ANTARCTIC
Prepare for epic tales of bloody battles, bravery, heroism and heartbreak as Dynasties, the BBC’s new natural history series, tells the story of five species being driven to the brink of extinction.
Narrator Sir David Attenborough says behind the tales of chimps, lions, tigers, painted wolves and penguins there is an environmental message just as serious as the one delivered by Blue Planet II.
Put simply, humans are endangering the very existence of these species more than ever before.
Sir David, 92, tells me: “The population of the world has to be aware of this and to believe it. Our job, as programmemakers, is to make it apparent.
“Or, as Ibsen once said, ‘My job as a playwright is not to produce the answers to the problems, but to make it so important so as you cannot ignore it’.
“Most of the time we’re not explicit about it – it is implicit in what we show. We can’t be accused of being doomsayers and continually going on about it, but it’s implicit in the truth.”
He says there is plenty we can do to try to improve things, such as joining the World Wildlife Fund and consuming less of everything.
He says: “Lots of things can be done – on a personal level, on a governmental level, on a national level.
“It has to be lots of things because there is no one answer. But if you believe in democracy, you will believe that people have to be informed about what the thing is and then make up their minds
– which is back to Ibsen.”
The first Dynasties shows a colony of chimps struggling to exist on the edge of the Sahara. They’ve been driven to the outskirts of the jungle by the gold rush in Senegal, which has brought many more people to the area.
Later in the series, the Marsh pride of lions in Kenya’s Masai Mara suffer terrible losses at the hands of farmers who illegally set out to kill them, using poisoned meat, to protect the cattle they have chosen to graze in lion territory.
Abandoned by the male lions, matriarch Charm struggles to keep the pride alive and the poisoning is catastrophic.
Cameraman John Aitchison is bereft. He says: “If one animal represents the African wilderness, it is lions – and if this is happening to lions in the most protected place in the world, where they are watched by more people than anywhere else, they are simply doomed.”
The painted wolves episode also tells a painful story of a mother and daughter at loggerheads as there is not enough food for their two packs in their territory on Zimbabwe’s floodplains. Hemmed in by humans, they find themselves pitched into battle against one another.
Sir David says: “When you think of the range of this series, going from the South Pole to west Africa, the common worry is space. We have to allow animals space.