Don't panic Ben, it's only a stray cow… not a volcano erupting

Don’t panic Ben, it’s only a stray cow… not a volcano erupting: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV

Ben Fogle And The Buried City

Rating: **** 

Inside Kabul: Storyville

Rating: ****   

The folk of Montserrat are so peaceable and law-abiding that they don’t just leave their doors unlocked day and night. Every parked car has the keys in its ignition.

This crime-free little Caribbean island, population around 5,000, is almost literally heaven on Earth. One of its nearest neighbours is Guadeloupe, where Death In Paradise is filmed.

But despite the idyllic atmosphere, life on Montserrat is constantly on the brink of obliteration. This joyful community could be wiped out at any moment. How’s that as a grim metaphor for humanity . . .

Ben Fogle And The Buried City (Ch5) explored the remains of Montserrat’s capital, Plymouth, known as the Pompeii of the Caribbean after a series of volcanic eruptions in the 1990s smothered it in ash.

Lava filled the bay, creating a burned-out plateau of new land scattered with vast boulders that were carried like seeds on waves of boiling gas, known as pyroclastic flow.

Ben Fogle meets JumBlack – the only person living in exclusion zone

Ben was happier chatting to Jumblack, a lone farmer who was defying officialdom by living in a house in the shadow of the volcano

The southern half of the island is now an exclusion zone. Visiting with a guide, Ben looked ill at ease. He’s no adrenaline junkie — comfortable chatting to hermits and nomads on the fringes of society, but not drawn to disaster for its own sake.

A flight in a helicopter over the barely dormant Soufriere Hills volcano left him sweating. And in the monitoring station with a laidback seismologist, he almost jumped out of his skin when a tremor alarm went off.

The scientist looked unconcerned. There was no need to panic, he said, unless all the klaxons started blaring at once. A single alarm was probably triggered by a stray cow.

Ben was happier chatting to Jumblack, a lone farmer who was defying officialdom by living in a house in the shadow of the volcano. A grey-bearded Rastafarian, he grew veg in the rich soil, trapping and eating the rat-like agoutis that came to steal his crops.

Jumblack was monosyllabic at first, but Ben’s expert and sympathetic questioning persuaded him to open up. He described the terror of the eruption and the refugee camps that followed, and how he fled to Antigua with a $10,000 government relocation grant — money that confused and frightened him, because he hadn’t earned it.

When the 65-year-old returned to Montserrat, he was hauled up in court for breaching the exclusion zone and fined $900. His response was defiance: he walked straight from the courtroom, back to his home. The authorities haven’t bothered him since then, apart from occasional raids looking for marijuana. ‘I’m a Rastaman,’ he grinned.

I’d love to see a longer interview with Jumblack, perhaps as part of Ben’s New Lives In The Wild series. Whether our intrepid presenter fancies spending a week under the volcano is a different question. Every time a heavy-hoofed cow set off an alarm, he’d be in bits.

Two young Afghan women, Raha and Marwa, described life in the shadow of a different kind of volcano, the Taliban regime, on Inside Kabul: Storyville (BBC4).

Two young Afghan women, Raha and Marwa, described life in the shadow of a different kind of volcano, the Taliban regime, on Inside Kabul: Storyville (BBC4)

Oppression under the fundamentalist junta is so extreme that all music is prohibited except for the religious dirges they blast from speakers on the back of pick-up trucks. Raha had to remove the strings from her guitar: ‘It is a very dead guitar in a very dead country,’ she said.

Marwa managed to flee with her husband but spent years in an Abu Dhabi hostel for refugees. They took just a backpack: ‘I could only carry my body without my soul,’ was how Marwa put it.

The women’s voices were recorded in secret, with the audio replayed over simple animations that gave the half-hour film an oddly childlike quality — like a nightmarish Watch With Mother story. A brave and valuable testimony.

Source: Read Full Article