You needed a strong stomach to see what was inside this Leviathan of the deep
A big whale is washed up dead on a Kent beach. That's pretty much the best thing that could possibly happen for TV leviathan dissectors Mark Evans and Joy Reidenberg and their team. There's a lot of stuff inside a dead whale, so Sperm Whale: Inside Nature's Giants (Channel 4, Sunday), a special edition of the series, got an extra half an hour. And it was worth it.
You can't take a 45ft whale to a lab or a studio; it all has to happen on the beach. They need to make a start at night, because of the tide. There's something both sad and beautiful about such a giant corpse lying on the mud, floodlit in the dark.
It gets less beautiful inside, once they get in there. A sperm whale has very thick skin. You can shout "You're really fat, like a big fat person lying on the beach and your head's full of jizz" in its ear and it won't give a damn. Well, this one's dead, obviously, so it won't even hear. Joy does what you know she's been longing to do ever since she heard about this whale; she plunges her knife in, right up to the hilt. They cut a huge rectangle, and then use a digger to peel the slab of skin away, and there's their window into a world rarely seen since Jonah. Joy gets to work, hacking away with her knife, hauling out armfuls of intestines. Oops, she punctures one, it does a big wet dead whale fart in her face; never mind, I think she quite likes it.
Elsewhere, Simon Watt the hunky biologist visits some human free- divers, who frankly are less impressive at being whales than the whales are ? three minutes underwater compared to more than an hour for the whale. Simon also goes to the Azores to visit a nice old boy who shows him a piece of ambergris, thick oily black stuff that comes from a sperm whale's arse and is used in perfumery. "You can still smell the rectum of a whale in the most expensive of perfumes," says Simon.
Simon also gets to dive with a whale and comes back to the surface, saying "That was amazing", as they always do. I'm a bit bored of TV people coming back to the surface saying "That was amazing". But Simon is so moved by it all that he peels back his wetsuit to reveal his hunky torso, then sits at the end of a pier, looking out to sea, reflecting on the enormity of the experience.
Whales do tend to have a profound effect on people. Over in the Natural History Museum (I think), Richard Dawkins is moved to read a passage from the Book of Job. Who'd have thought it, Dawkins and the Bible?
Back at the beach, and it's getting very messy ? stomachs, the remnants of digested squid, synovial fluid, a liver the size of a cart horse, all spilled out and mixed in with the Kent mud. Not that Joy seems to mind; she's in her element, wading about in the gloop, sticking her arm in to pull things out, enlisting the help of a tree surgeon with a chain saw to help get at the heart.
The police and the coast-guard, however, want the whale removed. A cable is attached to its tail and they start to tow it towards the water's edge where it will be reclaimed by the sea when the tide returns.
Wait though. "Look at the penis, it's coming out!" shouts Joy. How can a dead whale, its innards all spilled out be getting turned on by this experience? Joy explains: "With the tension of pulling on the tail, those muscle are actually being squeezed and they're pushing out the penis." Anyway, it seems in all the excitement they've completely forgotten about Moby's dick; the towing has to be interrupted because this is the most impressive organ of all. It's actually prehensile, says Joy, like a monkey's tail; it can stick out in any direction, and that helps whales overcome the problem of not having anything much to grab hold of on each other. He can just swim along next to her and stick it in. Joy pulls it out further, peeling back the sheath, a bit like Simon peeling back his wetsuit. And then she waggles it backwards and forwards to show it's flexibility . . . OK, that's enough now, Joy. And don't even think about sticking your knife in. I think the poor creature should be allowed to return to the sea with its mighty penis, if not its dignity, intact.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/aug/07/tv-review-inside-sperm-whale
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