The Living Planet (1984) s01e13 Episode Script

These highlights from The Living Planet make it look easy to film nature, but it's not.
It's a tricky business, because polar bears would like to eat cameramen.
Nature doesn't know when it's meant to be collaborating.
Whales lead a private life, to which film-makers are not invited.
And birds just don't see any point in flying alongside a car full of cameras.
So the makers had to use all their cunning and perseverance in order to play nature at its own game.
This is the story of how it was done, how things went wrong but most, eventually, came right.
But, as any fox will tell you, it's to Bristol we must go first.
Foxes now flock to Bristol from all over the country, hoping to be given their own TV show, and it's inside this unlikely building that we shall find the man behind it all.
Or, rather, in front of it all.
One thing that distinguishes men from other living creatures is that only men make films about other living creatures.
Perhaps one of the most famous and interesting is the species known as David Attenborough.
Somewhat shy, and not always easy to film in his habitat, we're lucky here to see the David Attenborough at work on his latest project, The Living Planet.
His mission: To search out and photograph everything from volcanoes to jellyfish to explain how the earth works.
Now, for this, his habitat is totally useless.
In London and Bristol there are no volcanoes and no jellyfish, so he has to travel thousands of miles to search out his prey.
He has boundless curiosity and endless energy.
He doesn't have the vast quantity of money and expertise that only the BBC can offer.
He enjoys a rather strange symbiotic relationship with the BBC, an odd and apparently friendly organism, whose workings we do not yet fully understand.
The idea was to show how nature adapts to different environments, so their firstjob was to adapt David Attenborough by buying him clothes: Rainforest clothes to keep him dry where it's always wet, and, of course, a new set of khaki shorts and shirts, for places where it's boiling hot.
You can go and film a desert any time, but other things are trickier.
They had to wait two years to film a volcano, and when news came that it had erupted, they had to drop everything and rush off, hoping it would still be alight when they got there.
It seems that there's a danger with nature films that they come over so professional, things happen on cue so much, people may get a false impression of what nature is like.
Yes, and that, in a sense, is the artifice of making films.
All writing and all film-making and all recording is artificial, because you are trying to give the viewer, through artifice, the impression that the camera is not there, and you're continually pretending that You and I sitting here are surrounded by recordists, cameramen and all kinds of people.
But we are pretending they aren't there, because we're talking about what we were talking about.
If you have slightly interfered with nature, nature has interfered with you.
What sort of difficulties do you get? What are the most amusing moments you remember? They are the difficulties, really.
The difficulties are not actually experienced by me, because the bits that I do are the easiest bits.
It's not too difficult to sit on a rock and answer questions, or to walk onto a rock, look at a camera and say something.
The difficulties are encountered by the cameramen, directors and recordists, who have to get an animal doing something which perhaps nobody's even seen before.
Those are extremely difficult things to do.
Before you even try that, you have to get there.
The most interesting environments are the furthest from public transport.
If they want to film in the Himalayas, they have to do a lot of walking.
One Sherpa has been on so many film trips, his mates call him Sherpa BBC.
Those two going the other way are probably ITV Sherpas.
In Algeria, where they had to walk for several days to find some cave paintings, there are no Sherpas, but there are mules.
The man with the big rucksack is a junior producer.
The man with the small rucksack is a senior producer.
Film crews, like everything else in nature, have pecking orders.
South America has something you don't find in the desert: Navigable rivers.
I think rivers are the environment that natural history film crews like best.
If there's only enough room for the cameraman or his equipment but not both, it's the cameraman who has to get out and push.
These natives have an old legend which says that one day their god will come back to them, and he will be pushing a dinghy across the river.
When he gets out, he will approach them and say the magic words, "Hello, I'm Hugh Maynard from the BBC.
Have you seen a film crew anywhere?" They hadn't seen a film crew.
And nor had David Attenborough, off the Peruvian coast, where we find him not only doing his own stunt work but taking care of the equipment too.
Pull real hard.
Then you push this down and when you don't want that it moves, you just lift your hand.
- And that's the brake.
- What's this one? That's the other brake.
Go.
In Lapland, it takes only half a minute's driving lesson to learn to master a skidoo.
