The Blue Planet

I have a soft spot for the Blue Planet. Not only because I live on it, without it I’d be floating in space and I don’t float well these days, and not only because it remains the only thing I’ve watched in High Definition that has impressed me (Jack Dee’s "Lead Balloon" doesn’t count because it looks the same in SD and HD and I was expecting Raquel Cassidy to look even hotter so I was disappointed). It’s a big aquarium near the Cheshire Oaks outlet mall and quite near Chester Zoo. Both of which I also like. So I poured myself in my little car, fired up the old satellite navigation and away I went. Anna Massey giving me a potted history of late 18^th century politics en route.

A word about the M56. It is a fine road. It does its job to the best of its abilities. It has many well designed junctions and slip roads and rarely (if ever) does it forget to be firm and flat. But junction 15 is not a good junction. The problem is that it’s two junctions in one. Everywhere located just off junction 15 of the M56 says to go off at junction 15 of the M56. That’s all they say. They feel they should offer the traveller nothing more. You approach the junction and think "Ah ha – junction 15 – M53 – I will do well here" and make for the appropriate lane. Bad move. Luckily I have faith in my sat nav as she kept telling me "Keep right"… "keep right"… "keep right"… My instinct was to go left because that’s what the signs said. She was right. Because while the left lane is going off at junction 15, the next lane is going off at the other junction 15. Suddenly, as if by magic, one big road becomes three smaller roads and people to the left are off to Chester, people on the right are going on to junction 16 and people in the middle (me and my kind) are going to the aquarium. Hooray for satellite navigation and the sense to obey it.

Unless I’m being very stupid – and there are boxes full of evidence which could be produced to support this theory were the case to come to court – the Blue Planet doesn’t have any sort of map. No handy leaflets telling you what is where and why. No wall charts with big "You are here – stuff is over there" stickers on it. In short, no maps. Which is basically fine because it isn’t hard to find your way around but it is a bit disconcerting not to know how far round you are. Am I near the end? Is there lots more to come? Where is the octopus? That sort of thing.

One of the other problems is that fish won’t keep still so it’s very difficult to take pictures of them. I took almost an hour of video but few useable photographs. The thing about places like this is that the temptation is to take lots of pics or videos. At least it is with me. But after a few minutes I realised I didn’t want to only see these remarkable creatures on a 2 inch LCD screen. So I sat by the tanks just watching them. The oceans really are alien worlds. Fish are amazing creatures to just watch swim by. They must be bored out of their minds as they literally go one way and then the other and back again. Aliens watching humans probably think the same thing as we go from home to the office and back again a few hours later.

The aquarium is split into several different sections as you would expect. I don’t really know which was which as they all have amazing fish swimming around in tanks. That sounds flippant and dismissive but it isn’t meant to be. Every tank was different and every fish was worth a few minutes to watch every odd little detail of its body. From eyes that don’t look like eyes to tails that guide it so effortlessly through the water. The diversity amongst creatures which look, on first inspection, to be all the same is fascinating. You take your chance with zoos – the animals may spend the whole time hiding or they might come out and perform for you. Fish aren’t like that – if they even know you’re there, they don’t care. They swim around, never leaving the audience short changed and demanding restitution. Indeed, this little bugger seemed to be positively craving attention.

I tried and tried to get a decent photo of this one because it reminded me strangely of 1980s super-helicoper, Airwolf.

There were a few frogs too – poisonous ones – and that felt quite exciting. They are tiny little plastic things which suddenly move and you realise they are real. The plaques tell you they are poisonous but don’t say how one would get poisoned by a frog. Do you have to eat the frog or will it simply squirt its juices into your cup of tea while you’re distracted by a fake phone call from the frog’s accomplice?

Off downstairs and we find the turtles. Some were swimming, some were just sitting on the island and a couple seemed to have started having sex but then decided they’d rather just stand there and pass the time of day.

There were some strange, bug-eyed fish which looked like cartoon characters that had just had a big comedy surprise. "My wife’s done WHAT?"

There was a big pool of flat fish. Some apparently like to be tickled, others don’t. I have better things to do than tickle a fish. Some of those that don’t like to be tickled have taken to disguising themselves as the bottom of the tank. A wise move. I’ve done that at parties.

Coral Bay – an outcrop of coral with some exotic fish swimming under, over, round and through it – was an early highlight. It’s the colours and the weird shapes which gets me. Some of them look like fish shaped florescent tubes. It must be great living in an aquarium – you get to be as colourful as you like without the risk of something floating past, thinking "Mmm – I fancy florescent tonight" and eating the hell out of you.

This wacky fish lets you see its internal organs. If it could talk it would sound like Zoë Wannamaker. Fact.

The lion fish is apparently very dangerous indeed. It’s also gorgeous. It glides and swooshes around its tank with all its fish-feathers (all right, what should I call them?) flying around it like yes-men round an executive. It has a combination of flamboyance and deadliness not seen since Ric Flair had all his own hair.

