Saturday - Pay Tv

The Age

Thursday May 24, 2007

Brad Newsome

The Accidental Angler: London

BBC World, 5.10pm

This beautifully photographed and lovingly crafted production follows the efforts of British writer and fishing enthusiast Charles Rangeley-Wilson to catch a real, live trout within London proper. He's pushing ordure upstream, you might think, but that's not necessarily the case. The water quality in the rivers that flow through the city has improved out of sight in recent years (they no longer catch fire, for one thing) and all manner of aquatic life is said to have returned. Knowing that there are fish about is one thing, but finding out where they're biting can be quite another, and we get to meet a colourful assortment of Londoners as Rangeley-Wilson goes looking for tips. There's the no-nonsense fishmonger at the Billingsgate market, the enthusiastic amateur who's sat in the one spot so long that the park people have had to mow around him, and the schoolboys who might just tell more whoppers than they land, to mention a few. Rangeley-Wilson has a beautiful way with words - a big, fat chub is "a zeppelin", the New River was once "crayfish soup" - and he provides us with a fascinating social history of the rivers and a lament for the once-proud River Fleet, which has long since been built over. Repeats are scheduled for Sunday at 1.10am, 10.10am and 10.10pm.

One Piece Marathon

Cartoon Network, 10.30am

Dragonball Z meets Pirates of the Caribbean in this typically bizarre Japanese animation, left, based on the hugely popular manga comics of Eiichiro Oda. The story is basically about the hunt for a legendary piece of treasure known as One Piece, which will make its owner the Pirate King or somesuch. Our heroes are a motley crew called the Straw Hat Pirates, which includes the usual assortment of excitable, hyperactive youths, brooding, enigmatic youths, pneumatically pulchritudinous young women with no particular fondness for clothes, and talking reindeer-teddy-bear things. Today, as the whole production fishtails wildly between the stylishly noir and the utterly bonkers, various Straw Hatters find themselves buried alive, attacked by giant catfish, rescued by river seals and persecuted by a redneck transvestite, all the while travelling across some kind of trackless Sahara on the back of a giant taxi crab or on the backs of a squadron of intelligent but apparently flightless giant ducks in an effort to prevent the desert kingdom from being torn apart by civil war. Or something like that, anyway. There are no fewer than 11 episodes on the trot here today, but that's just the tip of the iceberg - more than 300 eps have already been made. Meanwhile, back in Japan, the manga magazine presses have been running hot, with issues serialising One Piece having sold more than 130 million copies. The mind boggles.