Primate time viewing:

The behaviour of animals, with which we have so much in common, makes for fascinating television. But there is a darker side, too.

A new documentary takes a look at our closest relatives.

Primates are the closest living relatives of humans, and perhaps closer than many people think.

Chimps, for example, use nine different tools made mostly from sticks and stones, while bearded capuchins use six to hunt lizards and crack open nuts among other things, something they have been doing for at least 3000 years.

Blue-eyed black lemurs have been observed anointing themselves with acid from carpenter ants, which scientists believe they use as an insect repellent.

Silverback mountain gorillas are commonly thought of as the ultimate alpha male, but they are caring fathers, too, showing a gentle, affectionate side to their offspring, even when they’re naughty.

The abilities of some primates leave us standing – literally.

South Africa’s bush babies use the elastic tendons in their legs to propel themselves 10 times their body length – a 20-metre long jump, anyone? And lars gibbons make Tarzan look positively pedestrian as they swing through the jungle at close on 60km/h with single leaps as long as 17 metres.

A BBC natural history show called Primates celebrates these special animals and highlights the dangers they are facing.

It is the latest project from BBC executive producer Mike Gunton. He has worked on more than 20 natural history shows since 1990, including 2016’s Planet Earth II, hosted by Sir David Attenborough.

“Primates is the ultimate, definitive celebration of our very own animal family,” says Gunton.

“It follows on from the very successful series Big Cats and Shark we made for BBC One over the last few years. Like those series, Primates is designed to be a high-impact, entertaining treat.

“The shows are a little more fast-paced than the BBC One Planet landmarks with a signature style using more contemporary music and narration. We also try to bring novel photography to bring new perspectives – for example the 360-degree camera we used with gibbons swinging through the trees.

“The series is global, exploring as many habitats as possible to give the sense of diversity of these amazing animals – and there are a lot of them, more than 300 species,” adds Gunton.

“We ended up mixing the famous stars like gorillas, baboons or orangutans where we looked for new surprising angles on their lives, with many less well-known species – the oddities and the rarities like bald-headed white uakari or some of the lemurs, which are full of surprises in their own right.”

Over the course of two years, the Primates team embarked on 28 filming expeditions across the world. They battled snowstorms in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and forded or floated through flooded jungles in remote corners of Sumatra and Brazil.

TV personality and conservationist Chris Packham presents the three-part series.

“If you ask people about primates, they’ll talk about apes and monkeys. They’ll talk particularly about gorillas, chimpanzees, orangs’ and so on ... the big flashy ‘T-shirt’ animals as I call them, things people easily engage with.

“I like the way the series covers the whole breadth of the primate family. They’ve got everything including the lemurs, the slow loris, the bush babies, spider monkeys and the gibbons to mention a few. There’s a great breadth there that

I think will open people’s eyes to this really important group of animals which are, as programme three tells us, critically endangered in many cases.”

In fact, some 60 per cent of all primates are under threat, with 75 per cent of species in decline.

There are only 800 Tapanuli orangutan in existence – the Primates crew met one per cent of them during a trek through the Sumatran jungle.

And the show reveals that in the Democratic Republic Of The Congo, 180 rangers have died in the Virunga National Park trying to protect endangered mountain gorillas from poachers.

Packham says that primates are a remarkable group of animals.

“We’re still learning and there’s so much more to learn which makes them exciting. Very beautiful, very similar to us and, therefore, easy to engage with – but collectively a group of animals that, just like ourselves, are in big trouble.

“But the big trouble from their point of view is down to us. “I think this is a series which has to leave us with one or two questions about ourselves. We are a primate, we are part of this group of species and the way we behave at this point in time will determine all of our futures.”

“We are part of this group of species and the way we behave at this point in time will determine all of our futures.” – Chris Packham