Only five years ago, Tom Hardy was the nation’s mumbler in chief, baffling viewers as formidably butch top-hatted adventurer Jack Delaney in the BBC drama Taboo. Some viewers were angry, while others calculated that the 98 pig-like grunts Hardy emitted in the first seven episodes were not so much signs of an apparently pre-verbal role, as a cry for help.
How lovely to report then that in Sky Nature’s new series Predators, Hardy has stepped back from the edge of incomprehensibility. In future episodes, polar bears, wild dogs, pumas and lions will take centre stage, but here we watch two male cheetahs off as much Tanzanian fauna as they can get their teeth into as Hardy narrates with the crisp enunciation of a post-makeover Eliza Doolittle. Perhaps reading bedtime stories mellows a person.
