Here's why we're all going to die
It's all to do with this house in Bow, East London. It is owned by a yoga teacher called Claire Harrigan. She appeared on Wednesday's Property Ladder, which had an eco theme. She wanted to develop a "healthy house" - a home free of modern toxins and filled with spirit-lifting ideas, such as "happy" coloured lighting and wiring carefully diverted from sleeping areas. This, you must admit, is admirable. However, and here's the rub, Claire seemed (and she may have been a victim of narrative-led editing) like an idiot. Instead of coming across as a visionary, committed human being, she seemed "batty" (Sarah Beeny's assessment), putting crystals beneath the floorboards, threatening to put in a circular bed, installing a "happy shower" (which sounds like a service offered by a prostitute) and working from a "plan" that was just words like "spirit" and "happiness" with starbursts drawn round them. She'd also been arsing around with her development for four years when the programme joined her, taking down supporting walls without rhyme or structural reason, and when she'd finished creating her vision, Sarah calculated that Claire could have made a profit if she'd done nothing and left it to the market. She actually spent 74 grand, and could have made 36 grand more profit if she'd left it and got on with her yoga.

Now, the important thing here is not that a silly woman in Bow failed to maximise profit from a development, but that she was chosen and presented by the programme as a nutcase. Eco-friendly in this case meant off her head. If Claire had been redesigning the house for herself, you couldn't have criticised, as it wouldn't have been about profit. But because she'd confused vision with business, she came out of it at a disillusioned loss. (Actually, she hadn't even sold it by the end, so the figures are academic.) My worry is that those who attempt to do something about the parlous state of the planet are still portayed as dimwits, or as comic relief. Poor old Claire seemed well-intentioned but ill-informed. She made some connection between the rise in the sale of organic food and a willingness for housebuyers to pay a premium for an eco-friendly house. The programme gave some practical advice about reclaiming wood and using energy-saving lightbulbs, but it's not its brief to save the world, it's about making money! Meanwhile, we're left with the impression that environmental types are simply mental. And a quick vox pop on Hungerford Bridge in London concluded that people are into the idea of an eco-friendly house, but wouldn't pay for it.

Meanwhile, over in conservative Surbiton, a lecturer and his astronomer girlfriend, JP and Julie, did an eco-friendly number on a 1970s flat. Much less silly than Claire, they actually said they wanted to prove that eco developing doesn’t have to be "woolly hats and sandals" - and good for them. But it was obvious they were in the wrong suburb, and their budget was miniscule. (Natural, non-chemical paints, for instance, cost a fortune - I can vouch for that.) At one point, when they almost seemed sensible, JP threatened to install an "eco aspirator", a vegetation system that's meant to improve the flat's air quality but cost two grand. Sarah talked him out of it. Cuh! Those nutty eco-warriors! (She was right, in the circumstances, but the narrative remained consistent.) They couldn't sell their finished flat either.

Message: don't bother.

This worries me as we are currently experiencing the hottest days on record. I know, I know, it was bloody hot in the summer of 1911, but the three warmest years on record, globally, have occurred since 1998, and 19 of the warmest 20 since 1980. Meanwhile, bits of the Eiger broke off this week due to melting glaciers, there's almost no snow on the top of Kilimanjaro and polar bears are drowning in the Arctic. The Independent, ever-reliable in these matters, wrote an impassioned leader on Wednesday - the day Property Ladder made a monkey out of environmental builders - that ended with these words, which I quote in full:

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that most of the warming is caused by rising CO2 emissions directly attributable to human burning of nature's vast stores of coal, oil and natural gas. In the face of this, the silence on global warming from the leaders of the rich world gathered in St Petersburg was deafening. They were led in their foot-dragging by George Bush, who insists that the cost of mitigating global warming is too high to be justified in the light of what he calls the scientific uncertainty about the pace of climate change. The rest of the world sees no such uncertainty, and the heat of today will only underline that.

