Broadcast Article on Ray Mears.

[Zammo]

You may not like this...

It was taken from Broadcast which is a newspaper for the Television and Radio Industry. The writer starts by praising the Mission Africa programme then goes on to write this:

No such excitement, sadly, in Ray Mears' Wild Food, which was one of those heavily graded docs with a ponderous orchestral score that makes you want to do something else. This was like a posh schools programme with a slightly embarrising geography teacher wearing shorts on a field trip.
The main problem was that it didn't make sense. It was supposed to be about "our ancesters, the people who hunted and gathered here in Britian" said Ray besides the white cliffs of Dover. So he went to Australia ("litterally the other siide of the planet!") with a beardy expert. They pitched a tent and had tea besides some Aboriginals who they didn't talk to. Then they found a tomato and a potatoe. Then an Aboriginal made them a boomerang. When the hour was up, Ray and his pals concluded that Australia was "entirely different to Britian". Could've told them that.


IMO the writer has totally missed the point in that they went to Aus to study how an existing culture of Hunter gatherers survive in order to compare them to Britians stone age man. Plus they did speak to the Aboriginals, so i'm not sure where he got that bit from?

 

[chrisanson]

You may not like this...

It was taken from Broadcast which is a newspaper for the Television and Radio Industry. The writer starts by praising the Mission Africa programme then goes on to write this:

No such excitement, sadly, in Ray Mears' Wild Food, which was one of those heavily graded docs with a ponderous orchestral score that makes you want to do something else. This was like a posh schools programme with a slightly embarrising geography teacher wearing shorts on a field trip.
The main problem was that it didn't make sense. It was supposed to be about "our ancesters, the people who hunted and gathered here in Britian" said Ray besides the white cliffs of Dover. So he went to Australia ("litterally the other siide of the planet!") with a beardy expert. They pitched a tent and had tea besides some Aboriginals who they didn't talk to. Then they found a tomato and a potatoe. Then an Aboriginal made them a boomerang. When the hour was up, Ray and his pals concluded that Austrakia was "entirely different to Britian". Could've told them that.


IMO the writer has totally missed the point in that they went to Aus to study how an existing culture of Hunter gatherers survive in order to compare them to Britians stone age man. Plus they did speak to the Aboriginals, so i'm not sure where he got that bit from?

Obviously he was either watching a different program or listening to a commentary from coronation street while watching the program!

The chap sounds like an idiot to me reading the sun to much
Chris
Ps
I have typed this very slowly and hit the keys very hard just in case the writer reads this post.

 

[michiel]

This journalist has obviously completely missed the point. I hope he saw the second episode and saw what the program is about.

Michiel

 

[philaw]

I thought the point was that aboriginals are the closest thing we have left to our ancient ancestors? That they have a similar level of technology, so would have done things in a similar way (using natural materials inventively, avoiding burning calories unnecessarily, etc).

Critics need to rip into things sometimes to justify their jobs, but I still don't see the point in them. Everbody knows what genres they like and can't tell how good something is until they see it for themselves. It sounds like this critic is probably a dedicated urbanite who doesn't like Bushcraft, and probably spends all his time in central london.

 

[fred gordon]

This journalist has obviously completely missed the point. I hope he saw the second episode and saw what the program is about.

Michiel

I think one of the difficulties is that as far as Bushcraft is concerned we are on the inside looking out. Others, like this Journalist, are on the outside looking in. They have little conception about the subject and for them its just another form of entertainment. For us its purely educational. That, I think, is the main difference.

 

[The Joker]

I really liked the episode in the UK and I think the rest of it will be great........But I did find the bit in Aus boring, the best bit for me was seeing Ray in those shorts .

But like I said, I think the rest will be really good

 

[Zammo]

I'd be interested to know what the viewing figures for the show are, but they haven't been compiled yet.

 

[nobby]

I think one of the difficulties is that as far as Bushcraft is concerned we are on the inside looking out.

