Lavish BBC/Discovery Channel Documentary Looks at Our Colorful Earth

By Andy Smith; Journal Television Writer

The Discovery Channel does a fair share of bragging during the course of Planet Earth, a lavish, 11-part nature documentary made in partnership with the BBC that debuts Sunday with three hour-long episodes beginning at 8 p.m.: Pole to Pole, Mountains, and Deep Ocean.

To be fair, they’ve got reason to boast. The BBC teams that shot Planet Earth went to 204 locations over a five-year period, using the latest technology to capture animal behavior never before caught on camera, from snow leopards hunting in the wild to the blue bird of paradise performing a mating dance.

Occasionally narrator Sigourney Weaver will remind us how much effort went into a shot: “A camerman waited four days straight in freezing weather to get this footage,” she says as we look at rare Amur leopards in eastern Russia.

Executive producer Maureen Lemire of the Discovery Channel refers to Planet Earth as “a landmark in natural history documentaries.”

There are some extraordinary sequences, such as a flock of cranes attacked by golden eagles as they attempt to migrate over the Himalayas. (The negotiations with Nepal and Pakistan to shoot sequences in and above the Himalayas took more than a year.)

Planet Earth also includes some animals that are familiar to even the casual natural history fan – giant pandas, the penguins of Antarctica, American grizzly bears. Even so, the documentary tries to find a new twist for these familiar faces.

Who knew, for example, that grizzlies ventured onto the most barren slopes of the Rockies to eat moths?

Planet Earth was conceived as a sequel to Blue Planet, a BBC/ Discovery partnership about the oceans that aired at the end of 2001. Since that one did so well, BBC executives decided to go for the whole planet with the best technology available.

That meant shooting the entire project in high definition, and using innovations such as the heligimbal, a device to stabilize cameras on helicopters.

Thanks to the heligimbal, Planet Earth could get stunning aerial shots of, say, wolves hunting caribou on the tundra of northern Canada.

Planet Earth’s first episode consists of one planetary overview, from north to south, from the polar bears of the Arctic all the way down to the penguins of the Antarctic. The remaining episodes each focus on a particular habitat: mountains, deep ocean, deserts, ice worlds, shallow seas, great plains, jungles, fresh water, forests and caves.

After tonight’s three episodes, the Discovery Channel will show two episodes each Sunday evening through April 22. The series is also available in high definition on Discovery HD Theater, airing on the same schedule.

Lemire said there were tough decisions about where to go. Caves, for example, might not seem worthy of an entire episode, but they are fascinating places full of strange and mysterious creatures, among them cave angel fish, which live on waterfalls, hanging on by microscopic hooks in their fins.

Lemire acknowledged there are a few differences between the British and American versions of Planet Earth. In Britain, the episodes are narrated by naturalist David Attenborough, while Weaver handles the job in the U.S.

The British Planet will air without commercials; the American version will include commercial breaks. So the Discovery Channel did some discreet editing, not only to make room for the commercials, but to create natural pauses in the narration.

Human beings are very rarely seen on this Planet Earth, and when they are it is usually only to provide a sense of scale.

“We are looking at the last of the wild places, many of them never to be seen again . . . we’re giving people an opportunity to see what is here. People sometimes forget there are wild places still left,” Lemire said.

Planet Earth does not contain an overt message about conservation, although one could be implied when, say, Weaver points out that there are only about 40 Amur leopards left in the wild.

“It’s a subtle message, a few lines in each episode . . . we are involved in other documentaries that address conservation issues in a much harder way. This is to celebrates what’s still there,” Lemire said.

Planet Earth might be the last word in natural history filmmaking, but Lemire said that hardly means it will quench our thirst for watching strange creatures, odd mating rituals or the life-and-death struggle between predator and prey.

“There’s an endless fascination with nature,” Lemire said. “It’s almost primal the way we want to connect with the natural world, even as many of us are becoming more and more removed from it. It’s why we watch our bird feeders, or look at a squirrel running along a fence in our backyard.”

asmith@projo.com / (401) 277-7262

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Cameraman Wade Fairley films emperor penguins in Antarctica.

Discovery Channel / Frederique Olivier

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A lion hunts in the Okavango Delta in Botswana in Pole to Pole, the first episode of the BBC/Discovery Channel’s 11-part documentary Planet Earth, beginning tonight at 8 with three back-to-back episodes on The Discovery Channel.

BBC / Ben Osborne

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Underwater cameraman Doug Allan gets up close and personal with mother and baby humpback whales off the coast of Tonga in the South Pacific.

Discovery Channel / Sue Flood

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The world’s highest waterfall, Angel Falls, in Venezuela.

BBC / Mark Brownlow

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Cameraman Paul Stewart works among the people of the Huli tribe in Papua New Guinea.

A boy’s simple toy contrasts distinctively with the Discovery Channel’s high-tech Western recording equipment.

Discovery Channel / Tom Clarke

(c) 2007 Providence Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.