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Tribe

Bruce Parry
  • Posted at 11:56am
  • 20 September 2007
  • by AlisonGraham-RT
  • 4 comments

It’s impossible not to love Bruce Parry, Tribe's vomiting pixie and the neatest, sweetest and most pocket-sized of all of the TV explorers. Ladies, he is the perfect TV Boyfriend.

If you accompanied Bruce on a camping trip, you just know he’d be far too charming and courtly ever to insist you carried on to the next rocky outcrop if your feet were hurting. In fact, he would fashion you a sedan chair from coconut husks while wafting you with palm fronds.

And if you wanted to find somewhere to plug in your hairdryer – no problem. Bruce would whip up a perfect scaled replica of the Hoover Dam using only birch twigs and a bottle of Evian water, thus generating the required electrical current.

You can tell that the women in the various tribes he visits feel the same way. Just look at them as they cast covetous and appraising glances in his direction as he mucks in with jobs none of the tribesmen will touch. As the tribesmen lounge around whittling, spitting and thinking about killing wild boar, Bruce is with the ladies, chopping wood and washing turmeric.

Crikey, in one episode he even collected flowers with the girls from a mountainside. Was there a woman in the world who saw that and didn’t immediately imagine setting up home with Bruce in a little cottage on a riverbank? I did. And by the end of the programme I’d chosen the curtains and decided to place our wedding list with John Lewis.

He even pukes in a charming manner (and he pukes a lot). But you can’t hold this against him. It’s not as if he’s purging into the gutter after one too many nan breads and a misspent three hours mainlining vodka jellies via intravenous drip.

Bruce pukes in the name of honest research. Fancy being rubbed with frog poison as an initiation rite? It’ll make you extravagantly sick, he is warned by a scary-looking tribal elder. Bring it on!

And this is one of the truly great things about Tribe (Tuesday, BBC2). It feels utterly authentic – hugely important considering the recent furore about fakery. You know that Bruce Parry really is living the whole experience, round the clock, and isn’t spending his days in a loincloth wrestling yaks and pulling leeches from donkeys, and his nights in shell suit bottoms raiding the minibar at the Borneo Best Western.

When it gets dark, Bruce is right in the midst of the gloom in his host family’s hut or tent, talking to a night vision camera as if in a benign version of The Blair Witch Project - and not beneath a ten-tog duvet.

**

Alison Graham is TV editor of Radio Times.

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Comments

  • Posted on 19 October 2007
  • at 10:59pm
  • by Perspicador

A lasting impact from the Tribe series would be guaranteed if we were all to take up the cause of these, the people who show everyone a lesson we should all heed, if the planet is to survive, and the climate is to to be equable for the future survival of us all - how to live sustainably within a finite natural environment, as they have done, apparently for thousands of years. In the case of the tropical rain forest dwellers, they provide us with the only surviving links with our human origins, unlocking the mysteries of the origins of life-forms as we know them and the key to sustaining future life on earth, and the most crucial means of off-setting climate change, by ensuring the preservation and future recovery of lost rain forest habitats. If anyone is serious about this issue, then the first measure should be a preservation order on all surviving Rain forests and cessation of world-market exploitation of these vulnerable and irreplaceable habitats for vegetation, the only guarantee of continuity in preserving the sources of natural gases that keep our atmosphere in balance and replenished to sustain us. Long Live the forest tribes that keep the balances in check for our futures' sakes.

  • Posted on 26 September 2007
  • at 12:27pm
  • by follyman
Excellent programme with a great,caring presenter. The Tribal Peoples have been so welcoming and I hope the whole world watches this show !! We must preserve their way of life before it goes forever.
  • Posted on 25 September 2007
  • at 11:44pm
  • by Anerley

I love this show. There's a real sense of warmth and love for the native peoples of disappearing worlds he stays with. The last programme tonight, on the Penan in Sarawak (Malaysia Borneo), really brought home the danger to the human as well as biological diversity of this here planet.

Andy S

  • Posted on 22 September 2007
  • at 11:33pm
  • by StanJohns

B-)

The best thing about this series is the total lack of fakery. You know when Bruce is offered a piece of raw liver to eat, he really wants it, it is not just to show how hard he is. It is down to survival, and after eating nothing but raw bark (or the equivilant of) for a few days 'raw liver' is just the thing.

I love this programme, and often watch it at the start from a sceptical viewpoint, but i am always won over by its honesty. TV at its mosgt watchable and compulsive best.

JS

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