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The Wussification of Planet Earth
Did you catch BBC Television's Planet Earth last night? As ever the cinematography was as wonder to behold - if a little obviously framed to be a marketing tool for high-definition television. The film makers once again managed to magically film events hitherto unseen by the human eye proving the BBC is at the fore-front of natural history documentary making.
Yet there's something very odd about Planet Earth. Where's the blood and guts?
Look, I'm not asking for the wildlife equivalent of a snuff movie, but nature is a rough and tumble mistress. Animals hunt, kill and eat each other. However you'll see precious little of the second one of this activities in Planet Earth. Some of the footage of animals on the hunt is really stunning, such as watching an aerial view of an Arctic wolf chase a young gazelle.
But have you noticed that in most cases in this otherwise excellent series either tends to move to another subject just before the moment of the kill, or cuts directly the final morsels of the meal being consumed? Could it be that the BBC is sanitising nature in an effort to make it a happy, cuddly and ratings-friendly subject for Sunday evening television?
It's bad enough that nature programs are scripted these days, with a story being told using wildlife footage combined with other camera work in captivity such as internal nest footage. The appalling lack of science in the standard Walking With Dinosaurs narration seems to have pervaded real natural history programming these days.
And now it looks like the harder side of nature is being glossed over by the BBC's wildlife programming. This comes as something of a shock as the corporation's natural history output is usually peerless.
Let's take a look at a few examples. Last week the Arctic and Antarctic episode showed a hunt for oxen, which ended with the wolves not having to chase the heard as a young ox had gotten lost from the rest of the creatures. The section ended with a wolf howl and not the wolves successfully hunting down this creature.
Last night's episode on the great planes was equally sanitised. On several occasions we saw either the kill at a very long distance - not even of worth to those watching in HD - or not at all. It was amazing to see lions attacking an Elephant, but as even in this series the footage skipped from the middle of the chase to indistinct footage of lions eating something.
Perhaps this is down to employing wusses on the film crew. Last night's Planet Earth Diaries showed a cameraman rather distraught at having filmed the lion vs. elephant sequence. This isn't exactly what one would expect from someone employed to visually document nature in all its beauty and barbarity.
Time and time again last night the brutality of nature was avoided. It felt like the editor was continually looking away when anything nasty might happen. I'm sure the BBC might counter with the idea that Planet Earth is being made for a family audience and therefore shouldn't show blood and gore.
Do you want your kids so badly educated that they have no idea of the realities of natural history? I grew up watching excellent BBC shows such as Life on Earth and The Living Planet. Who could forget watching killer whales hunting throwing themselves onto beaches to capture seals on The Trials of Life? Would the BBC not include such footage in Planet Earth? Would it shy away from showing the orcas cruelly playing with their food? I think so.
The surprise is that the BBC actually thinks that what is being shown in Planet Earth is rather brutal. Executive Producer Alastair Fothergill has called for the BBC to broadcast a warning about the show's content before some episodes of the show. Yet he readily admits that the show is showing the true nature of...well...nature.
"The thing is, we have to tread a fine line between showing nature as it really is and not offending the sensibilities of viewers," he told The Radio Times. "I thinks it's an enormous mistake to try and sanitise nature, but I can assure you there's plenty of footage that we shan't be showing."
Anyone get a mixed message from this. He says it is wrong to sanitise nature but there's plenty of footage not being shown. Seems to me that the show is being sanitised, Planet Earth is certainly less bloody than any of the major natural history programmes narrated by Sir David Attenborough.
Planet Earth in many ways is a triumph. Much of the photography is amazing. But there's precious little science in it. We get to see some sad events and some violence, but nature has been tamed, for all the harsh scenes of unhappy polar bears, there's the many sequences that are too cute given their subject matter.
Last night's episode saw an Arctic fox with a baby duck in its jaws. One might have expected the sequence to be bloody and perhaps even upsetting. Instead the chick happily chirped away in the jaws of the fox as though it spent every day leaping into the jaws of predators because it found their jaws a comfy place for a snooze. No we didn't get to see what happened to the chick next.
When our children are old enough to be watching wildlife programmes we'll have to invest in DVDs of the classic series of the 1970s and 1980s, because the current crop of shows present a distorted and cuddly view of nature that is too unrealistic to provide any educational worth.
Just as the BBC flagship science programme Horizon is now a sad spectacle of out-of-focus re-enactments and little science, the BBC Natural History Unit is now providing wildlife documentaries without the realities of nature.
This entry was posted on November 13th, 2006 at 17:02 by Harry and is filed under Science & Nature, Television.
9 comments
I think that Planet Earth's doing a great job of demonstrating the atrocities that the human race are carrying out to this planet whilst actually demonstrating the scale of certain things. Showing blood guts and gore doesn't tell me anything about the state of a particular species or area of the globe but showing huge wide angle shots of polar bears having to swim ever further to find food or groups of penguins dropping and freezing to death does. As the tags said, this is Planet Earth as you've NOT seen it before. ;-)
They could have given the polar bear food. But it wasn't cute.
On the whole though, I think they're doing a good job of showing the bigger picture. Leave the violence for "the life of mammals" or such like - this is a documentary about the planet as a whole
If they just wanted to show that big picture they needn't film these events at all. Instead they are being filmed, but elements seem to be left out for cuddly purposes, as the producer pretty much admitted.
There doesn't have to be blood, guts and gore in the show. It helps people fall in love with this planet without showing all the gruesome stuff.
Second, In defense of the cameramen and with respect to the hungry male polar bear, they were very much in danger. I would imagine that immobile foreign mammals who clearly have warmth and food are excellent targets. To feed a hungry male polar bear is an extremely bad idea. I hope that the two cameramen didn't have to shoot the thing, though. Never feed bears unless you're running and have a steak in your hand. Secondly, don't run from bears , they'll catch you!)
As for the series choosing not to show too many animal insides, that can be expected, considering that they have a world market to satisfy, and in the future what is to hold them back from releasing otherwise unseen footage of blood and guts for a less family oriented television show. I assure you they're making their money's worth in the end. In the meantime, I could watch the Planet Earth series next to my little second cousins, my parents and my grandparents with nobody thinking twice about gore or even bringing it up. I think they made the right move.
Lastly, would I prefer a bit more blood and guts? Sure! I'd like to see the reality and not just the heartwarming, but I think that the BBC has done an excellent job with the series, and stand by it.
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