergency about oncoming storms that threaten Oceans' boat as it traverses the Sea of Cortez (or to give it its less exciting name, the Gulf of California).
No storms actually blew up, and you wouldn't care if one sank the Oceans boat, anyway. Aside from Tooni, its crew are a dreary bunch, led by silver-haired explorer Paul Rose, a chap who tries awfully hard to be apposite and kinda witty, but never says anything worth listening to.
Marine archaeologist Dr Lucy Blue resembles the former Mrs Noel Gallagher, Meg Matthews. Philippe Cousteau is a California surfie version of his famous grandfather, Jacques. Bland, dude.
When not frolicking photogenically as if filming a travel show, the programme's scientists acted like carefree holiday-makers, eg. boiling eggs in the San Andreas fault's bubbling seabed hydro-thermal vents. To some, this super-heated water evokes millennia-old forces ripping two landmasses apart. To others, it's handy for lunch.
At such junctures, oh, to be heading whole-heartedly west to the Bay of Conception with Tooni Mahto
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