CHRISTOPHER STEVENS MY VIEW

Wildlife shows are the pride of our nation, says the Mail critic

When royals and statesmen make official visits abroad, they take with them gifts that reflect their nation’s unique wealth. Prime Minister Theresa May, visiting Beijing earlier this month, gave Chinese president Xi Jinping a box set of Blue Planet II. It was an inspired choice, reflecting Britain’s technical prowess – it relies on camera equipment that didn’t exist five years ago – and our pre-eminence at wildlife film-making.

British wildlife shows are constantly inventing new techniques, discovering new behaviours and delivering stunning images in ultra-high definition. This is the golden era of wildlife docs. Every show does something breathtaking.

On Boxing Day last year, Snow Bears brought us so close to a female polar bear and her two cubs that we could see their breath misting up the lens. The crew, from independent film-makers John Downer Productions, used cameras disguised as rocks, eggs and birds to avoid unsettling the bears. They even built a video recorder into a radio-controlled iceberg, steering it up to a floating whale carcass where bears were feeding.

BBC1’s sumptuous series Big Cats last month introduced us to some of the most adorable wild animals ever filmed, including the rusty spotted cat from Sri Lanka – small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. Crews endured unspeakable conditions: one unit spent weeks in Mongolia’s Gobi desert during storm season watching Pallas’s cats, and in Patagonia a team stalking pumas had their camp washed away by a flash flood. All came back with astonishing video evidence of previously unseen behaviour. The Pallas’s cat had never even been filmed in the wild before.

Cameraman Gordon Buchanan has been trying a different method this month – handing the equipment to the wildlife, in Animals With Cameras. He clipped a recorder with military-grade night-vision around the neck of a meerkat: the device weighed no more than a lightbulb, but revealed for the first time how these sociable creatures share parenting duties underground.

He also looped underwater cameras around the fins of devil rays, showing us for the first time how they dive to freezing depths to feed before returning to the surface to sun themselves. Watching this was like being strapped into a rollercoaster, half a mile under the sea.

No wonder Mrs May presented a box set to the Chinese. No other country comes close to our innovation and brilliance in this field. These documentaries can make us very proud.