BBC Dynasties interview

Dynasties, a new series narrated by David Attenborough, reveals the power struggles within animal groups. Episode producer NICK LYON tells HELEN GLENNY how 18 months of sleepless nights, undocumented behaviours and Shakespearean drama became an unforgetta

We talk to Nick Lyon, a producer from new BBC series Dynasties, about his experiences of filming – and babysitting – painted wolves.

What’s the painted wolves episode about?

We were looking at a big family that would go through a change of leadership during filming. Tait is our central character. She’s the old matriarch and mother to two neighbouring alphas, Black-Tip and Janet. Black-Tip’s pack had grown very big, and there wasn’t really enough space, so her only option was to turn on her mother and take her throne. It’s a Shakespearian tale of a mother defending herself against her daughter. We were pretty certain that Tait would not survive the film, but we did not know how things were going to pan out, and what happened was unexpected.

How did you capture all of that?

We did 11 trips out to Zimbabwe, filming for 585 days in total in Mana Pools National Park. Usually on these filming shoots you have quite a steep learning curve, so you find your rate of acquisition of useful shots peaks towards the end, and then you go to a different location and a new story and you have to start that learning curve again. The brilliant thing about this is that we could build on that learning curve every time we came back, so we weren’t always starting from square one.

Were you always confident you’d get the footage you needed?

There were times when we thought we weren’t going to pull this off. My second shoot on Dynasties was incredibly tough. It was one-month long, we had 16-hour days every day, and we spent a total of two hours with our subjects.

Over the course of the whole month?!

Yeah. It’s funny, because it’s tiring when you’re filming, but when you find the animals, it’s enough to keep you going. You can live off adrenaline and fumes for a while, even if you’re kind of empty in the tank.

But when you don’t find them, you’re getting up at 3am knowing that you’re going to be driving all day looking for tracks. So you have to pretend to yourself that you’ll find them, even though you know you didn’t see them yesterday or the day before. That’s when it can get gruelling.

We pushed through that, but the third shoot was by no means a certainty. Tait 2