He finally breaks down their reserve when he joins a root beer party, in which tradition requires participants to drink until they projectile vomit. Raddled, dazed and one gag away from puking, Parry is picked up by Mantou, an Achuar elder, who lays him on a hammock, and washes his feet. Through the pain, Parry issues a sickly smile of vindication. "That one single act is the most wonderful thing that's happened to me since I've been here," he sighs. "Sooo lovely! Mantou, who is sooo stoical and rarely smiles and has just been a wonderful host, but always just a liddle bit separate, has just looked after me at this moment when I really needed him sooo nicely. Just washing my feet! Imagine!"
Shockingly, all around Parry is a story screaming to be investigated. The Achuar are not Rousseauian innocents. They wear modern clothes and have an accurately marked football pitch. Meanwhile, a part of the tribe has done a deal with the oil companies and moved from huts into houses with electricity and running water.
Parry does not find them and ask if wealth has brought better health and longer lives, or alcoholism and decadence. Nor does he notice that women are second-class citizens in the tribal village, and ask if the freedoms modernity brings are breaking the power of misogyny for those who escape traditional culture. If we are to credit his account, the BBC documentary is a "last chance to see" a doomed society. But instead of recording a vanishing culture for posterity, Parry merely tells us that New Age Englishmen can be wetter than the Amazon rain forest, and I knew that already.
The channel controllers treat Tony Robinson as an eccentric. He is an old leftist and stalwart of the actors' union and they can dismiss his complaints as luvvyish excess. But the latest style of documentaries shows that if Robinson is guilty of anything it is of underestimating the journalistic crisis in television.