The two big hitters at the Blue Planet are the aqua-theatre and the aqua-tunnel. The theatre is a huge, £100,000 window into the aquarium’s main tank. All the big stars swim past while you sit there and watch. They did a show where a couple of divers fed the assembled watery masses and we got some interesting facts about sharks.

The aqua-tunnel is fantastic. A 70m motorised walk way which takes you on a winding journey through the big tank.

Huge flat fish fly over your head and show you their weird mouths and swishing gills. Huge sharks swim past you and show you their mass of needle-like teeth. A couple of smaller, dumb looking fish bumped into one of the sharks. It just ignored them. The guide chap was obviously right when he said that sharks are basically harmless unless you really annoy them. Bumping into it and bubble a hasty apology and you’ll most likely get away with it.

By far the laziest creature was this shark who spent the entire time just sat at the bottom of the tank because he could. He wasn’t dead – just lucky enough to belong to a species which can in fact sit at the bottom of the tank and not move. The guide explained that this particular example is lazy and cunning – he’s learned to lie by the pump so he doesn’t even have to stay awake and use his gills to stay alive. He can let technology do all that hard work for him. A shark after my own heart.

When you get to the end of the aqua-tunnel there is a sign which says the "Voyage continues this way". This is a lie. It just takes you into the restaurant. That is in fact the end of the aquarium. This is why I wanted a map. As finales go, the theatre followed by the tunnel is about as good as you’re going to get, but it would be nice not to be mislead into thinking there is more to come. Fortunately, it is all fairly open plan so you can wander through the restaurant and have another go through the tunnel. I went four or five times because it has that rare combination of letting you see things you missed the last time while also being different each time.

I only stopped going through the tunnel because the motorised walk way broke. That sounds like I’m shark-lazy but there is a reason. The tunnel is fashioned in such a way that there is a good way to look through it and lots of bad ways to look through it. Get it at the right angle and everything looks great. Get it at the wrong angle and things go a bit weird. That’s the price you have to pay for being able to stay dry under millions of tonnes of water I suppose. Anyway, the moving walk way meant everything was right. Walking at my own pace and moving from the static walk way to the regular floor meant I wasn’t at the right angle and everything was too distorted. I’m such a wuss. Though in my own defence, I had thirty years focusing one way and I’ve only had six months to get used to a whole new field of vision and all the focusing opportunities that brings.

I think I said during my sprawling Chester Zoo epic that I was surprised I could get blasé about lions. "Oh" I’d say with all the enthusiasm of a teenage, "is that another lion?" Well, the same is true of sharks. First time round, sharks are awesome. "Oh" I’d exclaim, "my god – it’s a shark". Second and third time I’d notice more detail. Teeth, fins, eyes, facial expression, tail et cetera. By the fourth or fifth time I was hoping Brer Shark would have another string to his bow. Possibly a conjuring act or some kind of basic tap dancing. When you are no longer impressed by a shark, the time has come to leave the aquarium.

I went to the gift shop to find something for the little ones. I got Banana a stuffed shark – she’s already got a whale and a dolphin so she obviously likes sharing her little bed with marine creatures. This shark has the advantage of not being bigger than she is which will help. For my nephew a torch which projects sea creatures onto the walls. Banana will like it too – they had endless fun last winter playing with my sonic screwdrivers in the dark. I only have two because I got one (because you have to) and then got a second one so they wouldn’t fight over it.

Then, while in the gift shop, an announcement came over the loud speaker saying that it was time to feed the otters. What otters? I would’ve looked on the map for mention of otters but there is NO MAP. Apparently, you go through what looks like a fire exit at the back of the gift shop to get to the otter enclosure. They may be the least sign-posted otters in England.

Otters are smaller than I thought they’d be. These little things – barely bigger than fat squirrels despite being fully grown – emerged from the undergrowth to gorge themselves on fish tossed by a rather cute otter expert. She probably has othertalents but otter expert and hot lady were the only ones I saw her display.

At which point I decided to head back home. I live in fear of the rush hour – that impossibly annoying three hour spell which sucks the life out of the latter half of the day – so wanted to get going before three o’clock. My sat nav and I got home ok. I really pressed it onto the windscreen and, for the first time in months, it stayed on the whole way home. I took my usual detour on the way home – she says junction 1 but I know I prefer junction 2 and she usually bows to my local expertise and recalculates silently in the background.

The Blue Planet is a very good day out. Fish are amazing things to sit and watch swim around. The diversity is incredible – from massive things that look like they could eat a melon without blinking to tiny little ones which would be crushed by a postage stamp. The colours and unlike anything else in nature, the world they live in is so different to ours that it impossible to believe after seeing them that there isn’t life on other planets. If one world can produce us and them then surely every planet is capable of producing some form of life given half a chance. I did feel that it lacked one more big display though. If the aqua-tunnel was followed by something radically different again such as big jelly fish or an octopus then it would feel like a finished exhibition. It’s 90% of the way there but they either need another big finish or to make the actual big finish (which is fantastic) feel like the big finale. A plate of aquarium-themed chips and a carton of Ribena is not a fitting denouement.