He seems disappointed in me... and it’s personal

Planet Earth III Sunday, BBC1 The Gone Sunday, RTÉ One

David Attenborough’s shows should, surely, come with a trigger warning. I’m still shaken by Perfect Planet, where that baby flamingo on its wobbly legs was picked off by a stork. I know we are not meant to interfere with nature, circle of life and all that, but had I been present I would have put that baby flamingo under my arm and run, run like the wind.

This is probably why I’ve never been invited to work with the BBC’s natural history unit, where you are expected to stay in a hide for several hundred hours just to get the one shot. I would break out, grab that baby flamingo, and also the baby iguana from Planet Earth II that was chased by racer snakes, miss the shot and run, run like the wind. If you ever see someone walking a flamingo and iguana in the park you can be pretty sure it’s me.

Like its predecessors, Planet Earth III is beautiful, spectacular, magnificent and extraordinary. But unlike, say, American wildlife shows, which tend to be sentimental – Morgan Freeman, as a narrator, uses every word for ‘dead’ apart from ‘dead’ – it does not look away from nature’s inherent brutality and the fact that life feeds on life, that it’s eat or be eaten out there.

This is the way it is, yet I still can’t watch without a knot in my stomach and mounting dread, and what does this new series open with?

A baby seal. Still furry and cuddly with the big eyes and everything. And, yes, here comes the shark, and now there is blood blooming on the surface of the water. They couldn’t have eased us in?

However, we’re then shown a most unexpected twist – the seals gather into a mob and chase the shark off. Amazing to see seals win for a change, but I was baffled. Seals aren’t a threat to sharks even in numbers.

Why doesn’t the shark just stay put and eat them? I hope a shark isn’t reading this. I would hate to give it ideas.

The series took five years to make, in 43 countries across six continents.

Attenborough, now 97, does not travel any more, and I miss him sitting on a log in the rainforest telling us what the ants are up to, but he does narrate, in a voice that is often quietly sorrowful.

I frequently feel he is disappointed in me, personally. ‘The planet has been transformed by us…,’ are his opening words.

We visit Raine Island, off the coast of Australia, which he first visited for television 66 years ago.

It’s the main breeding site for a very precious species, the green turtle, yet the island could be gone within 30 years if the sea water levels keep rising. As it is, temperature determines whether hatchlings are male or female, and now 99% of turtles born there are female –

males need lower temperatures – which does not bode well for the survival of the species.

However, on a brighter note, the ban on commercial whaling means whales are thriving again and giving birth off the coast of Argentina. I think it was the only segment where nothing ‘passed’, as Morgan Freeman would say. There were

astonishing sights, such as the sea angel, which is small and cute and fairy-like, but don’t be deceived.

It’s a ferocious predator with mouth parts that invert to form deadly tentacles. (Bye bye, sea butterfly.)

There were the lions that have accrued the knack of hunting sea birds at night and archer fish that shoot down land-insects by spitting jets of water.

There were also some baby flamingos, but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. It may be that I never will.

On a completely different note, it’s hard to remember a first episode of any drama that so completely intrigued right from the off as RTÉ’s new Sunday night drama, The Gone.

It opened with a young Irish couple, Sinéad and Ronan, making dinner in their rented house in a small New Zealand town.

Sinéad’s mother, a Special Criminal Court judge in Ireland, and her partner (Game Of Thrones Michell Fairley and former Glenroe stalwart Liam Carney) arrive at the house on a visit from home, to find it not only empty, but with dinner still cooking on the hob, phones charging, and money undisturbed.

The couple have vanished without trace, and a detective from Auckland, Diana Huia (Acushla-Tara Kupe) is sent to the small town – her home town, as it happens – to investigate. She is joined by an Irish detective, Theo Richter (Red Rock’s Richard Flood playing a garda again), sent as a liaison on his final case before taking early retirement from the force, for reasons that have yet to become clear.

Both clearly have demons to exorcise. Richter takes out his anger by banging a sliothar off a wall, while Diana is sleeping in her car, reluctant to enter her family home because of the memories it holds following her mother’s suicide.

Other issues abound. The large corporation Sinéad works for wants to build on sacred Mãori land. Has Sinéad been targeted because of this, or because her mother jailed an Irish gangland kingpin? Is an investigative journalist, clearly modelled on the late Veronica Guerin, part of Richter’s troubled past? Are the disappearances linked to the murder of two tourists years before by a killer known as the Goatman – and is Diana’s uncle the Goatman in question?

There’s a lot to be going on with, but this is classy stuff, making maximum use of stunning locations around Te Ahora, where L ord Of T he R ings was filmed.

With a hint of the supernatural in the mix, the remaining five episodes promise to be unmissable.

Planet Earth III Should come with a trigger warning

The Gone The remaining five episodes promise to be unmissable