You have to work like a dog to capture a big cat on camera

For ALL wildlife telly fans, there’s a surge of anticipation ten minutes before the end of each documentary. We’ve sat mesmerised by the ravishing footage of rare animals and dreamlike locations. Now it’s time for the ‘Making of’, revealing the extraordinary measures taken by camera teams in order to capture those images.

Big Cats (BBC1) ended with an account of the hunt for Himalayan snow leopards. Equipment had to be ferried up some of the most dangerous mountain roads in the world, before the BBC team endured weeks of searching in bone-splintering cold.

Little wonder that, when they finally spotted their big cat, director Anna Place was laughing and sobbing simultaneously — much to the bemusement of the Nepalese trackers.

But when I interviewed the show’s producers late last year, it became plain that every expedition deserves its own mini-diary. Take that brief shot of a puma in Patagonia, galloping down the beach to slaughter a clutch of Magellanic penguins.

The kill was over in a few seconds. For director Nick Easton, though, it was the culmination of a ‘brutal’ assignment: weeks of staking out the coastline, to see something that had never been filmed before. They endured gale-force winds and sandstorms that wrecked their hides, and a flash flood that cut the camp in two.

Worst of all, the pumas knew humans were present and seemed to be mocking them. on their way to the beach, they repeatedly encountered sleek cats that stood and eyed them superciliously. But as soon as the cameras were in place, the animals disappeared.

Another shot that lasted just moments showed a jaguar in the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil, seizing a caiman crocodile and crushing its skull with its jaws. Series producer Mike Gunton revealed that one crew had an all-too-close encounter with that big cat, when it scented them inside their hide and pressed its face against the night-vision lens.

As the cat’s muzzle fills the screen, viewers might suppose the camera is simply zooming in. Not possible, says Gunton: thermal lenses don’t do zoom.

To me, and I’m certainly not alone, these stories are as thrilling as the main footage. Instead of cramming them into a ten-minute featurette, the BBC should devote a full hour to ‘behind the scenes’ stories from every episode.

reality shows do it, after all: Bake off, The Apprentice and Big Brother each have spin-offs. The Beeb’s superlative wildlife films — and Big Cats was outstanding — surely deserve nothing less.

The tales from behind the scenes on a luxury Mediterranean liner on The Cruise (ITV) were rather more banal. They’re a poor advert for these expensive holidays: the majority of the 4,000 guests seemed to spend most of each day queueing to book excursions, then queueing for refunds when bad weather stopped the ship from sailing into dock.

As he prepared to serve up an extra ton-and-a-half of food to all those passengers who were unexpectedly stuck on board, chef David came up with a description that no traveller wants to hear: ‘It’s a train smash, but this is what happens on ships.’

He didn’t mean that as a joke, but it was funnier than Diane the stand-up comedian, who opened her act with a mordant growl to the audience: ‘I know we’re gonna have a good time ’cos there’s no kids in!’

Yikes — that’s less of a gag, more of a threat.

The Cruise is doing for ocean breaks what Benidorm did for the package holiday. At this rate, we’ll all stay at home.