READY FOR THE WILDEST RIDE OF YOUR LIFE?

With cutting-edge technology, Planet Earth II brings you face-to-face with the world’s most elusive animals. And presenter Sir David Attenborough says it’s the most thrilling television ever

David in a hot air balloon over the Swiss Alps during filming

Our image of the planet on which we live has changed profoundly over the past few decades. Sixty years ago, almost the only pictures we saw of animals, other than those in our own countryside, were in books. The cinema occasionally showed some, but they were always the familiar ones. Lions, tigers and elephants – maybe. Aardvarks, pangolins and birds of paradise – never.

Television began to change that. The cameras of the time were the size of refrigerators and needed electric power beyond the capabilities of any battery. But then, in the mid-1950s, things began to change. Film cameramen working for television started to use cameras that until then had been for amateurs only – small ones that took 16mm film. It was a blissful time for those of us making natural history programmes. Even in Africa, where many of the animals were so familiar, we could easily find creatures that were quite new to most viewers – porcupines, chameleons and turtles. And if we went to other continents there were all kinds of astonishments – wombats and narwhals, hummingbirds and armadillos, manatees and sloths.

Now, cameras can be powered by batteries so small and long-lasting that they can be taken to the most remote jungle, the highest mountain and the most desolate wilderness, and you can record everything on tiny memory cards. We can even arrange for an unattended camera to be turned on by an animal’s movement or turned off by the protracted absence of it.

We cal led these last devices ‘camera traps’ and for those of us making natural history films it was liberation. I remember 20 years ago, when planning a new series, considering a sequence about the snow leopard. No one had ever filmed this mysterious animal in the wild. We researched it in great detail, but the more we discovered the more improbable it seemed that we could ever film it and eventually we abandoned it.

Ten years ago, the team producing the first Planet Ear th series wer e bolde r. Two highly experienced natural history cameramen took on the job, working patiently for more than two years. In the end one of them secured a memorable shot of a snow leopard stalking, chasing and finally pouncing on a Himalayan goat – which then shook off its attacker and escaped by leaping into a river. For a picture of a hunting snow leopard it was surely unsurpassable. But now new technology has allowed Planet Earth II to go even further. The producers deployed 20 camera traps to try to film the social life of this most solitary of all the big cats. The results are not only thrilling for television viewers, they also revealed aspects of snow leopard behaviour that were new even to the scientists who have been studying them for years. And this is only one of a whole range of astonishments in this new series.

Does all this matter? Has all this technical invention and human endeavour provided us with anything more than a wonderfully watchable and visually unforgettable television series? I believe it does. Since those early days, the human population of this planet has tripled, meaning the space for the other creatures we share it with has become more restricted. Series such as Planet Earth II manage to bring us greater understanding of the natural world, the way it works and what it needs to survive. And its survival could not be more important to us. We depend on the natural world for all the food we eat, for the very air we breathe. Its health is our health. Its survival is essential for ours.