This is a kind of motorised bobsleigh which everyone in the film crew can master, with the exception of David Attenborough, who travels chauffeur-driven.
But then he hasn't got a driving licence.
The most ambitious trip was to the remote part of the Sudan, where the main runway was nibbled flatjust in time.
There was no way of getting here than by plane.
There are simply no roads.
If you did try to drive across country, you'd hit floods.
The crew is here.
The plane is bringing supplies because they're in for a long wait.
They've come to film the elusive antelope known as the white-eared kob.
Not a lot is known about the kob.
It's highly prized by David Attenborough for filming and highly prized by the locals for cooking.
The kob will probably, sooner or later, converge on this river at this crossing point.
But the crew may be taking a huge gamble to come here and go away with no more than a shot of a Land Rover.
In nature films, nature always appears dead on cue.
In real life, it comes into sight when it feels like it, so the crew has to be on duty every day.
Meanwhile, they just sit and wait.
Film crews are very good at waiting because they practise all the time, in airport lounges, customs areas, and planes with rotten movies.
I have now learnt not to tell a natural history film-maker what an exciting life he must lead.
And so have the locals.
Being adaptable, David Attenborough doesn'tjust travel along.
He also travels upwards.
As he's heavier than air, he needs the help of a tree and he also needs something that looks like a parachute harness without a parachute.
The locals have never seen anything like this before.
They probably never will again.
Back in the Sudan, no sign of the kob, so we've time to look at a balloon.
David Attenborough is going to see what the sky looks like when you're looking down on it, which gives us the chance to see what his ecosystem is like crushed into a little space.
Into a large laundry basket, they have to squash two cameramen, the sound man, the man with the sandwiches and Attenborough himself, and the pilot too.
But all these people and all this equipment are vital to give us the notion that Attenborough is up there all by himself.
In the Sudan, the kob have finally been sighted, coming in this direction.
Cameraman Hugh Maynard is up before the sun, as usual.
The hunters are waiting too for breakfast.
At the top of the transport scale, a plane which can simulate zero gravity.
NASA lent it to The Living Planet for the programme about life in the skies.
Zero gravity can only be simulated when the plane is diving near vertically, so there's no furniture, and it's also why the plane is known in the trade, I'm afraid, as the "vomit comet".
Sensitive viewers may like to be reassured that there is nothing distasteful in these scenes.
Some creatures have managed to overcome the forces of gravity so well that they've managed to launch themselves into the air and so fly.
Conditions are not good today and the team is having difficulty keeping its footing, but this does make for thrilling moments, so let's see again the controversial incident when Martin Saunders was dropped at second slip by David Attenborough.
But this is what Martin chose to go off in when he wanted to film whales coming up to feed.
On a ship, you don't know exactly where that's going to happen, so the rigging was a problem.
Every time you move the camera, you've got rope ladders or ropes in the shot.
So we actually filmed it sat on the end of the bow spread, and it gave a 180-degree angle of view, so you could immediately swing and get the camera pointing in the right direction.
We had a week to do it and on the next to last day we found the whales.
Fortunately, it was in an ideal situation, because the sea was mirror-calm.
There is a problem seeing things underwater and trying to show something that's happening underwater from above the surface.
You could see the ring of bubbles and also the panic of the fish, which boiled on the surface to try and get out of the way of this huge mouth coming at them.
So there's this boiling effect on the surface and the whale comes through the middle of it.
The troubles don't stop once you get there.
You've then got to get the best picture, or any picture at all.
If it's something that rarely happens, like a flash flood in the desert, you have to find out when it's likely to come, where it's going to run, and find a place to stand.
After that, it's luck.
If it happens, you film it.
If it doesn't, you can't, and nobody will believe you when you say that rivers do run through the desert.
In the rainforest, it's always wet.
Easy to film, you might think, but ask this simple question.
How would you get a moving shot of the forest like this? You tie yourself to a rope and throw yourself off the highest tree, making sure first you have a friend tied to the other end.
When he's at the top, ask him to throw himself off, so you can go up filming.
The only snag is that at the end of filming, one of you is stuck at the top of a tree.