Well said, and we are in a minority. A pretty odd minority at that!

 

[sam_acw]

That said I do wish that Ray would spend more time in Britain and less in the outback, desert or rainforest. The programmes I prefer are the ones that relate to me and the bushcraft one on Britain in the Mesolithic (?) was one of the best.

 

[Mikey P]

As a small minority of us stated in a previous posting, the links between the Australian 'jolly' and the UK were tenuous at best. I think that they ended up not making the programme they wanted to but had to show it anyway because they had spent the money (a glib statement, I realise).

There are much better programmes available on Australian bushcraft (ie, Bushrucker Man) and, personally, I think they could have made a better go of what I thought was a poor, and badly-edited, first programme by interspersing the Australian experience with scenes of foraging in the UK. This would have made a better 'link' between the two areas and, if they were truly trying to show parallels between Aus/UK, would have been a much more effective technique.

Although I don't agree with everything that the journalist said, at least he was being objective. Many of us on this site are 'coloured' by the fact that we don't wish to hear any criticism of something we care deeply about.

The second programme in the series was much better - and, in my opinion, should have been shown first.

 

[Zammo]

I think the way you have to look at the series is that each episode is concorrent, which personally I like. Ray sets out his stall saying that he will see how some existiing hunter gatherers live in order to better understand Britians ancesters, then at the end of the episode he says he will then apply what he has discovered in the UK and also look for more clues. In the second episode he also references what he did in the 1st episode. Alot of doc series never do this.

 

[chrisanson]

I often feel like I am on the outside looking in with most of modern life.
but I don’t think that is a bad thing. I have no wish to change my view of live but I think that unfortunately people like this think that they have the right do that very thing to others. However I do try my best to look at things from both sides. Which is something I find to be quite lacking in most forms of journalism today! And not just the critic but I think in all of British news journalism! It all seems to need to be bigger and more sensationalized more every day. Maybe ray is just not EXTREEM bushcraft enough ?
Chris

 

[ArkAngel]

Standard article from people who don't know/or want to know anything about the subject.

The Radio times were very critical of some of the "Bushcraft" series totally missing the point about the building of the birch bark canoe. Generally regarded as "boring" television. I thought it was one of the best programms i had watched in years compareing them to 'big brother/soapstar<who> superstar/i'm a celebrity<just>/ nobodies on ice/strickly ballsup' (you get the idea, i HATE reality shows )

The same applies to Ray's apperance on "Something for the weekend" today.
The host asked "so what do you do if you get ill when you are in the outback?"
Ray's reply "You deal with it, you have no option!"

This guy could not comprehend not having a doctor's surgery on the other end of a telephone line to deal with his every sniffle a lot of people i meet and talk to about the outdoors cannot understand either the point of it or what happens if things go wrong (which they sometimes do)

 

[locum76]

imo, there wasn't much in the way of good info on either episode so far. i was hoping he'd show us more stuff to forage for rather than mearly hypothesise about what might have happened in the mesolithic. more plant identification please.

 

[Zammo]

imo, there wasn't much in the way of good info on either episode so far. i was hoping he'd show us more stuff to forage for rather than mearly hypothesise about what might have happened in the mesolithic. more plant identification please.

Yeah but he needs to make it assessable to a wide audience. Simply going through a load of plants and if we can eat them or not would hardly be entertaining, there are books for that sort of thing.

 

[fred gordon]

That said I do wish that Ray would spend more time in Britain and less in the outback, desert or rainforest. The programmes I prefer are the ones that relate to me and the bushcraft one on Britain in the Mesolithic (?) was one of the best.

I would tend to agree with this. But, I suspect that too much concentration in Britain would bore a lot of the audience. The series makers are not doing this for us, the Bushcrafters, they are trying to make a programme that will appeal to a wider, populist, audience and get themselves high viewer ratings. Also I think that many of these programmes are make overseas because it is easier to find people who can show us Bushcraft in practice, and they have environments where this can be done much more easily than in the UK. I think part of the appeal of this series is that Ray is at last trying to take a close, serious, look at Bushcraft in the UK. I think he has found it difficult and has to take a more scientific approach this time since it has required a lot of research, and I suspect, guesswork,to give us a clearer picture of our Bushcraft past. I think its great!

