Why I love Bruce Parry
I'm only just starting to catch up with the third series of BBC2's excellent Tribe. Saw the first one last night (they're already onto the third, I think), and remembered why I love it. Here is a man, an ex-Royal Marine and all-round adventurer, who gives us a glimpse into the lives of indigenous natives by living among them with seemingly minimal interference from vast camera crews (he shoots a lot of footage on a hand-held camera himself). He's softly-spoken, incredibly respectful and totally committed to absorption in another tribe's culture. I suppose we have almost come to expect this now, but it seems that with each visit he is obliged to join in some local ritual that involves sickness or self-harm. But this never seems sensational. Last night, with the Matis tribe of Western Brazil, he completed four hunting rituals, the least of which was being whipped all over with stingy nettles (these rituals were all about beating fear and being a better hunter), the worst of which involved frog poison being injected into his arm and side, after which he brought up his entire guts. I suppose there's some cleansing aspect to this that isn't explained on the side of a bottle, and the Matis have been doing it for centuries. Certainly, Bruce felt brilliant afterwards (although he seemed to age ten years in the space of ten minutes during the first wave of nausea).

The Matis were typical of the people Bruce has met on the series thus far: great bone structure (preserved through in-breeding, obviously - they look as alike as members of our own Royal Family), they demonstrate a suspicious attitude to "outsiders" that thaws into respect via a lot of pisstaking, and they kill only what they eat - in this case, peccaries and howler monkeys, mostly, using vast blowpipes. It's hard to imagine any other presenter doing this job as unobtrusively and unsensationally as Bruce, who you'd never have down as an ex-Marine. He's so soft and sensitive. Not the lean, mean killing machine I've always imagined a Marine to be. The Matis were understandably wary of Bruce at first. They were first "discovered" by outsiders in the 70s, after which a third of them died of diseases brought in. Now they are protected (you need extensive paperwork to enter their village by river), but Western influence is everywhere, from the t-shirts and underwear previous camera crews have asked them to remove to make them look more "primitive", to the disco they held one night to a radio one of the tribe had brought back from "the city". Clearly, logging and industrial agriculture (don't touch that soya milk!) are destroying the Amazon rainforest, and with it harmless, self-sufficient stewards of the land like the Matis. You might ordinarily accuse this sort of TV programme of patronising look-at-the-funny-natives tourism were it not for people like Parry to act as intermediary. He believes we should leave them well alone, and allows us a look at their daily lives to reinforce that view.

As usual, I thought to myself, I wouldn't last five minutes out there. How pampered and cynical we have become.