Which is why we're all going to die. And George Bush comes from Texas, where it's already hot and I expect even the horse stables are air-conditioned, so he's going to be the last to notice. (I've been to Houson and Dallas, and they were the hottest places I have ever visited. The restaurants advertise "refridgerated air". Now, if you grow up in that environment, a little bit of warming isn't going to strike you as odd, or worrying. But tell that to the Europeans dying in heat waves and forest fires, or the Inuits who can no longer rely on centuries-old food and weather patterns, or the next lot of poor people to lose everything in a hurricane or mudslide. Yo, Blair! Build some nuclear power stations - that'll fix this shit.) Open a window before you put on that air-conditioning. It might help.

This reminds me of my teen years, when I was so captivated by the movies I would literally watch anything that was on in order to bump up my numbers. There's a day from 1981, when I was 16, that always sticks in my mind because that entire day's diary entry is taken up with three film reviews. It was a Sunday, so I'm assuming I was catching up on stuff I'd recorded on video in the week (1981 was the Year We Got A Video). I think the list proves that I really would watch anything, as long as it was a film: Raid On Entebbe (1976 - I always put the year afterwards!), The Four Feathers (1978) and The Class Of Miss MacMichael (1978). I would republish my teenage reviews but they're mainly cast lists ("Peter Finch is a good actor. Charles Bronson is so rugged etc.", "Rob Powell, Jane Seymour, Simon Ward (of course!), Harry Andrews grunting etc.","Is Oliver Reed in every Glenda Jackson film?"), and each has a sweet little caricature to accompany. Yes, quite the little film critic. The reason I mention all this is that today, due to it being too hot to work, and due to me being in the house on my own from dawn till dusk, I decided to watch some films. Hey, why the hell not? I also took the broken lawnmower to a place in Epsom where they fix lawnmowers and re-nosed a radio script I have to record tomorrow, although why I feel the need to defend myself for goofing off and doing "research and development" I don't know ...


Cabin Fever (2004) Inspired, obviously, by seeing Eli Roth's Hostel two days ago. I just had to check out his debut, and it was reduced to 6.99 in HMV. First things first: it's only a 15 certificate, so the claims that it's "terrifying" on the box are somewhat diluted. It is pretty creepy though, and, like Hostel, influenced by 1970s horror, with a big dose of Evil Dead thrown in. Five friends, including two nubile girls, head out to some unspecified bit of rural America to stay in a cabin; in panicky self-defence, they kill a man infected with a flesh-eating virus, and catch it themselves, one by one. There are plenty of gross-out scenes, including one involving the most nubile girl shaving her legs, and one that takes places during some foreplay, that will make you feel slightly ill. Beyond that, it turns into a fight against the local hillbillies. It's funnier than Hostel - it even ends on a gag - but whether it's saying anything about the ostracisation of the diseased, I don't rightly know. It's not a bad little film - Roth does a lot with $1.5 million, and the build-up, once again, is handled like someone who's seen a lot of horror movies.


V For Vendetta (2006) This is out on DVD next week I think, and I'm reviewing it for RT. Based on the Alan Moore graphic novel, although the old grump's had his name taken off it, and quite faithful to artist David Lloyd's drawings, this was originally a dystopian future based by Moore on a kind of Thatcher's Britain gone even more wrong, with a big debt to 1984, as per all dystopian futures. It's been smartly updated - by the Wachowski Brothers - to present a Britain run on the fear of terrorism (hey, that could never happen), with Natalie Portman kidnapped by V, the masked Guy Fawkes freedom fighter who intends to blow up Parliament. As John Hurt's Big Brother-type crypto-fascist leader appears all big on screens, and his suited stormtroopers go about their clean-up business, it's down to Stephen Rea's detective-with-a-conscience to uncover what really happened when that bio-attack killed 100,000 people and swept John Hurt to power. Hmmmmm. I wonder. It's sixth-form stuff in this reduced form, and yet taken far too seriously. There's little sense of camp here, even with V swooshing around in mask and cape and cooking fried eggs in his gloves. It's a little too earnest for my tastes. I've seen too many doors being kicked down by jackbooted futurepoliceman and innocent citizens being rubbed out for subversive acts. Brazil owns the patent on that. And Stephen Fry's Benny Hill-esque chat show host/comedian didn't work at all. Not his fault; badly-sketched character. (I'm pretty sure he wasn't a celebrity in the novel.) Considering how much talking there is in it, it's all spelled out in huge letters. Another problem, it's frustrating when a major character is in an unmoving, solid mask throughout; it's as if his voice is dubbed on and this creates a real disconnect for the audience.


