Wild At Heart South African Safari Experience - TV-Style

By Helen Palmer

I feel compelled to write about the current UK TV programme on ITV on Sunday evenings, "Wild At Heart". Billed as top Sunday night drama, about life in the South African bush.

The story is written by Ashley Pharoah, who wrote a previous Sunday night drama, Down to Earth, which was all about a London family deciding to up sticks and move to the country. In Down to Earth, the countryside was Devon, close to my own county of birth, Cornwall. This particular drama was well acted and most of all believable - to begin with.

Here then, is another tale about people upping sticks and moving to the countryside, a proven formula for success, it would seem. A Bristol vet is persuaded by his new wife to move their entire family to the South African safari region, all because a small Vervet monkey turns up injured in the vet's practice and they think it would be a good idea to travel with the monkey on it's return to the wild at a South African game reserve and sanctury.

Suprise, suprise! Upon arrival at the sanctury, the family is amazed to find that all is not as they expected ...

The filming, you might be interested to hear, took place just 40 minutes outside Sandton, Johannesburg, very close to "The Cradle of Humankind"; at a game reserve and sanctury called Glen Afric.

This was definitely not an encounter with truly wild animals, such as you would get on a safari experience at Sabi Sabi or Londolozi, some 5 hours drive into the Limpopo region. Nevertheless, the animals are very beautiful and are unpredictable by their very nature. This is far more like a safari park here in the UK, where you drive your car around a pre-determined route, stopping where you will with your car-windows firmly closed and no getting out of the car, viewing the animals on show.

Don't believe what they are trying to portray as being an honest account of life on safari. The animals are tame, wandering around the enclosure that is the game reserve, mainly tame because they have been orphaned and hand-reared. Nothing wrong in that at all, but it's not the wild and very impulsive experience you would get on a real safari.

I can cope with the knowledge that this was not filmed in one of the safari settings most associated with lions, cheetahs, elephants, buffalo and the rest of the Big Five, but whether it's the storyline or the actors themselves, this drama, for me, simply has none of the colour, passion and vibrancy that is South Africa.

It's disappointing to watch, week after week, expecting the programme to really fire up and grab the attention, as it has the great potential to showcase South Africa's incredible diversity and one of it's most well-known commodities - wildlife.

The actors themselves appear overawed by their situation and somehow don't gel, giving the drama a rather stilted delivery. Perhaps this is because the author is not South African, or has not consulted with the right people. In this day and age, I would have thought that it was possible to find the best authority on the subject and that they would be South African.

Often the storyline gives an impression of a British point of view that has long since gone; putting people in cliched situations - black people in servants roles, Afrikaans man in destitute circumstances, white English family with no experience, ending up the heros of the plot.

If you do like the programme so far, imagine things to be even better, then go and see for yourself how fantastic the people, animals, countryside and life in South Africa really are.

If you don't like it, shout about it. Make sure your voice for the true South Africa is heard and make sure everyone understands that not everything they see written or portrayed in the media, is exactly as it appears. It can be so much better. Just go and see for yourself. I dare you not to come home eulogising about the country that is South Africa.