![]() ![]() Perfect predator … A Siberian tiger roams the forest. Your eyes widen involuntarily as the scenes of howling gales, frozen peaks and troughs, and the animals wrenching a life from them sweep past. You cannot stay unengaged, you cannot remain unmoved by the sight of nature in all her glory, or unawed by the sight of creatures honed by countless years of evolution to survive the apparently unsurvivable. This latest offering from the crack team and Sir David accomplishes its goal as effectively as ever it makes us, in the best way, children again. And God knows, they deserve some fun after being deserted by their parents and left to navigate across 30 miles of snowy wasteland on their own before they reach a fish-stuffed sea. He is a cat for our times and I want an animated series about his accidental arrival in Florida, abundant merch and Twitter clips of him staring out of the screen with contempt for us all.īut, you know, the emperor penguin chicks tobogganing down the far side of an ice mountain on their bellies were good too. He spits on the notion of feline elegance and would rather walk backwards into hell than break eye contact with a foe. The awards in this category must be given to the Pallas’s cat, a squat, lavishly furred oblong who looks as if he’s eaten three other Pallas’s cats and a bulldog. To avert the risk of falling victim to Stendhal syndrome, numbed by the relentless beauty of it all, the sweeping majesty is carefully punctuated with lighter moments. The first instalment works its way up from Antarctica to the Arctic via the Great Steppe, north of the Himalayas, the boreal forests (where the Siberian tiger roams a 700-square-mile territory looking for the 10kg of slower animal it needs a day) and Greenland. The uninterrupted viewing allowed by the BBC might not be quite as breathtaking as the Siberian tiger crunching through a snowy forest, but it deserves its own little moment of appreciation. Syndication deals need to allow for advertisement time in other countries. It is, like every episode of the original and of Blue Planet and Planet Earth before it, an hour of wonders. Spitting on the notion of feline elegance … The Pallas’s cat. It is only occasionally you remember to stop and marvel that you will be following that emperor penguin chick into the freezing waters of the Antarctic seas, or swooping above that Weddell seal for the perfect aerial shot as the ice floe fragments around him under the lashing tails of massed killer whales working in fatal unison. The accumulated skills and wisdom of decades enable them to capture these extraordinary images and put them together with a grace that is seemingly effortless. The opening montage of Frozen Planet II (BBC One) lays out the promise of pandas, penguins and polar bears, all brought to us by the latest in technology racer drones are deployed for the first time, Attenborough tells us. Despite their exotic plumage, mobula rays and sailfish hastening to the banquet were mere supporting players in this unimaginable drama.Eleven years after the BBC Natural History Unit led by Alastair Fothergill and Vanessa Berlowitz capped its trilogy of documentary series on the wonders of our planet with the icy grandeurs of Frozen Planet, they return with a sequel – “To witness new wonders while there is still time to save them”. ![]() They bore down on a vast shoal of lantern fish, a group-thinking mass which moved like the sea’s mirror image of a starling murmuration. The astonishing boiling-sea sequence starred spinner dolphins, so-called for their 720-degree corkscrew leaps. The fourth episode of Blue Planet II threw up fewer outlandish implausibilities as it scoured the ocean wastes for hardy big-bodied familiars: big and bigger sharks, albatrosses with Stakhanovite parenting skills, a pod of sleeping sperm whales vertically a-dangling like buoyant prehistoric menhirs.Īnd yet once more it discovered evidence for behaviour previously known only as a fisherman’s legend (see also episode one’s bird-hunting trevallies). This week’s come-off-it segment featured myriad beautiful jellyfish dangling in the briny main, as if hanging around in their thousands for James Cameron to copyright their image for the Avatar sequel. ![]() Nature’s design solutions are sometimes so freakish as to seem fictitious – the kobudai which changes gender, that Technicolor cuttlefish, the barrel eye which looks upwards through its transparent skull. But a little sceptical devil in you, probably dosed up on the desensitizing wonders of CGI, harbours a rebellious niggle: begging your pardon, Sir David, but surely that’s not really real? After another instalment of Blue Planet II (BBC One) one’s jaw has to be surgically removed from the floor.
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