And you might find yourself asked to get as close as possible to the biggest lizards in the world, the Komodo dragons.
Enter Martin Saunders, again, somewhat tentatively.
This is what it looks like from up here, but what does it look like from where Martin is? Actually, the Komodo dragons are not quite as fierce as they look.
Polar bears, on the other hand, look furry and cuddly, and kill quite a few people every year.
They can run, climb and swim faster than a man, so it's sensible not to get within spitting distance, unlike this seal.
So, how would you get close enough to get pictures like these, remembering that a polar bear is always hungry, you look like food, and he never bothers to say grace before he eats? In Canada, scientists have discovered a place for observing polar bears, a cliff top, from where they can look down on where the bears live.
The bears can look up at the scientists, hoping one will venture down and become supper.
This is called ecology.
The scientists have even constructed a lavatory with a door containing a bear-shaped hole, so one cameraman can sit in comfort and safety while the rest form a queue outside.
But Hugh Miles, the BBC cameraman, has a problem.
His zoom lens can turn a distant dot into a recognisable polar bear, and coming this way.
But it's not close enough to satisfy him, so what does he do? He goes to the bottom of the cliff, till the bear is only 25 yards away, and then he unscrews his flask of hot soup, which the bear smells.
If the bear hadn't got somewhere to go, our film would turn into a tribute to the late Hugh Miles.
A more restful job for Hugh was standing motionless hour after hour, day after day, in a reed bed in Yugoslavia, filming the elusive little bittern from his hide.
The main snag, apart from leeches, was that when a bittern sees a camera, he goes behind a reed stem.
So you turn to the young, which has not yet acquired this knack.
But it does seem to be learning quite fast.
Neil Rettig's problem was to find out how to film a rhea, a bird like an ostrich.
His solution: To build a portable hide looking like an ostrich.
Here he is modelling the scaffolding.
And here is the rhea, unless, of course, it's Neil in disguise.
And here is the crowd that gathers whenever filming's taking place anywhere in the world.
The message is obvious: Why film a stupid bird like a rhea when you can film a dozen handsome pieces of beefcake like us? If you try to film the rhea's nest, the message is: Why bother with eggs when you've got a handsome armadillo willing to stride through them? The armadillo doesn't realize that natural history film-makers aren't interested in nature, only in the bit they're trying to film.
The strange creature with a snout like an Italian handbag is an anteater.
The strange creature with a snout like a mine detector is a human being, Dickie Bird, who's a sound recordist.
Together they're engaged in the strange ritual dance called "getting some background noise".
Ants are easier meat.
They pay no attention to you and they carry on as if they ruled the world, which perhaps they do.
Filming termites and ants above ground isn't too bad, but below ground it gets harder.
In South America, the grass-cutting ant makes colonies which take up to 15 or 20 million ants, but not a cameraman, so they brought the ants from South America here, and put them in this, which looks like a French horn made by Henry Moore while drunk.
They put them down the inside, which is like an ant tunnel, and followed them with an endoscope, a lens you put down people to see what their supper looks like just after they've eaten it.
More trouble was taken over these goslings than any other creature in The Living Planet.
From birth, they were destined to grow up and be in it.
They are red-breasted geese, and their mother is a goose.
But they think their mother is Mrs Rose Eastman.
They think she's just a pair of red gumboots.
If these geese go on growing up with their human Mother Goose, identifying with her voice, there's a chance that they will sooner or later fly after her, and yield dramatic pictures of flight.
She takes them for walks with her voice, now on a cassette, but soon available on LP and single.
The next step was to put Mrs Eastman on a bicycle and see if the birds followed.
All this proved was that flying's a much quicker way of travelling than bicycling.
Then it was the final crucial stage in which Mother is put in a car, sticking up out of the top like the queen, together with a cameraman.
There's more to The Living Planet than just wildlife and exotic locations.
Here in sun-drenched Borehamwood lives the globe featured in every episode.
But even filming a globe is no picnic.
For a start, you have to carry it in without dropping it.
Is this really the best of all possible worlds? If you were in a satellite, would the earth look like this? No, you wouldn't really be able to see much of the land mass at all.
It would be all cloud and sea.
If you could see through clouds, it would look pretty much like this.
