The BEST episodes directed by Steve Westh
#1 - Kangaroo Mob
Nature - Season 30 - Episode 5
In the past 50 years, the eastern gray kangaroo population around Canberra, Australia’s capital city, has exploded from a few hundred to tens of thousands. Forced from the surrounding drought-stricken hills, hungry kangaroos have done their best to adapt to city life, dining on city parks and suburban lawns—though they do pay a price for their meals. Each year, thousands of kangaroos lose their lives in collisions with cars on busy roads, causing injuries and property damage of more than a million dollars in the process. Overgrazing by large numbers of kangaroos has also created stress on the environment. It’s all led to a government policy of culling, and an emotional public dispute between those who support reducing kangaroo numbers, and those who are appalled by the prospect of killing this beloved Australian icon. The government’s culling “solution” has led some Canberra residents to seek out new, innovative, and kangaroo-friendly ways to regulate the surging population. Can they be relocated, or can their numbers be controlled through forced contraception? Following the stories of several urban kangaroos, Kangaroo Mob reveals how these metropolitan marsupials manage to survive the city, and documents the ongoing debate on how best to manage them.
#2 - The Great Escape: The Reckoning
Channel 4 (UK) Documentaries - Season 2009 - Episode 17
The Great Escape is one of the most celebrated stories of World War II, and the subject of an iconic film. Of the 76 Allied airmen who famously escaped in March 1944 from POW camp Stalag Luft III, deep in Nazi Germany, all but three were recaptured. Fifty of them were then shot dead by the Gestapo, in a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention. As well as recounting the escape, led by charismatic Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, this documentary tells the largely unknown, yet incredible account of what happened next. This is the story beyond the Hollywood legend: the remorseless hunt throughout Europe for the men who murdered the Great Escapers, in a dark mission of detection and revenge that lasted into the 1960s. The film features interviews with WWII experts, with escape survivors reliving their extraordinary experiences, and an interview with the daughter of a Gestapo officer executed for killing Roger Bushell. A relative of murdered Australian flying ace James Catanach is also interviewed; Catanach, along with Bushell, was a very popular POW, and an important player in the Great Escape.