Television
An update on a groundbreaking 2006 series makes full and spectacular use of new technologies.
The nature series that made it to the top of everyone’s list last year – and is still being talked about – has finally arrived. Planet Earth II (Prime, Sunday, 7.30pm) is an update on the groundbreaking series from 2006.
However, as narrator David Attenborough points out, a lot has changed in the 10 years since Planet Earth. “We can show animals in entirely new ways,” he says, referring to the new technologies that allowed film-makers to capture the most extraordinary footage. These include ultra-highdefinition cameras, hidden cameras and remote recording, and drones.
These advances are gaspingly obvious in the first episode, Islands, which includes a swimming pygmy sloth on Isla Escudo near Panama; battling Komodo dragons; lemurs living in the inhospitable spiny forest of Madagascar; and penguins on remote Zavodovski Island that are nearly battered to death exiting and entering the sea.
By contrast, the crested penguins, shearwaters and Buller’s albatrosses of Snares Island, south of New Zealand, look to be having a lovely summer holiday as they arrive for the breeding season.
The most OMG sequence in the episode has also been the subject of a recent “fakery” charge in the UK: baby iguanas on volcanic Fernandina Island in the Galápagos scampering away from racer snakes – and sometimes being caught.
The Mail Online thought that stitching together the chase scene, which went viral last year, was a cheat, but it’s hardly a surprise that nature shows are edited for maximum impact. “Unfortunately lizards, snakes and iguanas aren’t good at ‘takes’,” the episode’s producer wryly commented.
No doubt there will be more remarkable scenes in Mountains, Jungles, Deserts, Grasslands and, in a nod to
the increasing encroachment of humans, Cities.
Planet Earth II was filmed in 40 countries over four years. Forty-two camera operators shot 400 terabytes of footage; remarkably, there was only one injury – a cameraman was stung by a stingray. Remote cameras filmed spraying snow leopards in the Himalayas and grizzly bears rubbing against trees in the Rockies like pole dancers. A small camera was strapped to a trained eagle to capture the speed and swoop of its flight.
But if the first Planet Earth ended with a warning from Attenborough that “we can destroy or we can cherish, the choice is ours”, Planet Earth II comes with a worse one: that “our wildernesses have never been as fragile and as precious”.