We've accentuated the colouring, like the green of the forests, so they stand out.
But obviously there would be some cloud over the earth, so we've devised another globe.
What we do is we film this globe first and then this globe afterwards, and the white areas here come out as cloud on our base globe.
Filming the globe turning is like walking round Britain wearing slippers: Very slow, very boring.
To turn the globe completely once, you turn that handle 5,000 times and let the camera click over once with each turn.
In other words, it turns far slower than the real thing.
And people wonder why TV programmes take so long to make.
A problem arose with the filming of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean: It can't be done.
Even if you could get deep enough, it would be too dark.
So The Living Planet built its own seabed, with materials imported from the real ocean floor and real mountains at the bottom of the Pacific.
Tricks seem less impressive when explained, and as you watch the camera swing through the mountains, it looks a bit pointless, until you see the actual film taken, as we will in a minute, when we've added the music.
Maida Vale, once a roller-skating rink and now the habitat of the BBC radiophonic workshop.
Here they've been wrestling with the problem of what nature sounds like.
It doesn't make a lot of noise at all, so they've asked composer Elizabeth Parker to invent sound to go with 12 hours of nature.
They keep her locked up in one of these little cells.
Liz Parker is an electronic composer.
I think this means she has to be plugged in.
I find it very hard to believe that there's enough resources to produce music for 12 programmes.
I don't even see a musical instrument around.
So what have you got here? My most basic piece of equipment is the synthesiser.
I've got three of those.
They provide the basis for the music.
I have devices through which I can manipulate sounds off the synthesizer or natural sounds.
For example, the harmoniser is one of them.
If we take a simple sound like that sort of sound.
If we put it through the harmoniser, sometimes called the fairy dust machine It gives quite a pretty effect.
There.
Going a bit high.
And then if we add a bit of flutter echo, that's another very simple way of manipulating the sound.
I've also got a vocoder, which is something I can sing into and play at the same time, and the resulting sound is a combination of voice and instrumental sound, which I've used fairly extensively throughout the 12 programmes.
And a phase shifter, which um If you can imagine a sound as a piece of ribbon, it kind of turns the sound round and makes it move up and down.
No, I can't imagine.
Then, of course, I have all the natural sounds that I've used extensively.
- The bottles? - Even the bottles, yes.
What I do with those is to process them through a computer here.
And the computer puts them back onto the synthesiser as a natural sound.
If I just call up this particular sound.
There That's got a harmoniser as well.
That is the sound of me blowing across a bottle, and you can see it becomes a musical instrument.
One can do the same with the bells, that bell up there.
One can do it with scratching mikes, paper, glass, anything.
That adds enormously to your range.
You give the computer one note and it can deduce all the other notes? Here we're going along the ocean bed and looking at these mountains at the bottom of the ocean, and the music is trying to convey that feeling of mysteriousness and beauty and strangeness.
This is the same dusty studio floor we were looking atjust now.
So much for big effects.
But what about music for tiny things? A particular example I can think of was the leafy sea dragon.
I actually used a couple of combs to create a sound.
It has little fins that waggle around while it's underwater, and although they don't as such make a noise, I created a sound for them using these combs.
This is a weedy sea dragon.
It's beautiful, but you didn't see it in The Living Planet.
They already had the picturesque leafy sea dragon, and apparently there's only room for one sea dragon in any nature film.
I'd like to pay my own tribute to the things that didn't make the big time.
The potoo, which showed no desire to go into showbiz and looked like Frank Sinatra smiling for the press.
It even tried to bite the cameraman.
The lowly lichen which, although speeded up, still wasn't glamorous enough at the auditions.
The Rocky Mountain goat, filmed to show off its hairy protection against the snow, but was ruthlessly dropped from the production because there was no snow.
The snow was all up in the Rocky Mountains.
The prairie chicken, adapted for running on the green, grassy prairie, given the chop because of too much snow, so that it looked like a kind of Kentucky frozen chicken.
The ghost crab.
The only thing it did wrong was to run away to sea, and the only reason it did that is that it was being chased by a man with a camera.
The owls in the Arizona cactus.
They weren't allowed into the desert sequence.
