Two PBS Gifts for the New Year

By Gerald Clarke

A naturalist and a novelist take wise, winning looks at existence

LIFE ON EARTH. PBS, beginning Jan. 12 a 8 p.m. (E.S.T.). In the beginning was the word, but David Attenborough and the BBC seem not to have been far behind recording the story of evolution from the primordial ooze to the uncertain present The result, a 13-hour television series, is PBS's gift for the new year, a fresh and often astonishing examination of a very old subject: life on earth.

Like life, the series begins slowly. Attenborough ventures back to the planet's earliest days, some 3 billion or so years ago. DNA molecules lead to bacteria, which in turn are transformed into protozoans. Over hundreds of millions of years, the oceans begin to swarm with increasingly complicated forms of life. The records from those days are scanty at best, and, to the layman, one fossil looks much like another. There may be books in running brooks and sermons in stones, but they do not translate very well into TV.

Suddenly, however, somewhere in the third episode, the series takes off, and not for another second does it falter or flag The reason: at this point Attenborough has reached the place in his story where life can actually be photographed. Many of the creatures he now begins to talk about--the crocodiles, for example-have let evolution pass them by and have remained the same through the eons.

But even the beings that have become extinct usually have approximate, living counterparts that Attenborough and his camera crews can pursue, as they snoop, like scientific paparazzi, on the private lives of all creatures great and small. Probably never has any program shown so many forms of courtship and copulation: millipedes writhing in combinations too complicated to comprehend, goggle-eyed newts climbing atop each other, fish defying the hazards of nature to bring sperm to egg, frogs singing hoarse epithalamiums in ponds and swamps. Only fast-flying swifts, which mate on the wing, seem able to escape the prying lens.

Life on Earth is a series of miracles, some familiar and some so strange as to sound like a tale told by a space traveler returning from a distant galaxy. On the more bizarre side there are the Cycloranas, the water-holding frogs of the Australian desert. Their active life is condensed to brief times when there is water in those arid wastes. After a rainstorm, they gorge themselves on insects, mate, then watch their eggs quickly develop into tadpoles. Finally, bloated with water, they burrow into the sand and wait for the next storm, which may not come for many months. In one of the series' most fascinating sequences, Attenborough digs up a piece of the desert and drops it into a container of water. The dirt turns to mud, then dissolves, and a single Cyclorana emerges--looking, doubtless, for a mate.

There seems to be no place that Attenborough's camera has not gone: to all seven continents and the seas that separate them, into the air and deep under the water. One coup was capturing on film a living coelacanth, a fish once thought to lave died out 70 million years ago. With a brief foreword by Attenborough, whose unpretentiousness has an eloquence all its own, the footage of an extremely ugly fish Becomes oddly moving. The coelacanth has limblike fins, and it is likely that one of its ancestors was the first to climb onto he land, 350 million years ago.

Attenborough, 55, is an ideal guide through the millenniums. An amateur zoologist from childhood, he helped edit books on natural history before joining the BBC in 1952. When the host of a natural history series called Zoo Quest died in 1956, he was the logical replacement.

Nine years later he was offered a post he could not refuse: the directorship of BBC-2, Britain's new high-brow channel. His stewardship produced such series as The Forsyte Saga, Civilisation, The Ascent of Man and America. Attenborough, the brother of Actor-Director Richard Attenborough, did not thrive on administrative duties, however, and in 1977 he began the three years of work that would produce his own series. Life on Earth was first shown on the BBC in 1979 and has since gone through two reruns, receiving universal praise from British critics. The reason for so much success seems evident; his story is compelling, and he tells it well. In the 13th and final episode, he even draws a moral. If for some reason man should ever become extinct, there is almost certainly some other creature, perhaps too lowly now to be noticed, that would take his place. That, sadly and happily, is the natural order of things.

THE SHADY HILL KIDNAPPING by John Cheever. PBS, Jan. 12, 9 p.m. (E.S.T.). In his own way, John Cheever has been writing about life on earth for the past 50 years. He does not roam very far--usually no farther than one of the tonier suburbs of New York City--but his concerns are universal. He was a logical choice, then, to lead off what promises to be another notable PBS series: American Playhouse, a 25-week program of original works by American writers.

The most ambitious dramatic series in PBS history, American Playhouse is an attempt to deal with that old and irritating question: Why can't we do these things as well as the British? The answer, if the Cheever play is an indication of what follows, is that we can, if we are true to our own talents and our own idiom. That, at least, is what a consortium of four stations--in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and South Carolina--are trying to prove. With a budget of $12.9 million, they have filmed or taped programs all over the country. Next on the list are BJ. Merholz's King of America, the story of early Greek immigrants to the U.S., and Jesus Salvador Trevino's Sequin, the tale of a Mexican American who raised an army to fight the forces of Santa Anna.

But Cheever was not only the logical but the ideal first choice. PBS could not have found a better play to begin the series than The Shady Hill Kidnapping, a hilarious and touching satire of life on the author's particular patch of earth. It begins with Mr. Wooster (George Grizzard) emerging from his expensive house and greeting the morning, as happy as Adam on the first day in Eden. But then there is Mrs. Wooster (Polly Holliday), two younger Woosters and Grandson Toby (Garrett Hanf). Separating each from the other is a void as wide as the Sahara.

Toby has gone off exploring on his tricycle, and when he does not return, the anxious Woosters call the police. First they are confronted by a recording; then they are told that the police do not have time for missing children, only kidnaped children, particularly those threatened with mutilation. Such bureaucratic insolence demands a kidnap note, and one is obligingly produced by the Wooster son (David Marshall Grant), who adds a helpful piquancy--a threat to cut off the little fellow's ear. Events then follow a funny and totally unpredictable course.

There are no real jokes in this one-hour production, any more than there are in Cheever's short stories or novels. There are instead constant amusements that cause small and often wry smiles. His satire is so complete, in fact, that he has even provided five mock commercials, with Celeste Holm as pitchwoman for a wonder goo called Elixircol. "Does your face in the morning seem rucked and seamed with alcoholic and sexual excesses?" she asks sweetly. "Only Elixircol, the true juice of youth, can save you."

The tone is gentle, however, and Cheever loves his characters more than they seem to love one another. At the end there is both a reunion and a reconciliation in the railroad station, always an important landmark in Cheever country. In this case it signifies coming home, and the author's own tangy voice delivers the final message. "This is a homecoming nearly as old as the planet itself," he says, "nearly as old as the fall of darkness." Shady Hill is his first original play for television, but the wait, quite clearly, was worth it.

--By Gerald Clarke

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