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Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula, yet again, for this gem of a movie review from Channel 4:

Interview With A Penguin

It is the heart-warming documentary that took America by storm, the story of Emperor Penguins and their fight to breed in the harsh conditions of Antarctica. Matthew De Abaitua caught up with one of its flippered stars.

DE ABAITUA
So how was the shoot?

PENGUIN
The conditions in Antarctica were very difficult but everyone was great to work with. It was a really rewarding experience. Emperor Penguins pride themselves on their professionalism.

DE ABAITUA
Your film has been used by right wing commentators to show how nature upholds family values. How do you feel about that?

PENGUIN
You have to realise that, first and foremost, I am concerned with fish.

DE ABAITUA
Surely you have an opinion about how your devotion to your spouse and your egg has been used to support arguments for Intelligent Design and the importance of monogamy?

PR INTERVENES
The penguin doesn’t want to talk about monogamy.

PENGUIN

Actually, I will take this one. There is a scene where I stand around on the thick ice for about three months, incubating an egg in a flap of skin just above my feet. When I heard people talking about Intelligent Design, I had to laugh. Our breeding grounds are far inland, about 70 miles away from our food, which is in the sea. Where is the intelligence in that? Where is the design? Have you any idea how hard it is to walk with these stupid legs? If there was such a thing as Intelligent Design, there would be another animal in the South Pole – like a moose or a gnu – that had an overwhelming instinct to run a small mini-cab firm.

DE ABAITUA
What happens if your mate doesn’t make it back with food before your blubber runs out?

PENGUIN
I hop into the ocean and get some fish.

DE ABAITUA
What about the egg?

PENGUIN
It fends for itself.

DE ABAITUA
That doesn’t sound like family values to me.

PENGUIN
That’s because you are part of the liberal establishment media. You are weak. You are soft. Can you survive on your own blubber for three months? I think not. If there is one lesson I think we’ve taught America, it’s the importance of blubber. You can never have enough blubber. They say, “Intelligent Design”, I say “blubber blubber blubber”.

DE ABAITUA
I think you’ll find only aquatic mammals like seals and whales have blubber. You’re just a fat bird.

PR
Time’s up

I do miss British Channel 4. We get BBC’s 1 and 2 here on our cable package in the Netherlands, but none of the BBC digital channels or Channel 4. There’s a Dutch channel, the visual equivalent of the Daily Mail, called Veronica (which I’ve always thought an odd name for a tv channel, like calling it Trevor, but there you go, cloggies. ) Veronica runs some Channel 4 output, mostly the more tacky reality shows ( just look at the schedule ) of which Ch4 is very guilty. However, Ch4 does redeem itself by having a great news programme with Jon Snow.

Dutch tv is…. different. I have tried to watch it, with my minimal Dutch, but it’s just so damned dull. It’s either talking heads in studios (3 self-consciously intellectual white men, including interviewer, one over-made up token woman in ‘arty’ glasses, and/or the same old ‘minority’ faces over and over), because it’s cheap – or knockoffs of 2 year old British reality show formats in Dutch, or the worst kind of American sitcom/made for tv movie, subtitled badly in Dutch. A bit of a cultural desert. Oh, and although I rather enjoy AT5‘s local news -it’s a nice idea to get local people out and about to read the weather, and the Kort Amsterdam segments are brilliant, for instance – but, oh oh oh that newsreader.

There is a woman newsreader, (I’ve no idea what her name is, so no picture) who appears to have strabismus, or lazy eye. I’m not making lookist remarks as I suffer from it myself and need to have prismatic lenses in reading glasses. But it’s one of those things you just can’t take your eyes off – to coin a phrase – in a news-reader. It’s hypnotising – you can’t hear a word she’s saying because you just can’t stop watching her weird eyes almost going cross-eyed and back again. Most disconcerting.

But I digress – with insane logic after seeing March of The Penguins the fundies have tried to adopt the Emperor penguin’s life history as some kind of endorsement of their views on marriage and family. But penguins are not all they may seem at first glance to naive fundies… Why, a gay penguin has even run for President:

And lets not forget, some penguins even cross-dress.

I’ve no doubt that even now the religious right is shocked to its core, working frantically to spread the ‘Why do penguins hate America?’ meme, fingers poised over the ‘send’ button of denunciatory emails. But do the penguins care? Do they buggery.