In the opening sequences of the new BBC wildlife series Dynasties, there’s a startling close-up of David staring straight in your eyes. No, not David Attenborough, but David the leader of a group of chimpanzees in Senegal, west Africa. It’s more like a scene from Planet of the Apes than a wildlife documentary, and that’s part of the plan.
The makers of wildlife documentaries have long tried to captivate audiences by telling the stories of the animals they show, but this isn’t easy if you can only afford to spend a few days filming. That’s forced many film-makers to resort to questionable tricks, such as .
Two years of watching
The executive producer of Dynasties, Mike Gunton, decided to take the opposite approach: to follow the same animals for two years, so their stories could be told with no need for fabrication.
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“When Mike first talked to me about it I said, ‘You’re mad. In two years you can’t know for sure that something will happen. You have got to be there when it does. At the end of it, what if nothing happens? That’s a huge financial investment.’ But it happened. Extraordinarily interesting things happened in all five locations that they chose,” .
The first episode starts off following David (whom one suspects was named after the other David) as the chimps search for food in the dry season. At this point, David has already led the group for three years, longer than most males manage, and several younger males are starting to challenge his dominance.
Game of Thrones?
It is when a female comes into oestrus, though, that things really kick off. There will be no spoilers in this review, but let’s just say it is a bit a like Game of Thrones, where really horrible and brutal things happen to the heroes. It is painful watching at times, but gripping.
“[These programmes] are a new form of filmmaking, and a new form of wildlife filmmaking,” . That’s a big claim but based on the first episode, there is some justification. My 11-year-old son, who has watched many an Attenborough programme, certainly noticed a difference. “It’s like a film,” he said unprompted.
From penguins to tigers
The next four episodes will follow emperor penguins in Antarctica, lions in the Masai Mara, African wild dogs in Zimbabwe and tigers in India.
Apparently, the tiger episode does show the conflict between animals and people, but the destruction of the chimps’ territory by gold miners gets mentioned only in the last part of the behind-the-scenes part at the end of the first episode, which won’t be shown in some countries.
Failing the world
This has led to controversy. Writer and activist he loves by not telling viewers the truth about what’s happening to it.
Has he? I have no doubt that Attenborough is right when he says that banging on about the dire situation most wildlife is in is a turn-off for viewers. Personally, I have no masochistic desire to watch doom-and-gloom programmes – it’s depressing enough writing about these issues.
I suspect that if we could go back in time and rerun history with added activism from Attenborough, the result would be that his programmes would have been far less successful and popular, and the natural world would be no better off.
Plastic planet
Yes, Attenborough’s mention of plastic in the Blue Planet II sparked some discussion. But plastic is really very far down the list of threats to wildlife compared with, say, habitat destruction or climate change, and some of the proposed solutions would actually make things worse.
Monbiot is right when he says we remain astonishingly ignorant about what is happening to wildlife. But it seems unfair to blame wildlife film-makers. I think the fundamental reason is that this is a story no one wants to know about. It just doesn’t have the same mass appeal as watching David (the chimp) battle for survival.
Dynasties begins at 8.30 pm on Sunday 11 November, BBC1
