TV preview, The Gift of Hearing: a surefire cure for misanthropy

The Gift of Hearing, BBC2, Thursday 11.05pm; and Highlands – Scotland’s Wild Heart, BBC2, Friday 9pm

There is plenty on television for us misanthropes. A plethora of 24-hour news channels, for example, provide ample evidence that humanity is hardly lovable, and that the fact of man’s inhumanity to man is at least as nasty as it has ever been. If you want to believe that most of us are only a few stages from barbarity, either through becoming brutalised ourselves or as victims of it, then a quarter of an hour in front of Sky News should do the trick.

Evidence to the contrary then – television for optimists, if you will – is doubly to be welcomed, and this week sees a particularly uplifting example. The Gift of Hearing features a journey of compassion and healing undertaken by Jo Milne. You may not recognise the name of this Gateshead woman, but you may well recall the internet sensation she caused a couple of years ago when a relatively simple operation meant that her profound deafness, Usher Syndrome, could be cured. The video of the moment of her hearing the world for the first time went viral, and it was very moving. Now Jo has dedicated her life to others and has been travelling the world to do so. We find her in Bangladesh, helping some of that country’s one million deaf children being granted the gift of a new sense – technically the “sensation of hearing” rather than hearing itself, but no matter. She is also reunited with her school friend Amina Khan who emigrated to Bangladesh, and we learn how the two girls formed an unbreakable bond because they were both bullied at school. There is, though some bad news for Jo too.

It was interesting to see some Osmonds chucked into this exotic mix, and I never realised that their singing career started so they could raise money to help deal with two of the brothers’ deafness. Such is the power of the documentary that this particular misanthrope felt compelled to make a donation to one of the excellent charities featured (The Hearing Fund UK and the Starkey Foundation). A cure for misanthropy is quite a breakthrough too.

I can also recommend The Highlands – Scotland’s Wild Heart, a fresh four-part series thath explores the indisputable beauty of Scotland’s natural history. Like football matches, wildlife is best seen on television, with its slow-motion replays and HD closeness to the action. The life and death sequences of osprey v trout are particularly dramatic; and of course there’s lots of cute red squirrels too.