That was switched to the Middle East, and there are no cacti there, so no owls.
I feel sorry for the beautiful butterfly taking off in slow motion, dropped because the cameraman hadn't focused the camera.
Nobody ever drops the cameraman.
They keep everything he does.
The cameraman is afraid of only one life form: The editors.
The pack leader of the editors is Andrew Naylor.
You've been locked away in a cutting room in Bristol while the cameramen are having a great time abroad and sending back their film to you.
- About 100 hours' worth? - Even more than that.
That's film you're not using, which suggests you're looking for something that's not there.
What are you looking for? Unlike drama filming, where the shots are tailor-made to fit a script, animals can't read a script, so I rely heavily on the cameraman to give me enough coverage of an animal, 25 times as much film as I need, in order that I can find shots in there that will cut together to produce a nice smooth flow.
Sometimes they just haven't done the stuff.
You can't send them back to the rainforest.
They have problems, and that's what makes my job interesting, sorting out problems.
We do have ways of doing that.
Unlike the cameraman's job, where his results are shown on the screen, you shouldn't really see what I've done.
The results should be nice and smooth and easy to watch.
What bit of nature have you got on the screen today? You might recognise this one.
During the 12 hours, you were seen quite a lot, front, back, side, but never once smiling, which gave the impression that nature's serious, but is making nature programmes serious? Well, the fact is, there are a lot of laughs, particularly when it goes wrong.
Whether we should actually make a film I don't know what kind of film you're making.
A lot of things make us fall about laughing.
There is some life actually within this snowfield itself, because this snow is not white And this is perhaps the most extremely adapted of all New Zealand's island-living forms.
This is the kakapo.
What David doesn't realize is that nature may be starting to adapt to him.
Watch this kakapo listening carefully to David.
Above all, watch what it does when David says the words "sit still".
It has lost its powers of flight.
Indeed, its only defence is to sit still, which is how I can approach it so closely here.
The second feature it has is that it is a giant.
Like so many other island-living animals, it's very big of its kind.
It's the biggest of all parrots.
Or look at this animal, a male black sable.
It presents its profile to the camera and back again.
As soon as it's sure it's being filmed, it goes behind a bush, or into its dressing room, and does a lightning-quick-change act, and, with a great theatrical flair, comes out again as a brown female sable.
Even a supposedly remote and deserted river in South America can play up to Attenborough.
It's bigger, it's broader and its waters contain not only sand and gravel, but are rich with nutrients that have washed in from the vegetation that covers its banks.
After it's crossed its last patch of rapids and tumbled over its last fall, it becomes a very different river indeed.
Every wave of every tide stirs the surface of the sand, so it's virtually impossible for plants to get a hold of it as they can on a rocky shore or a mudflat.
And, as a consequence, a sandy beach seems to be about as lifeless as any part of the margins of the sand.
I'm sorry.
I've lost my thing.
What is this thing he has lost? It's a stick or a stone that he uses as a mark.
At Avebury, he's using very big things as a mark, probably left by Stone Age documentary-makers.
There's the camera he needs the thing for, to stop him bumping into.
It's not easy walking and talking and keeping an eye open for things, so a large back-up team is needed in the ecosystem, a team that normally we never see.
And the team is going to try the kakapo once again, but this time not mentioning the words 'sit still', to see if it will sit still.
It's a parrot.
It's nocturnal.
It feeds on grass and leaves.
And it shows those two characteristics which are so typical of island-adapted forms.
It is totally flightless.
Secondly, it is a giant, the biggest of all the parrot family, weighing as much as three and a half kilograms.
One last question because the rock you're on is about to go up with a big bang.
I knew it was a joke rock.
This place here in Jordan is the last location that you're doing for the series, after three years.
What now? I've no idea.
Well, I've got one or two ideas of programmes we might do, but I haven't really thought about them, simply because after this, this has so obsessed all of our minds for so long that it's very difficult to see beyond it.
Well, that's enough, I think.
If we could explode the rock now.
Cut.
The rock hasn't gone off.
And so all over the world, scarcely able to believe that The Living Planet is really finished, nature is going back into the bush, knowing that one day, surely, David Attenborough will be back again.