Weekend (1967) "What a rotten film. All we meet are crazy people." I was inspired to plug this gap in my collection by a conversation with Robin Ince. It's one of those films I've just never got round to seeing, and I certainly feel richer for having finally experienced it. Jean Luc Godard was really cooking in the 60s, just taking film apart and slinging it back together again, all the while making revolutionary polemical points about borgeois society as he saw it. In this, a frightful middle-class couple drive to the French countryside to muscle their way into her dying father's will (I think - they spend an awful lot of time at the beginning of the film talking about a detailed sexual fantasy while he smokes Gitanes). Along the way, if that's not too conventional a concept, they end up in a multiple car pile-up (one of many glimpsed througout the film) and wander, lost, until they are captured by armed revolutionaries, who also turn out to be cannibals. It's all honking horns, pulling people out of cars, firing off guns and the uncouth brutality and selfishness of modern folk. Deeply allegorical, it's also very funny and very disturbing. You spend all this time trying to work out if Eli Roth is saying something about society, when in fact, it's all Godard is doing. I have no idea what he's saying most of the time, but it's bracing nonetheless. I love his brash intertitles, and the way the music just cuts in and out. And I love the metatextual gags - at one point, one of the revolutionaries is on a radio and the call-signs he uses are "The Searchers" and "Battleship Potemkin". He's a funny guy. And the famous ten-minute tracking shot along an endless traffic jam on a country lane is inspired. Yes, Godard fucks about, but he's like Les Dawson, he knows how to do it properly too. He's earned the right.

Incidentally, I saw a total of 121 films in 1981. I was rather pleased with that at the time. I managed 144 in 1982.

Hostile
Not my usual cup of tea, but I've read so much about wunderkind Eli Roth, 34, I thought I'd better get behind the sofa and experience Hostel, which is out on DVD in a couple of weeks. I've not seen Cabin Fever, his flesh-eating-virus calling-card, which cost $1.5 million and made around $30 million, but it sounds pretty nasty. Hostel, I've read an awful lot about. Kim Newman wrote a fine think-piece in Sight & Sound about the phenomenon of torture movies, in particular the political ramifications of Americans being tortured. The film is about two American backpackers (plus an older Icelandic companion they've hooked up with), hiking across Yurp in search of kicks rather than museums and art galleries. In Amsterdam - where one of them at least notes the preponderence of American backpackers - they meet an East European who suggests they travel to Slovakia, where the girls are hot and there are no men "because of the war." Because of the war? Now either this is clever satire, or Roth actually doesn't know that the Yugoslav war affected Slovenia, not Slovakia. I'll accept it may be the former, which makes Hostel a clever satire about the geographical idiocy of Americans. It's all foreign to them. It's all "the rest of the world". Naturally, this tip-off proves their undoing, and they are sucked into a gruesome torture ring, about which I'll say no more, even though other reviewers seem happy to go into great detail about the whys and wherefores. It's better if you don't know exactly what's going on until the revelatory third act. That is, if you're interested in the story. If you just want to see some horrible sadism involving tools, such fripperies won't trouble you.

I came away from Hostel slightly troubled. It's not a badly-made film. The tension builds nicely. Sex and death are, as is traditional, interlinked, and as soon as our two idiot heroes get laid, you know they're for the high jump, but at least most of the violence is meted out on males and not squealing females. This is, in itself, refreshing. But if Roth is making any points at all, about xenophobia, or anti-Americanism in Europe, or the need for snuff-style gratification in an increasingly pornographic culture, the very act of making a film that glorifies physical torture completely undermines it. At the end of the day, when the blood's been sluiced down the drain and the butcher's aprons hung up, Hostel is a gorefest for audiences who like that type of thing. It titilates, sexually and viscerally, and parades yet another technically impressive show of prosthetic and latex makeup effects, its mission mostly to top the last gorefest. It's enjoyable on these terms, if enjoyable is the right word. I was certainly gripped, and repelled, and nauseated. (And the craftsmanship of the makeup artists is given a worthy platform in the making-of featurettes on the DVD.)

