"Compleat Cobblers."

I have stopped watching Dog the Bounty Hunter because I think that I have seen every episode several times. Nothing more depressing than sitting through episodes trying to recall whether you have seen them or not. Waiting for a dim light of doomed recognition to bleerily alight at the bottom of your weary medulla oblongata. Waiting for a stray quip from Beth that "rings a vague bell," or a memorable facial tic, a harelip or a squint, something unique and familiar about the perp.

Now, in the absence of a regular stream of Parking Wars episodes, I have elected to watch River Monsters to feed my appetite for cable reality guff. It naturally doesn't feature the same high-grade repartee as Dog the Bounty Hunter, but on the positive side it does have gigantic freshwater fish.

The gist of this show is the same as Dog anyway: hunt down a perp, wherefore 95% of the show is wholly devoid of direction, necessarily devoted to building up the putative "thrill of the chase". When the perpetrator (or here the "fish") is finally identified, located and caught, there is that same familiar sense of anti-climax, and the corollary pang of intense self-loathing, felt by the viewer. However on River Monsters, for better or for worse, the presenter does not take the giant fish onto the back seat of an SUV, offer it a cigarette, and try to turn it to Jesus and redemption.

In today's episode, the English extreme-stunt-fisherman presenter (or "EESFP" - his name escapes me and I can't even be bothered to look it up) was hunting down a monster killer fish described in Eskimo legends. He was in Alaska. In other programs this would of course be cue for a volley of jokes about Sarah Palin but River Monsters is not that show. It never will be. If you want Sarah Palin jokes switch to Letterman.

After much exposition and shrill shilly-shallying, and interviewing less-than-credible "witnesses" (half the time I felt like I was watching Teeth Mountain testifying on Judge Judy Christ sake) the EESFP found himself in the unenviable position of trying in vain to catch a common or garden sockeye salmon. When he finally hooked one, a baby bear came over and stole it from him. I'm not making this up - it really happened. The camera crew were so vexxed by this baby bear stealing their salmon that they reported him to the authorities. Really.

I couldn't work out the relevance of the capture of this salmon to the larger narrative (which is, lest we forget, the capture of the mysterious Esquimaux Death Fish) anyway. It was not properly explained. They were trying to ascertain whether there was a "viable food source" for the Mystery Monster Fish I think, but I would have thought the mere presence of the salmon alone was sufficient to conclude that there was a food source. Anyway, after the baby bear chased them off the river they blithely abandoned the hunt for sockeye salmon with utter equanimity. They said, "Well there are pike and salmon in the river so the monster fish could obviously eat them." So what was this whole folderol scene for?

It seems to me, as a lowly layperson, a landlubber and no "piscatorean," that the whole scene was cooked up purely to get a scene with a grizzly bear hovering in the background. The presenter kept pretending to be nonplussed, prattling on about absolutely nothing, while there was a bear idling on the opposite bank of the river. Like he was a tough guy, unfazed by bears. This was just the usual prick-teasing that goes on on American television. They keep you watching narrative emptiness waiting for the punchline. Obviously they decided that the baby bear did not have the cinematic cachet that an adult one would, but still he made the EESFP and his crew look like bunglers and cowards.

So they shopped the poor bear to the park ranger.

Wonder what happened to him.

I hope he wasn't shot.

Anyway, after that - and with no "useful data" extracted from the sockeye salmon - the EESFP went up in a small plane where he interviewed a female anthropologist who told him in detail about a giant monster fish she had seen from the air last year. Why didn't they use her testimony in the first place? Without the capering on the riverbank amongst our ursine cousins?

From this "expert testimony" our intrepid guide quickly asserted that the fish was - must be - a "Massive White Sturgeon". The rapidity and ease with which he arrived at this diagnosis just from the female anthropologist's scanty and bored testimony was suspicious to my critical and cynical eyes and ears. It smacked, I say, of a put-on. Then he says, with equal blitheness, "Well I could spend forty or fifty years trying to catch a sturgeon on this body of water but you and I in televisionland don't have forty or fifty years to spare so I am going to go down to Oregon waters, there to catch a sturgeon." To anticipate his viewers' obvious disappointment, he insisted "I am still catching the same fish, just in completely different waters several thousand miles away. This is not, I repeat not, a cop-out."

This was a reductio ad absurdum if I ever I heard one. There was no proof that the Monster Fish in question was a Massive White Sturgeon except on our eminent expert's dubious say-so; his speculation would only be confirmed by catching the monster fish in question in Alaskan waters. Which he now had decided against. This journey down to Oregon was a fool's errand.

There's no point in getting angry about this. I know: don't sweat the small stuff. You keep telling me that but it's hard sometimes. So he went over to Oregon where there are literally scads of sturgeon idly booping along the sea-floor just waiting to be hooked up. He caught one in about five seconds and it was about three foot long. We all mistook it for a sprat. It swam away as soon as he tried to grab it by the jaw so he fished for another one and made a mighty production of it when he caught this one, which was I think eight foot long. Still, the one in Alaska was meant to be twenty foot long so I felt cheated some more. By ooh let's see twelve feet of fish flesh.

Then he reaches into this micro-sturgeon's mouth and says, "Look the sturgeon has no teeth, just these telescopic gums." He demonstrated this by pulling the sturgeon's gums this way and that for a while, just to demonstrate the toothlessness of the fish. The poor sturgeon just took it with Christianly good grace. He "never said a mumblin' word." This did not seem to strengthen our presenter's position from where I was sitting. This diminutive, pacific, toothless wonder was our threatening Monster Esquimaux Killer?

The conclusion was, nevertheless, that this fish - "or one like it" - was the same monster up in Alaska and that it had capsized all those Esquimaux kayaks not by ruthless biting (since teeth had it none) but by its mysterious habit of leaping out of the water and knocking Esquimaux out of their canoes. This eccentric trick, incidentally, "has never been explained. Maybe it is motivated by panic."

Maybe.

This is some "fish story" indeed! This wasn't even the tale of "the one that got away" - this was the tale of "the much smaller version of the one several thousand miles away which even that one's identification was only deduced by the idlest speculation. And which got away."


"VENATOR"