Rosio Pavoris

This news is actually a few days old, but it just hit our local newspapers, and now it made James Randi’s Swift, and given the fact that I seem to be keeping track of the march of fundamentalism in the lowlands, I guess it bears mentioning.

Chances are you’ve heard of David Attenborough’s BBC nature documentary series, The Life of Mammals. It’s a few years old at this point, and is comprised of ten episodes. It’s a pretty good series, which, apparently, is also what the Dutch TV station EO thought.
EO stands for Evangelische Omroep (”Evangelical Broadcast”), and due to the idiosyncracies of religious history in the Netherlands, it’s a public broadcasting association. And it is, of course, fundie. Young Earth Creationist, even.

Imagine its surprise when The Life of Mammals suddenly started talking about evolution, and things happening millions of years ago!

The short of it is that they cut an entire episode, and bowdlerised a few of the others.
It’s all documented in greater detail on this (Dutch) blog (including YouTube videos), which was also the first one to notice it. Basically, everything mentioning evolution, fossils, common descent, or the fact that the Earth is older than a few thousand years has been cut or mistranslated in the dub.

I wonder if the BBC knows about this. I know Attenborough wouldn’t take kindly to being censored like this.
The fact that a public broadcasting association gets away with this is shameful.

Quit sucking, Netherlands.