I would say that it's not as profound as it thinks it is, but then again, it's possible that it doesn't think it's profound at all, and Eli Roth really doesn't know the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia.

Is anybody else deeply embarrassed by the off-duty conversation caught on mic in St Petersburg between President Bush and Tony Blair? I am. That said, I also find it fascinating, as we so very rarely catch any kind of meaningful glimpse of their fabled relationship beyond stage-managed bonhomie at Crawford Ranch and formal joint press conferences, during which they exchange smiles like teenage lovers, but what does it actually tell us about these two men and the way they regard one another?

Bush Yo, Blair. How are you doing?
Yo, Blair? Is this a form of address our Prime Minister approves of? Does it not give him flashbacks to public school? Maybe he likes it. Maybe it speaks to him of informality, when actually it sounds to me like Bush is saying, "Here, boy!" Let us vow never to forget this greeting. This is the crux of their relationship, and thus, a key to everything that's precarious about global politics.
Blair I'm just ...
Bush You're leaving?
Yes, Mr President, he's fucking leaving. Just off, like that, mid-G8. Bye!
Blair No, no, no not yet. On this trade thingy ... [inaudible]
I know Blair's big thing is to downplay, act like "one of us", with his shirtsleeves and his glottal stops, but sometimes, just sometimes, to describe something as a "thingy" kind of, I don't know, belittles it somehow. Maybe, in his defence, this is the only language the President of the United States of America understands.
Bush Yeah, I told that to the man.
The man? Is that the best he can do? Which man? The nice man with the moustache? The fat man with the bald head? The funny lookin' man with the mane of grey hair? Specify.
Blair Are you planning to say that here or not?
Bush If you want me to.
Wait! Blair's not Bush's poodle after all! Bush is asking permission from Blair to say a thing to a man!
Blair Well, it's just that if the discussion arises ...
Bush I just want some movement.
Blair Yeah.
Bush Yesterday we didn't see much movement.
Blair No, no, it may be that it's not, it may be that it's impossible.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Bush I am prepared to say it.
You are prepared to say a vague thing to an unidentified man? Who said these summits are toothless talking shops?
Blair But it's just I think what we need to be an opposition...
Bush Who is introducing the trade?
Blair Angela [Merkel, the German chancellor].
Bush Tell her to call 'em.
Yeah, Blair, tell the lady to call them. Let's have some action here.
Blair Yes.
Surely, "Yo, Bush!"
Bush Tell her to put him on, them on the spot. Thanks for [inaudible] it's awfully thoughtful of you.
This refers to a jumper Blair gave Bush as a present. Something woolly. How appropriate.
Blair It's a pleasure.
Bush I know you picked it out yourself.
Blair Oh, absolutely, in fact [inaudible].
Apparently Blair jokes, "I knitted it." What fun they have.
Bush What about Kofi? [inaudible] His attitude to ceasefire and everything else ... happens.
It's hard to see why the situation in the Lebanon appears so intractable when great minds like this are discussing it in such a forthright manner.
Blair Yeah, no I think the [inaudible] is really difficult. We can't stop this unless you get this international business agreed.
Bush Yeah.
Blair I don't know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.
The Prime Minister of Great Britain seems to be offering to nip over to Israel to see what the lie of the land is. Flat, I think you'll find.
Bush I think Condi is going to go pretty soon.
She gets a nickname based on her first name. No "Yo, Rice!" for the ladies. Respect due.
Blair But that's, that's, that's all that matters. But if you ... you see it will take some time to get that together.
Bush Yeah, yeah.
Glad you understand, Mr Bush.
Blair But at least it gives people ...
Bush It's a process, I agree. I told her your offer to ...
Blair Well ... it's only if I mean ... you know. If she's got a ... or if she needs the ground prepared as it were ... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.
Talk like that and you'll have the crisis solved in a jiffy.
Bush You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it's over.
Why Syria don't just do this simple thing, I don't know. It's almost as if ... it's more complicated than that.
Blair Syria.
Bush Why?
What do you mean, "Why?" You said Syria first.
Blair Because I think this is all part of the same thing.
Bush Yeah.
Blair What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way ...
Who is "he"? We don't know for certain. Possibly Bashar al-Assad of Syria, as he gets a namecheck in a moment: "Yo, Assad!"
Bush Yeah, yeah, he is sweet.
Sweet as!
Blair He is honey. And that's what the whole thing is about. It's the same with Iraq.
Wait a minute. Did Blair just describe another world leader as "honey"? Is he trying to get in with Bush by talking downhome shit? Or should there be a comma, as in, "He is, Honey"?
Bush I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.
Blair Yeah.
Yeah!
Bush We are not blaming the Lebanese government.
Blair Is this ... ? [at this point Blair taps the microphone in front of him and the sound is cut.]

