We’re not far into five-part series Simon Reeve’s South America (BBC Earth), when the elephant in the room sounds its trumpet call of despair: yes, humans are screwing up the planet.
Anthropocentric eco-destruction quickly rears its hideous head in an adventure-exploration show that marks the culmination of Reeve’s journey (albeit a Covid-interrupted one) down the whole of the Americas.
But even his equanimity is tested from the off, with some of the most disgusting evidence possible of human incursion into otherwise pristine wilderness, centred in this case on the flat-top tepuis rock formations of Venezuela.
Like elsewhere in the continent, Venezuela must choose: expand the economy (in its case by exploiting the world’s most extensive oil deposits) or be eco-responsible.
Nowhere does finding a balance between the two seem possible. Nowhere except among the isolated tribes persecuted by Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, chief Amazon rainforest desecrator and proponent of mining, logging and farming.
And there’s the rub. Because whatever form it takes, destruction of the natural world provides jobs – just as, Reeve finds, the “ingrained poverty and lawlessness” of Peru means some farmers can’t make a living other than by growing the coca leaves from which cocaine is produced.
The farther he ventures, the more serious rather than fun, this travel show becomes: Reeve can hardly be blamed for a certain nervousness when undertaking a “search and destroy” mission with a machine-gun-toting police unit looking for rudimentary cocaine field factories. So heavily armed are the local narco-terrorists that the police don’t bother wearing flak jackets.
Affable Reeve is a softie at heart, sometimes reacting emotionally to tales of hardship told by interviewees. And having sampled life on the drugs front line, he and his crew are then run out of “murder town”, the lawless gold mining settlement of La Rinconada, Peru, by miners objecting to their presence.
Be it the “obscenely lucrative” illegal pet trade that threatens sloths in Colombia; the zoonotic diseases dispersing because of our increasing encroachment into the Brazilian jungle; or unregulated logging in Suriname, much of what Reeve reports on doesn’t make for jolly viewing. Or many “wish you were here” postcards.
Desperate times
Private tutors might be the rock stars of the fiercely competitive Korean education system (or perhaps like to think they are) but sometimes, life just doesn’t add up – even for the most popular maths teacher.
Jung Kyung-ho plays Choi Chi-yeol in Crash Course in Romance (Netflix; continuing), the big attraction at his private academy. Dazzlingly adept with numbers and the object of much female teenage lust, he is an odious dandy in his personal life, brags about his economic worth, is vain, self-centred (and accordingly lonely) and so stressed he can’t keep food down.
What sometimes feels like it is slipping into a silly caper of a show does, however, take a potentially sinister turn when Chi-yeol, having been ambushed by a young girl student who dashes into his apartment, is photographed with her and seems destined for some ruinous scam. Naturally, outraged social media slaves believe everything they are told.
An unlikely series of events puts Chi-yeol in the same orbit as banchan shop owner Nam Haeng-seon (Jeon Do-yeon); and although they are hardly matched economically or socially, she might just turn out to be his saviour – or at least make him more human. Heart-rending backstories come into play, but nothing brings them together quite like a drunken clinch in the street.
Who knew “logarithmic and exponential functions” could be sexy?
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