Baboons with Bill Bailey   Presenter: Bill Bailey ITV Studios Home Entertainment RRP: £19.99 3711534713 Certificate: E Available 30 May 2011

Bill Bailey, one of Britain’s best loved comedians, travels to Cape Town’s urban districts to track baboon colonies and document the trials and tribulations of these remarkable primates lives. This eight-part creature feature takes viewers on a journey into the lives of these fascinating animals, providing an insight into the species that has been reported to share up to 91% of human DNA...

This DVD contains all 8, 30 minute episodes of Baboons with Bill Bailey. The series see Bailey narrating a wild life documentary that follows three troops of baboons that live in and around Cape Town, South Africa. Each troop has its own members with their own personalities. There's the highway robbers of the Smitz troop, the rustic rascals known as the Tokai troop and the urbanites know as the Da Gama troop.

The show anthropomorphises the baboons in a bid to appeal to the widest possible audience. It's a shame that hardly any time is given over to exploring this species in a little more in depth, in favour of showing baby baboons falling over or the adults displaying human characteristics. In this Disney era, it is probably not surprising that the producers opted to appeal to the great mindless masses in favour of actually attempting to educate the viewer with something of real interest. So, like a British soap opera we have fights (the leadership challenge of the Smitz troop); heartbreaking stories (the three legged female who is looked after by the alpha male); humour (the Smitz troop breaking into cars and the Da Gama troop stealing from bins and stealing washing that's been hung out to dry.

To be honest four hours of this is not only rather boring for the viewer, but for the editor too it would appear. There are way too many times when we witness the same things - we can only chuckle so many times as the Smitz troop breaks into yet another car. And by far the worst crime was that the same footage is occasionally shown to illustrate two different events. So, if the producers were running out of footage, wouldn't the sensible thing have been to cut the number of episodes? They could easily have sliced this down to four episodes and lost nothing.

While Bailey's narration is amusing and the episodes entertaining, there's just not enough here to make this a worthwhile purchase.

6

Darren Rea