Boo! We were just geting into that! I could honestly listen to these two all day.

Better than the Secret Machines?
Another album of the year has arrived: Return To Cookie Mountain. I've been aware of Brooklyn's TV On The Radio (not, we must assume, named in honour of Tommy Vance), but I've never sat down and listened to a whole album of theirs - I know, their first one was really a big EP. This, their second or third, depending on whether you count the first one, has turned my head. I can't stop listening to it. It reminds me of early Peter Gabriel, Psychedelic Furs and the Afghan Whigs, a rum list which may already have piqued your interest. It's so rhythmically interesting, and Tunde Adebimpe's vocals are soulful and oblique at the same time. This is dark, funky rock music that really pulsates and intrigues (and I had no idea of the band's racial makeup when I first heard them - four black, one white - which takes away any preconceptions). It reminds me of Ten Silver Drops by Secret Machines only in that it has captivated me in the same way and proves that big rock music does not have to be vague, woolly, ploddy and soulless, like Keane and Snow Patrol and latter Coldplay. God is in the sonic details, the droning sample on I Was A Lover, for instance. David Bowie is a fan of TVOTR and appears, vocally, on Province, but it is testament to the band's innate Bowieness that it sounds like him singing on Playhouses too. It's currently at number one in the 6 Music Chart, which means it has not troubled the Official UK Top 40 - another similarity with the Secret Machines album - and thus remains one of those "rock's best-kept secret" phenomenons.

Here is the news ...
The Radio Times has published a list of 25 movies every aspiring film buff should see. Alongside undisputed classics such as La Dolce Vita and Casablanca, editor Andrew Collins has included some rather more contentious "must-sees", most prominently Armageddon, the blockbuster starring Bruce Willis as the hero protecting planet Earth from a meteorite collision. "Snobbery does not belong to the film buff," commented Collins. "To understand the 1980s/1990s blockbuster, you must accept producer Jerry Bruckheimer into your life. Armageddon is the pinnacle of Bruckheimer excess."

That's from today's Guardian. (I'm not the editor of Radio Times, by the way, but it's only a journal of record.) This breaking news story was also in the Mirror:

THE 25 MOVIE CLASSICS THAT EVERY FILM BUFF MUST SEE
BEST EPICS, FLOPS AND ODDITIES
By Nicola Methven, TV Editor
THERE are 25 iconic movies every wannabe movie buff must see, experts claim. The diverse list includes timeless classics such as Casablanca, La Dolce Vita and High Noon. But it also has blockbusters such as Jerry Bruckheimer's disaster flick Armageddon, ridiculed by critics but a worldwide hit. Radio Times' Andrew Collins, who drew up the table, said: "Snobbery doesn't belong to the film buff blah blah blah ..." The compilation, with entries in no particular order, also has well-known films such as sci-fi epic Blade Runner and Hitchcock's Rear Window. But there are some you might have missed at your local Odeon - Salvador Dali's surrealist piece Un Chien Andalou and 1919 German horror The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, for example. There is even room for Hollywood's biggest flop Heaven's Gate, which cost 22million but made back less than 2million. Andrew added: "It's possible to enjoy it despite knowledge of the budget and chaos behind the camera."

