Widely previewed and reviewed, Monkeys, Rats and Me: Animal Testing (BBC2) on Monday evening was widely seen as an excellent documentary about a ‘difficult’ issue. But the antivivisectionists didn’t like it, if the following from ‘Beast’ on the Beyond Bunnies blog is anything to go by:
… it was the pro-vivisection tubthump it always threatened to be, in which the only person (other than Mel Broughton) from an anti-vivisection standpoint who appeared on camera was Pete Singer - who was properly stitched up, as already discussed on the below entry. Too angry to blog further. Bile coursing down nose, hard to type.
I guess the antivivs just don’t have any persuasive arguments that journalists and producers feel are worthy of inclusion in a serious documentary. They only have themselves to blame.
Contrast Beast’s whining (I concede his description of his reaction is great, I can just see him snivelling) with the review by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian on Tuesday. She thinks the documentary was ‘superbly balanced’ and ‘outstanding’. She concludes:
Wishart [Adam Wishart, producer/director] remained personally ambivalent right to the end, when he confesses with relief that a discussion between Aziz [Tipu Aziz, neuroscientist and surgeon] and Peter Singer, author of (and coiner of the phrase) Animal Liberation 30 years ago, allowed him to come down - just - on the side of the scientists. Aziz told Singer that the 100 monkeys he had used had so far helped 40,000 people with diseases such as Parkinson’s and dystonia. Singer said that he ‘could see that as justifiable’.
Wishart’s achievement lay in the fact that viewers were not manipulated into agreeing with that position. They were still free to agree or disagree - but were far better informed when it came to doing so than they had been 80 minutes before.
