See you later, crocodile

Press, 23 June 1978, Page 11

See you later, crocodile

By

JOHN COLLINS

Nature’s answer to the vinyl handbag, the crocodile. got a pretty good press in "Smile for the Crocodile" (SPTV. 6.30 Wednesday), a superbly photographed look at the chances of survival of something most of us regard as being good only for shoes, bags, belts, or for sliding ominously off mudbanks whenever the action starts to wilt in Africa movies.

It was a good, committed documentary of the All Things Bright and Beautiful school, a warning that the last crocodile may soon find himself swimming down the Champs Elysee, dangling from some rich and perfumed arm, unless croco-

dile hunting is severely restricted: and concluding, interestingly, that the expansion of crocodile farms to push down the market price of crocodile skin might be the best way of protecting the wild crocodile.

What’s more, they’ve even started working on a sort of battery crocodile, force-feeding them and keeping them so warm that they forget to hibernate and just keep on growing. It’ll be hormone injections next, and piped music into the swamps, and sales franchises all over the world. Zambezi Fried Crocodile. Actually, the skins are worth so much — $l5OO for a top-class handbag — that nobody seemed interested in the flesh, not even the French, who will eat anything. There was a lovely interview in a crocodileskin warehouse with a Frenchman who clearly thought he spoke perfect English I found it hard to join him in drooling over his expensive bits of pelt: It all looked like vinyl to me.

The croc ><!ik. like the great white shark and the rattlesnake, both themstives recently the subject

of fine television programmes. has always beer well up on the list ol

Things I Would Least Like to Find tn my Sock. But such is the film-makers skill that I found myself warming towards the revolting creature and

agreeing that it had a right to live, even though men see it as cold and strange and ugly and

likely to take you off a the knees if it feels like it

Refreshingly, that feeling of benevolence towards all the worlds creatures soon passed, so that by the end of the following programme, ’The Liver Birds." 1 was back to preferring crocodile handbags to crocodiles.

Indeed, such is my opinion of “The Liver Birds” that 1 began to ponder on the possibilities of turning them into smart accessories. too.

“Horizon" documentaries are always rewarding, relieving slightly the depressing feeling these days that those who run television have forgotten, if they ever knew, that their magic box has a far more worthy purpose than merely Starsky and Hutching the population into such a state of confused numbness that it will succumb meekly to the first advertisement it meets. Come to think of it, a dozen determined crocodiles among the mahogany rows of television executive suites might do more towards putting style in our nightlife than a truckload of handbags.

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