Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
IS THIS THE ZEBRA CROSSING, MUM?
From adolescent elephants to lovelorn baboons, stunning new BBC1 series Serengeti follows the heart-rending family sagas playing out on the African plains
Bakari the baboon is nursing a battered heart. The easy-going male has a passionate crush on his troupe’s alpha female, Subira. She’s the one he looks for when dawn breaks over Africa’s Serengeti plains, the one he yearns to spend every minute with, the one whose long, silky fur he longs to groom. But Subira has turned her back on him to be with the clan’s aggressive new leader.
As First Lady of the baboons, Subira gets special privileges such as morsels of tasty food and extra protection for her newborn baby. Still, she carries a bit of a torch for Bakari too, and allows him to groom her when the alpha male isn’t around. Bakari dreams of doing
something heroic to impress her. And when a leopard comes slinking around the high rock that has been the baboons’ home for generations, he gets his chance.
Most of the other adults are oblivious to the danger. They’re in the meadows at the foot of the rock, feeding on seed heads. Bakari growls and whoops a warning at the leopard, which is now lounging in a tree, and then fearlessly climbs up to challenge it. Irritated, the big cat slopes off. Subira is flattered. She knows her admirer was risking his life to win her favours, and she generously allows him to stroke her fur... at least until the alpha male returns. For a few minutes Bakari is in heaven. His satisfaction glows from his face: there’s no mistaking the look which says, ‘I am thoroughly pleased with myself.’
But Bakari cannot guess how his world is about to be turned upside down. And neither can the camera crew that has been watching these baboons during every hour of daylight for months, and will continue to film them for more than a year, for one of the most emotional and dramatic wildlife series ever made – Serengeti. The show is the brainchild of Spice Girls manager and Pop Idol creator Simon Fuller, who was amazed by the soap operas unfolding in front of him during a safari holiday in Africa. Instead of the ‘ wildlife’ he was expecting to see, every animal seemed to have a different personality, a role to play within its family that dictated its behaviour.
Back at home, he contacted natural history veteran John Downer, the Bristol-based producer whose award-winning documentaries use remote-control cameras, known as spycams, hidden in artificial rocks, eggs and even fake animals to get up close to their subjects without affecting their natural behaviour. ‘I was inspired by Simon’s enthusiasm,’ says John. ‘He’s not a wildlife expert but he’s an expert in stories and TV, and he could see such rich veins of drama. I immediately knew this could be the culmination of everything I have dreamed of doing:
‘Viewers can almost feel the animals’ breath’
showing audiences the incredible storylines that play out unscripted in every animal community.
‘Serengeti has been a labour of love, because the camera technology I have wanted all my life finally exists. Even before we started filming we spent months refining new spycam techniques, shooting from multiple perspectives – at ground level, from the air, on the move, from the viewpoints of different animals, all at the same time. Learning to coordinate it all was exceptionally challenging, but the results are unprecedented. The cameras get so close you can almost feel the animals’ breath on the screen. And because we’re shooting in such high definition, in extreme close-up, the colours are astounding. The heat haze in Africa can so often make colour seem washed out, but not here.’
Producer Phil Dalton, who spent months with the camera crews tracking individual animals and families as they roamed the vast Tanzanian nature reserve, explains how the production relied on a combination of
techniques, both cutting-edge and as old as the hunter-gatherer tribes that once roamed the great African savannah. ‘We used state-of-the-art
camera stabilisers to get unprecedented pictures from moving vehicles,’ he says. ‘The lenses are mounted on vehicles at eye level, and they
can absorb every shock and bounce, even at 40mph. Your teeth are rattling but the picture is rock steady.
‘ But to track the animals, we
relied on old-fashioned fieldcraft. Our guides understood each species so well, it was as though they
could get into their heads and see through their eyes, based on variables such as the weather and the presence of other animals. That meant we didn’t have to fit any wildlife with radio collars: whether it was cheetahs, lions or hyenas, we could find them each morning with 95 per cent certainty, just by learning to think the way they did.’
The six-episode series has drawn on more than 3,000 hours of ultrahigh- definition photography. The job of sifting through all that fell to editor Imogen Pollard, who was the first to spot the extraordinary story of Bakari the beta male baboon. ‘He has just emerged as the show’s star,’ she says. ‘And it’s such an amazing story.’
Indeed it is – and one with a shocking death at its heart. Soon after Bakari’s brave encounter with
the leopard, his beloved but unattainable alpha female Subira is killed by a python. The rest of the troupe gather round her body in horror. Only Bakari sees the real tragedy: her defenceless baby has been left motherless. And so Bakari
scoops up the infant and starts to look after it. He doesn’t have the first idea what he is doing: for the first day he carries it upside down by the ankle. The baby soon learns to cling on to his adoptive dad’s fur, and they become inseparable. The
cameras capture the love and anxiety in Bakari’s eyes, and the exhaustion that quickly sweeps over him as he finds out that being a father to a baboon toddler is no easy task.
As a surrogate mum, Bakari has one serious drawback. He can’t give
his baby milk. And if you want to know how this ingenious, loving animal solves that problem, you’ll have to tune in to the show.