The second instalment of Scandinavia with Simon Reeve featured one of those set piece eye-openers he does rather well, a visit to a volcano buried and supposedly suppressed by a glacier which seems to be slowly melting away.
He'd waited until leaving Norway before delivering a proper lament about fossil fuels.
Though in fairness he had teased an appreciation of the essential hypocrisy underlying Norwegian affluence, comparing them to drug dealers (Pablo Escobar is the one who most springs to mind) who are notably reluctant to indulge in the substances they peddle to willing consumers abroad.
He did however pause to reflect, ruefully, that we Brits may have missed a chance to be as collectively wealthy and smug about it as this lot over the other side of the North Sea.
This reminded me that Reeve always seems to have an innate sense of balance in his narratives. (One could even say he has a rather sly appreciation of it.)
In this he compares favourably with many of other BBC 'treasures', who are often more cranky in their obsessions and less alert to the complexities and compromises going on in the world around them.
You might say that they take the sensibility of the dinner party with them out into the field, whereas with Reeve there is an attempt to switch the direction of this flow.
This was apparent in the previous episode when he visited the Sámi people, and it was again obvious here when he visited the boss of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, pressing him on the apolitical, 'bottom line' mandate behind his overall management strategy, which makes it environmentally and in some ways also ethically neutral, placing just 0.02% of this Viking hoard in renewable energy holdings.
Reeve might have mentioned that over the border in Sweden a focus on faddish eco-investments has been catastrophic for many speculators from the bottom line perspective, but maybe he'll cover that in part three...though I somehow doubt it.
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