A fresh TV fakery scandal has emerged which will rock the BBC to its very core. Polar bears, those cute white, fluffy mammals who lumber around on ice, smashing seals’ heads open and feasting on their very brains, have been FAKED giving birth in the Arctic. Today’s Daily Telegraph has the story.
Call Russell Brand. Call Andrew Sachs’s granddaughter. Call everyone you can think of. This one is going to be big! Another example of the tax-funded British Bolshevik Corporation using our hard-earned money to make a groundbreaking documentary series, the likes of which have never been seen anywhere else in the world, stretching the boundaries of natural history television. How dare they! And how dare they pretend that the widdle fwuffy powar beaw cubs were born under the Arctic snow when, in fact, the footage of them was filmed somewhere that wasn’t under the Arctic snow!
Oh, come off it. Please. I wouldn’t say I’m a BBC cheerleader — they do awful things, such as hiring rentagob no-marks like Kelvin Mackenzie to spout shouty garbage in a bid to get instantly polarised, meaningless, counterproductive conflict in their TV and radio debates, for example — but there are bigger fish, or polar bears, to fry. And when you see the kind of people who line their missiles up facing Bush House, I know which side I’m on, if I really have to take one.
Natural history programmes have reconstructed things for years. It’s not been terrifically difficult to spot most of the time, either: it’s not likely that you’re going to get gin-clear waters in every river environment, for example, or spectacularly good lighting. The studio stuff does tend to stand out. So the polar bears were filmed in a captive environment, rather than wild animals being disturbed out in the snow? Maybe the film crew didn’t want to be decapitated by a giant paw being swung at them from an angry ursine parent. Not wanting to disrupt the natural lives of increasingly endangered species — that’s another possible reason. Or maybe they tried, and it just didn’t work. Do we care? Does it really matter that very much?
Just a couple more things about that Telegraph article irritate me. Firstly, we’re told that BBC viewers wouldn’t have known about the alleged fakery, unless they’ve gone to the Frozen Planet website. The BBC were so secretive about their deception that they decided to talk about it on the official website for the programme, explaining the reasons for it! And secondly, some poor hack was sent down to Sir David Attenborough’s house to doorstep him and get a reaction about the polar bear “controversy”. What a noble thing to do in the cause of journalism: pester an 85-year-old man outside his house. Well done for that.
If we must enter a new age in which all natural history film-makers must disclose which shots were taken out in the field, and which were taken in a captive or studio environment, so as to ensure that elderly national treasures don’t get bothered on their doorsteps, then so be it. Let’s ensure, for the sake of transparency, that every time a cookery show features a “reaction shot” that’s filmed afterwards, that’s clearly marked too; we wouldn’t want to embroil the poor, naive, innocent viewers in yet more controversy, would we?
For the sake of transparency, I’m sure newspapers won’t mind revealing how certain stories came to be processed, either. For example, if a TV show recreated a scene, and the hacks involved babbled: “Well it’s nothing really, completely normal, but our plebby readers don’t know that, and it’ll get the 8,000 foam-flecked idiots who comment on everything we write about the BBC going, and give one of our terrible bloggers the chance to whine about how everyone’s biased about global warming, yes you know the one I’m on about,” then let’s have that too, shall we?
No, I thought not.
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