TV review: Watership Down; King Gary
There was no Bright Eyes in this new version of Watership Down, but there were no dry eyes either
Watership Down
BBC One
★★★☆☆
King Gary
BBC One
★★★★☆
Well, that wasn’t too harrowing, was it? Apart from Sam Smith singing that strange, whiny song at the end, which felt like gratuitous cruelty after all we’d been through. Not a patch on Bright Eyes, was it? My response to that song is Pavlovian even now: two bars can make me well up over rabbit suffering. But the new BBC/Netflix version of Watership Down promised to be less gory and distressing than the 1978 film, and it was. Which means our children were spared our trauma, doubtless fuelling more “snowflake” ammunition.
There were obviously still dark, upsetting scenes, one being the prolonged spectacle of Bigwig thrashing and choking in a snare and when the rottweiler chased and savaged…
