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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 1.78:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital Stereo
  Subtitles
    English - Hearing Impaired
  Extras
  • Cast/crew biographies
  • Interviews - Donal MacIntyre - 8 min
  • Music-only track - original score - 16 min

Wild Weather

BBC/Roadshow Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 231 mins . E . PAL

  Feature
Contract

Everyone loves a good weather doco. And before you jump up from the computer outraged, stick your head out the window and yell “except me!” have a think for a moment. To make the weather interesting isn’t hard. All that’s needed is some footage of a vicious hurricane tearing buildings apart while people stagger under its force, or a blizzard that turns New York City into an almond icing impersonation, or a tornado picking up a cow and depositing it upside down on top of a rave party (if you’ve never seen this, you’ve never had nightmares about upside-down cows and rave parties. But we digress.)

The thing is, it’s all been done, weather-wise, and yet we still lap these programs up any chance we can. Even that $2 bargain-bin DVD of “Terrible Twisters” is guaranteed to have a few moments of “whoa” to make the journey worthwhile. But from very few of these can we actually learn something. Usually it’s more like a climate-driven snuff movie where nature does big freaky stuff while you go “ooh” and feel secretly grateful that you’re in a city where stuff like that just doesn’t ever happen.

Wild Weather is the BBC’s high-budget entry into the great canon of “weatherporn”. It’s a four-part series hosted by investigative reporter Donal MacIntyre. Yes, you read it right; Irish-born Donal is one of Britain’s most renowned undercover journalists, famed for his daring exposes of football hooliganism (a program seen several times on Australian TV), drugs, prostitution, Nigerian 419 scams and the like. He’s gotten himself deliberately mugged on camera to prove a point, and he’s become known as the “hard man” of British journalism. So what’s this “hard man” doing hosting a natural science documentary series? No, it’s probably not because it meant being away from the UK for extended periods (and therefore escaping from the death threats that have followed his undercover reports). You see, this weather doco intends to take the art of explaining extreme weather to a new level. It attempts to chronicle the most extreme weather on the planet, explain how it comes about in as uncluttered a way as possible, and to then put poor Donal (and his poor camera and sound operators!) right in the middle of it.

The four hour-long episodes each cover a general theme: in order, Wind, Wet, Cold and Heat. The approach is, perhaps not surprisingly, quite journalistic. MacIntyre investigates a particular weather phenomenon by tracking it to its source, then following the “journey” it takes from source to the various ways it can kill you or do nasty things to your body parts, and through on to the dying stages of that bit of the weather (always peaceful, by the way, an environmental retirement home for recalcitrant bits of the climate). Effectively, MacIntyre investigates the weather in much the same way he’d investigate a drug syndicate, though in this case nobody’s going to arrest the weather just yet.

Along the way he keeps up his “hard man” image by submitting himself to all kinds of Japanese-TV-game-show-like tortures in order to make us glad it’s him and not us. He’s blown into submission by hurricane-force winds in a wind tunnel, stands in front of a dam as it is opened, freezes nearly to the point of death to prove how cold can freeze you all the way to the point of death, sweats it out in the tropics with the most sarcastic officer in the British Army on his back the whole way, gets blown around by the world’s worst blizzard, runs a marathon in the Sahara desert, is struck by one and a half million volts of electricity generated by an eerily-lit Van de Graaff Generator operated by a man who’s a combination between Dr Evil and a VCR repairman, gets buried in snow by the Sirius Patrol (who then refuse to answer their radios just to add to the excitement), and has enormous trouble saying the word “arctic”. It’s all winningly entertaining, and while the actual science is light-on, there’s some fascinating info to be found, illustrated by 3D animations so expensive that they have to keep showing you their favourite ones again and again.

Ultimately, though, this is all about Donal; it’s Weather Vs Macintyre, in four widescreen rounds with a little bit of trivia to keep you attuned to the big contest. There is a focus on the effects these events had on individuals (who are interviewed) and the series ends with a cautionary environmental warning, but you get the feeling that if the world’s climate started generating extreme weather on a daily basis and he got to do the interview with Mother Nature, Donal MacIntyre would be the happiest man on the planet.

  Video
Contract

Wild Weather was shot largely on film, as is still (admirably) BBC custom with their large-scale documentaries. There is some video footage here - not only the amateur weather stuff, but also some interviews and of course the computer graphics. But it’s mostly from film, and looks terrific - wonderfully photographed in 16:9 widescreen, all four episodes are presented in their original widescreen format in pristine anamorphic transfers.

As with all locally-released BBC discs, the authoring was done in the UK and the local release is bit-for-bit identical to the UK version. The BBC’s MPEG encoding hasn’t always stood up to the rigours of fast-paced documentary footage, so it’s pleasing to see that they’ve chosen not to cram all four episodes onto a single disc - they could easily have done so - but instead use two discs and encode the video at a gargantuan bitrate, frequently hitting the 10Mbit mark and dealing effortlessly with the at times challenging visuals. The only encoding problems that crop up are a few scenes where vertical bars of noise similar to macro-blocking are briefly visible, but at such a fine scale that few will notice.

Both discs are dual-layered, with one episode per layer - though unusually they’re authored as RSDL discs despite the lack of a need for a layer change.

  Audio
Contract

Nothing fancy here; the audio throughout is in straight stereo, encoded as Dolby Digital 2.0. It sounds fine, a solid representation of the soundtrack that conveys the mix perfectly clearly. The music score (performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra) is mixed a bit backwardly overall, which is largely fine by us; like the Blue Planet score, it tends towards the overblown rather than the evocative.

  Extras
Contract

There’s a surprisingly small batch of extra material included in this set; if you’re buying it, be sure it’s for the show, because you’re not getting much else. Then again, this double-disc set sells for a single-disc price, so don’t get too upset too quickly...!

The static, annoying-theme-music backed menus illustrate a possible rush to production for this particular release.

Interview: Donal, who obviously had a terrific time shooting the series, waxes lyrical for eight minutes about it, without interviewer questions; an interesting, but all too brief, insight.

Original Score: 16 minutes’ worth of audio-only tracks, containing selections from the original music score recorded for the program. Playable as a whole or as individual tracks.

Biography: A multi-page text bio of MacIntyre, reminding us of his achievements, none of which are related to science or the weather…!

  Overall  
Contract

A very watchable and user-friendly look at the big stuff that nature likes to throw up when we least expect it, Wild Weather isn’t the most focussed of science documentaries, but it’s certainly one of the most fun. The sense of humour that pervades the whole project certainly helps, and even if you try not to, you’ll probably learn some useful things about the way the Earth’s climate operates. The BBC’s DVD release is technically nearly flawless, but a bit sparse on the extras department.

Oh, and those reading in DVDnet’s home city of Melbourne, Australia will be rather pleased to see that the infamous February 1983 dust storm - celebrating its 20th anniversary as this review is published - gets a guernsey in the last program, right up there with the most extreme weather the world has to offer. Feel good, Melbourne - you do apocalyptic doom-laden weather better than anywhere else.


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      And I quote...
    "A very watchable and user-friendly look at the big stuff that nature likes to throw up when we least expect it."
    - Anthony Horan
      Review Equipment
    • DVD Player:
          Sony DVP-NS300
    • TV:
          Panasonic - The One
    • Receiver:
          Sony STR-DB870
    • Speakers:
          Klipsch Tangent 500
    • Centre Speaker:
          Panasonic
    • Surrounds:
          Jamo
    • Audio Cables:
          Standard Optical
    • Video Cables:
          Monster s-video
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