Tide (Irish: Taoide; Scottish Gaelic: An Làn; Welsh: Llanw) lets the moon-powered pulse of the sea speak for itself. Filmed over 15 locations from Svalbard ice to China’s Xiapu mudflats, the three-parter keeps humans largely in the background while time-lapse cameras and drone shots reveal the tide as a travelling engine that can fill and empty the Bay of Fundy twice a day with more water than all the world’s rivers combined.
Narrated by MacDara Ó Cuaig in Irish, Heledd Cynwal in Welsh and an unnamed Scottish Gaelic voice, the series was commissioned as part of 2019’s International Year of Indigenous Languages and delivered on a lean £600,000 budget split among TG4, BBC Alba, S4C, BBC Northern Ireland and China’s LIC. Each 50-minute episode aired within a fortnight on the Gaelic channels, giving viewers the rare treat of scientific television that does not talk down to minority-language audiences.
The cameras catch Galway Bay oysters timing their feeding to the flood, Orkney farmers cutting seaweed for cattle feed and a whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan spinning clockwise because the seabed ridge is shaped like a question mark. No narrator claims the tide is poetic; the images do that work.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2019
Main Cast