It also helped filled space in the Mail and probably others too. That's how journalism works. Radio Times puts out a press release each week running through what's in the magazine, and unless there's a war on (hang on ...), it will help fill the newspapers. This week, it just happens to be a bare-bones precis of How To Be A Film Buff, my 25 must-see-films feature in this week's mag, the subtleties of which are of course lost in translation. On the Mail website, where comments are invited after each story, they have fallen into my trap and started banging on about the films I have stupidly "missed off", as if perhaps I did actually miss them off. There are reasonable calls for the likes of Kes and The Godfather, but one chap thinks these superior titles should replace "irrelevent trash" like Blackboards, a fine allegorical piece from the flourishing cinema of Iran. Idiot. Hey, that's why we did the piece, to encourage debate. Oh, and to fill some of the Radio Times during the slow summer months!

For the record, these are the original 30 films (reduced to 25 to fit over five pages), in no particular order, each one with an alternative choice, making 60. Discuss:

1 CASABLANCA (1942)
If wet: Citizen Kane (1941)

2 THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI (1920)
If wet: Nosferatu (1921)

3 BLADE RUNNER (1982)
If wet: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969)

4 A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946)
If wet: The Red Shoes (1948)

5 OUT OF THE PAST (1947)
If wet: The Big Sleep (1946)

6 LA DOLCE VITA (1960)
If wet: The Bicycle Thieves (1948)

7 HIGH NOON (1952)
If wet: The Searchers (1956)

8 REAR WINDOW (1954)
If wet: Psycho (1960)

9 THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958)
If wet: Rashomon (1950)

10 BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)
If wet: Easy Rider (1969)

11 BRINGING UP BABY (1938)
If wet: His Girl Friday (1940)

12 THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)
If wet: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

13 UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928)
If wet: L'Age D'Or (1946)

14 ARMAGEDDON (1998)
If wet: Con Air (1998)

15 HEAVEN'S GATE (1980)
If wet: Dances With Wolves (1990)

16 ANNIE HALL (1977)
If wet: Manhattan (1979)

17 SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)
If wet: An American In Paris (1951)

18 A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS (1985)
If wet: Drowning By Numbers (1988)

19 PATHS OF GLORY (1957)
If wet: A Few Good Men (1988)

20 PERFORMANCE (1970)
If wet: Blow-Up (1969)

21 BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)
If wet: Dracula (1931)

22 BLACKBOARDS (2000)
If wet: The Apple (1998)

23 THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951)
If wet: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

24 PULP FICTION (1994)
If wet: Reservoir Dogs (1991)

25 HERO (2002)
If wet: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)

26 SHOAH (1985)
If wet: Night And Fog (1955)

27 WINTER LIGHT (1962)
If wet: The Silence (1963)

28 THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)
If wet: Three Days Of The Condor (1975)

29 GIMME SHELTER (1970)
If wet: The Last Waltz (1978)

30 WITHNAIL AND I (1986)
If wet: This Is Spinal Tap (1982)

... oh, and Phil Urr was a made-up contributor's name we used to use at Q. Geddit?!

Of course you have!
Watched the final segment of BBC1's Big Cat Week from last night. It was the most irksome of the run, with Jonathan Scott tear-arsing around the scrubland trying to find Toto, the baby cheetah, as if his life - and not just a run of five natural history programmes - depended on it. He didn't find him in the end, despite some dramatic editing, and a false alarm with a different baby cheetah, that almost finished him off, but that's nature, Jonathan, as you know better than any of us, having lived in Africa for 30 years! The "chase" to find him was utterly artificial (by which I mean, they were actually chasing, but the "deadline" was because it was Friday). So what if a man and a camera crew didn't find a cheetah and her cub? Africa's a big place. If a cheetah sits down in the bush and a TV crew doesn't record it, has she really sat down at all? Yes.

I thank the BBC for filming all this cat action, but it's been frustrating as hell watching it. All those cutaways to Saba grinning like a fool when she found Bella the leopard, when we could have been watching - hey! - Bella the leopard. It's all wrong. Good luck, Toto and Notch and Chui, may you survive another year in the scary old natural world, and may you roam far enough that the "spotters" don't spot you in time for next year's Big Cat Week.

Simon King, get back to Naturewatch. You other pair, watch some David Attenborough.