GK Chesterton once wrote a story about a man who broke into his own house like a burglar in order to recover a sense of its exotic desirability — the residence in question was somewhere like Tooting. Sir David Attenborough pulls off the same trick in his latest series, Wild Islands, which manages to make the flora and fauna of these islands as exciting and worthy of protection as the fun stuff on the savannah.
Instead of a big cat chase we see white eagles hunting a barnacle goose, orca whales after a seal (frankly, there are far too many seals so we should cheer on the killer whale), and instead of a pensive encounter with gorillas we find the great man contemplating... puffins.
