Courtship

• As our recent research explains, our local pipefish species really does confound expectations.
• Pipefish are unusual because the males carry their developing babies around on their bodies, often in special broad pouches.
• This was unexpected because the wide-bodied pipefish gets its name from the broad, colourful, striped abdomen of the female – not the male.
• Given this ornamentation, we expected females would approach males for courtship and display more often and for longer than males.

• Perhaps nothing embodies the BBC’s values of inform, educate and entertain more than its nature documentaries.
• In terms of its story, Planet Earth III warns of environmental catastrophe more than any similar BBC show before it.
• But with them all creating similar programmes, what effect does that have on their ability to inform, educate or entertain?

Comforting catastrophe

• Copyright laws can protect a show’s characters or plot, but not a visual, musical or storytelling style.
• Netflix has expanded their scope with Our Planet, Our Planet II and Our Universe (2022).
• These stories all follow a single format, comforting in its familiarity but should anything that seeks to educate about climate catastrophe be comforting?
• What do we lose when environmental stories are all told through the same lens and speak with the same voice?

Tackling climate change head on

• The first season did, however, offer one distinct competitive edge: a clear focus on environmental issues, which the BBC’s had been sorely lacking.
• The BBC’s nature documentaries have come under considerable criticism over the years for not addressing the climate and ecological crisis.
• Historically, the BBC had chosen to stay neutral on the debate about human-caused global heating and this decision affected the Planet shows.
• This one change, while great and urgently needed, has been quickly folded into the planet format and is a feature of all subsequent nature shows.

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Leora Hadas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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• A new book on South African liberation struggle icons Nelson and Winnie Mandela is a masterful biography of the pair.
• Jonny Steinberg’s splendid 550-page biography, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, ends on a note of pathos with a poignant tale from Nelson Mandela’s deathbed.
• Four days from death in December 2013, Nelson is in an advanced state of dementia and refuses to eat.
• Winnie, on the other hand,
  is at once the most commanding figure and a figure of terrible subjection.

Ambition and expedience

• The early Nelson is portrayed as a man consumed by insecurity and ambition.
• Sometimes ambition and expedience get in the way of altruism and principle.
• He joins the Communist Party, but when the Pan-Africanist Congress takes off, he proposes sidelining whites and dropping the Party.
• This book gives space to just two of his many lovers – the Women’s Federation leaders Lilian Ngoyi and Ruth Mompati.

Nelson and Winnie post-1990

• It was in his bid to save her after the murder of Seipei that Nelson bared his teeth and emerged in the least favourable light.
• First, when Winnie failed to get elected to the executive of her local ANC branch in Soweto, he got his aides to set up a new branch, which duly elected her.
• Nelson did all this to save Winnie.

Four murders

• The book directly implicates Winnie in the murders of two young men, Lolo Sono and Siboniso Tshabalala (both falsely accused of being informers, when the real informers were Winnie’s lover Johannes Mabotha and Jerry Richardson).
• It also strongly implies that she was behind the murder of her doctor Abu Baker Asvat (who’d examined Seipei) but leaves the question open as to whether she’d ordered Seipei’s murder.