 

[nickg]

imo, there wasn't much in the way of good info on either episode so far. i was hoping he'd show us more stuff to forage for rather than mearly hypothesise about what might have happened in the mesolithic. more plant identification please.

I agree, I wish Ray - and others- would put more emphasis of identification of natural resourses. There was hardly a couple of screen seconds of close up on marsh samphire etc yet minutes of close ups of them eating. Its often the same with wild food books, One picture of one species at one stage of its growth followed by a catch-all 'of course you should always carry a good field guide when foraging'. It very frustrating

Cheers
Nick

 

[BobFromHolland]

I think it is great.
Although I didn't see the complete first episode the thing that struck me was the potato-skinning-tool. This is a trick we learn from 'modern day stone-age cultures' that we couldn't have learnt from excavations.

It isn't about which plants are edible and which not, it is about what resources are necessary for long-term survival. It's all about the ratio of (energy provided by)/(energy spend in collecting) a specific food source. If the ratio is bad, the fact that it isn't poisonous (edible or not) isn't interesing after all...

In my opinion they are choosing a part scientific, part practical approach which highly suits my interest.

I hope BBC will sell DVD's of it as well.

 

[Tadpole]

I have watched both programmes so far and have to say that without doubt the first programme where Ray and Gordon are in Australia is every bit as important as any other we are to see. Ray clearly explains that although Gordon is an expert in Archaeobotany, he has never seen, let alone worked with, true hunter gathers.

Ray went where the ‘accessible’ experts are. Unless you count amazonian hunter gathers who are hard to find and even harder to convince to allow someone to film them. Also from a PC point of view, peoples like the Nukak and the Hotï tend not to be very ‘environmentally friendly’ in their management of their habitat.

Without the introduction to the methods of the “gathering” part of the hunter/gathering life. I doubt that Ray would have even attempted to cook the greens inside of the eel, or worked out how or why cooking of the Sea-kale roots made sense. We have no Mesolithic humans left to explain how they did, so Ray used the next credible experts/peoples, they just happened to be across the world

It is only a five part series, (sadly this is just about all the ‘general public’ would be willing to watch.) I’m sure that the 2 million viewers that ‘big-brother’ lost, added to the couple of million already watching found something better to watch when they hopped channel.

 

[Zammo]

I have watched both programmes so far and have to say that without doubt the first programme where Ray and Gordon are in Australia is every bit as important as any other we are to see. Ray clearly explains that although Gordon is an expert in Archaeobotany, he has never seen, let alone worked with, true hunter gathers.

Ray went where the ‘accessible’ experts are. Unless you count amazonian hunter gathers who are hard to find and even harder to convince to allow someone to film them. Also from a PC point of view, peoples like the Nukak and the Hotï tend not to be very ‘environmentally friendly’ in their management of their habitat.

Without the introduction to the methods of the “gathering” part of the hunter/gathering life. I doubt that Ray would have even attempted to cook the greens inside of the eel, or worked out how or why cooking of the Sea-kale roots made sense. We have no Mesolithic humans left to explain how they did, so Ray used the next credible experts/peoples, they just happened to be across the world

It is only a five part series, (sadly this is just about all the ‘general public’ would be willing to watch.) I’m sure that the 2 million viewers that ‘big-brother’ lost, added to the couple of million already watching found something better to watch when they hopped channel.

Yes I agree. If you remember at the end of the second episode he spoke to the female archaeologist and she admitted they didn't really have a clue how Mesolithic man was preparing the sea food they unearthed. But when Ray explained they had cooked it she said yes that would make sense as they had found scorching on the shells, I then presume he explained how they cooked it but this was edited out.