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First catch your fish
There’s a new line in tv programming, as Carla Parks reports
The problem with fish, those slippery creatures, is that they can be notoriously unreliable. It’s a lesson any fisherman knows well and one that producer John Miller learned over long hours spent on The Accidental Angler, a BBC Two series that combines fishing and anthropology.
Undoubtedly the programmes will appeal to the readers of Angling Times, but Miller says they are especially geared for people who’ve never had the urge to cast a line or step into a freezing-cold stream – and that’s many of us.
‘It’s not about fishing, it’s about the journey,’ explains the producer, who travelled to places such as Bhutan and Brazil to learn about what fishing means to people there. ‘As a viewer you get a glimpse into another culture while you armchair travel with someone. You are like a fishing buddy or a travelling companion.’ In an hour-long programme he estimates that there are about ten minutes of actual fishing.
This belies the amount of time it took to capture those precious ten minutes. ‘Filming it is dull. You spend a day in a boat filming and you might not catch anything,’ he shrugs, smiling.
In Brazil the production team experienced the worst rain for 60 years. Hoping to net the large peacock bass, they instead found that the Rio Negro, near the city of Manaus, had burst its banks and all the fish were in the trees.
This was not about to dampen the spirits of The Accidental Angler’s passionate presenter, Charles Rangeley-Wilson. In what became a bit of a detective story, Rangeley-Wilson met some Indians who knew an old man who said he could take them to some fish. After postponing their trip back to the UK – and on their last day in Brazil – Miller got the elusive shots he was after.
Miller believes that fishing, like football, crosses boundaries. ‘Once you start fishing, people will come to see you and talk to you. It seems to be a cultural ice-breaker. We found this in Wandsworth, London, and the same was true of the Himalayas.’
The Accidental Angler, BBC Two, starts November
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