Watership Down on the Kalahari

I don’t watch soap operas.  Never have.  Umm, except for that one brief unfortunate dalliance with General Hospital back in the 80s.  I got snared on the Luke and Laura thing  just long enough to learn how soap opera reality works.   See, in Port Charles rape isn’t necessarily a crime, leading to conviction and imprisonment.  Oh no.   Sometimes it’s an important steppingstone in one’s career development.   One day you’re the guy with the cover-up-the-receding-hairline perm and the Members Only jacket who manages the local disco.  Then, only one little rape later:   you suddenly fall in love with your victim, go “on the run” across the country all summer long, and end up an heroic, world-saving International Man of Mystery. Now that’s a career path even Horatio Alger could be proud of.   My fascination with GH lasted all of  3  months, and then I quit mainly because I could feel my head fixin’ to explode from all that “reality”.

Maybe nobody’s ever totally  immune to soap operas.   I used to think that if anybody was, it was Grandma Tild with her brutal Swedish practicality and no-nonsense approach to everything.    I was disabused of that notion one day when for some reason I was at her house on a weekday.  She was in her living room, banging her fist down on top of  the television repeatedly and yelling “Now you yust stop dat right NOW!” at the actors on Guiding Light.

(Well, to be fair, Grandma Tild was in her 80s at the time, and was starting to exhibit a few behaviors associated with senility. She had started to drift mentally back and forth between the present in Minnesota and seventy years earlier in Sweden.   I often thought how fun it must be to experience life  in such a fluid state of reality, with no pharmaceuticals needed.)

Do I need to mention that I can’t stand the Sopranos?   Ditto  Deadwood, Lost, and pretty much every other tv series past or present that’s basically a pimped up soap opera with just enough cussing and skin added so that guys are unafraid to be found watching and thus incurring the scorn of  the Testosterone Police.   I can’t stand any of those shows, and so of course it’s the curse of my existence to be the only female in a household full of males who are slavishly devoted to ALL of them.  Jesus H Christ the Baron Krauss Von Espy!

But to get to my point –and I do have one– can you guess what soap operatic show I DO watch?

Yep, and I say it with some embarrassment:  I’m obsessed with Meerkat Manor.

One Friday night a couple of months ago I was bored and clicking around looking for anything even mildly interesting when I happened to stop on Animal Planet and caught the last half of an episode of MM.  For those of you who want to know the backstory:  an animal research team from Cambridge went to the native meerkat habitat  in the Kalahari desert in southern Africa and set up cameras around a meerkat colony. Researchers even managed to fit tiny fiber optic cameras underground in the meerkat burrows.   The result is that the daily life and times of what’s been christened the Whiskers Clan have been documented down to the most minute detail for the past 10 years.

Starting in 2005,  half-hour episodes of the life-and-death goings on amongst the Whiskers have been produced and shown worldwide as “Meerkat Manor”. The estimable Bill Nighy narrates the episodes shown in the UK, while Sean Astin does the honors for the US version.  (Hmmm. Is it just coincidence that both Nighy and Astin have played the part of  Sam Gamgee in film or radio LOTR adaptations? Is this perhaps a requirement for Meerkat Manor narrators?   And if so, does that mean that the guy who narrates the episodes for Australian TV must have played Sam at some point too?)

All it took was 10 minutes and I was hooked.

An introduction to the Whiskers clan and a family tree

Will feisty wayward daughter Mozart be accepted back into the clan by her mother, the ruling matriarch Flower?  And will Flower let Mozart stay long enough to raise a litter, or will she kick Mozart out again as soon as she’s given birth and then kill Mozart’s babies?  What happened to Mozart’s sister Tosca and their doomed little brother Shakespeare, who was ready to keel over dead at the end of the first season?  Will stalwart, strong but silent heartthrob Mitch ever stop standing guard and finally find love?   With the help of faithful consort Zaphod, can Flower come up with a successful defense strategy to outsmart the ruthless Commandos?   Can plucky Daisy resist the seductive wiles of that lothario Carlos from the rival Lazuli clan?

…And what about Zaphod’s troubled brother Youssarian?

I’m telling ya, it’s insidiously addictive. The only thing I could wish for that would make the whole experience even more satisfying in a meerkat Watership Down kind of way would be some meerkat mythology…

Watch:  Meerkat Manor

Where:   (cable channel) Animal Planet

When:  Fridays, 7PM Central Time, with repeats at 11PM and  2AM

UPDATE:   I really expected to get at least some feedback or reaction to this jokey little picture I cobbled up, but so far zip , zilch, nada.   Come on, people– haven’t any of you ever seen The Lion King?   Sheesh!  ~