I must say, I was expecting Inside Britain’s National Parks to feel a bit less like school. The new documentary series looks at four of our 15 national parks and the people who live and work in them. So you would expect the usual barely disguised tourism ads – wall-to-wall shots of beautiful landscapes, scored with beautiful music, breaking off only for lovely, gentle interviews with lovely, gentle people. An hour’s escapism before you go back to your stress-bound, office-bound, mortgage-bound life instead of roaming the wilds of Wales noting new nesting sites for choughs or checking peatlands for sundews, or … Well, we’ll talk more about what else we could be doing later on. But it’s a lot.
We do get plenty of the expected stuff but its traditional soft edge is whetted by an oddly dry script (despite being delivered by Alex Jennings, who could customarily talk me into a burning car) that prevents you disappearing into these wonderful worlds as fully as you might have been hoping.
