David Attenborough and the new wildlife film

Last week I watched the third and last of the Great One's latest documentary series called Flight (Sky 1). There wasn't much new in it in terms of information we have already seen in numerous documentaries in the past, notably Life on Earth and The Living Planet. We have had high speed cameras for a long time which have unlocked the secrets of flight in insects and birds; we have got up close and personal with birds in flight, courtesy of the  questionable (to some) practice of imprinting birds on human beings by denying them the benefit of their natural parents at birth. These birds will then follow their human "parents" slavishly wherever they go, enabling cameramen to get as close as they like while the birds in question are on the wing.


All these techniques were deployed by the very high budget team from Sky. And more. For example, wishing to depict a peregrine falcon taking a starling on the wing high above the cupolas of Florence, The camera team first used a "peregrine wrangler" to get his bird to dive on a lure and go into its classic swept-back "stoop", then to deploy a "starling wrangler" to work with a small flock of trained starlings against a green-screen. They then graphiced the various bits of footage against a backdrop of Florence and hey presto! there was the scene in its all its glory, looking exactly as if some magical camera had indeed been high above the river Arno recording events faithfully.


David recently landed himself in hot water when it emerged that a scene involving polar bears caring for their young in a snow-cave in the Arctic were in fact filmed in a zoo in Amsterdam. You may think this is acceptable within the limits of making a film which is watchable for the general public; you may think the techniques I have described above equally acceptable and for the same reasons. For me, I still haven't decided, though what we must accept is that wildlife films have changed, and that they do not necessarily represent unvarnished truth and reality. But what we must accept is that things have thankfully moved on, ethically speaking, since the 1940s. Have you heard of Armand and Michaela Denis? They were the brave forerunners of Attenborough and his ilk, filming lions hunting in the Serengeti, hyena chasing down distressed wildebeest etc, but they were not above a bit of artifice themselves. On one occasion they were filming a Pygmy tribe in the heart of the great tropical jungle of the Congo Basin, and showed them building a rope bridge across a raging torrent. Only problem: they had never in their entire history built any rope bridge of any kind. In fact they were shown how to do it by the film makers, who then presented as it an example of the Pygmy's indigenous ingenuity. Now that's just plain wrong. I'm sure Saint David would never do anything like that. Would he?