By Nils Lindahl Elliot

Imagine you’re watching a wildlife documentary on television. The programme describes the coming of winter to the Arctic with stunning photography. In one of the most memorable scenes, the programme shows a polar bear with its newborn cubs in a den dug out by the bear in a snowbound hillside. You wonder how the filmmakers managed to film this and several other extraordinary scenes in the documentary. Later, you learn that at least the scene with the bear cubs was a ‘fake’ in so far as it was actually filmed in a zoo.

Does it matter that the scene was not filmed in the wild, and that the programme failed to explain this?

The situation I’ve just described actually took place towards the end of 2011, when a mini-scandal erupted in England for precisely the reasons I have just outlined: one of the episodes in the BBC’s blue-chip Frozen Planet series showed newborn polar bear cubs in what looked like a den in the wild. In fact, the den was purpose-built in a Dutch zoo – purpose-built, that is, for filming as well as birthing. Alas, the programme-makers refrained from telling audiences watching the episode about this. When the scene was ‘outed’ as a ‘fake’, a considerable rumpus ensued in the British press, with the matter even reaching the British parliament.

By the time that passions about the episode began to fade, two ideological positions had coalesced: on the one hand, the BBC’s critics, apparently an unholy alliance of genuinely outraged MPs and climate change deniers looking to score hits on an increasingly ‘green’ BBC, demanded that in future the programmes should be broadcast with appropriate health warnings. On the other hand, the BBC’s defenders, which included David Attenborough (of course) and some rather more surprising figures such as George Monbiot, suggested that the matter was a relatively trivial one (Monbiot), and was in any case adequately acknowledged and explained in this ‘making of’ video (the BBC). It was some in the latter camp that suggested that the matter was part of a dark conspiracy against the BBC, the result of its support for the theory, which is now really to say the reality, of anthropogenic climate change.

I have no idea whether there was a conspiracy or not – it would not be at all strange, but, truth be told, if the knives are out for the BBC, then the right-wingers have perhaps failed to notice Top Gear, or indeed the news that, in the US, the BBC reportedly made optional the last episode of the Frozen Planet series – the very episode that focussed on the effects of climate change on the polar regions. Climate change deniers have probably also failed to notice that, given the number of aerial shots in this, as in so many other of the BBC’s wildlife series (presumably produced with helicopters or other light aircraft), the series might well be described as an implicit ode to the kind of carbon belching practices which must come to an end if we are to meet the looming 2017 deadline (I make this point more seriously in a separate post, this time with reference to a BBC World Service radio programme).

Whatever the case, the polemic has gone the way of so many mass-mediated scandals, and has vanished beneath the e-waves almost as quickly as it surfaced.  There is, however, a critique which I think no one put forward at the time, and which needs to be made with respect to George Monbiot’s suggestion that, while the BBC should do more to indicate when scenes in its programmes involve animals filmed in captivity,  the matter was a completely trivial one. In Monbiot’s words,

‘It’s an issue of mindnumbing triviality, though I do think that the BBC should do more to warn viewers when scenes have been shot in captivity. The director-general, quizzed by the culture, media and sport select committee yesterday, said that when people were polled on the question, their overwhelming response was that they did not want to see captions or hear disclaimers in wildlife programmes.’

Monbiot added that ‘There is something both revealing and quite touching about this. It suggests that people watch such programmes much as they might listen to poetry: they want to be transported to a world whose veracity is less important than its beauty. Even so, it doesn’t feel quite right, and I think it would be wise for the BBC at least to list the scenes that were not shot on location in the credits at the end of the film’ (emphases added).

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First things first: Contrary to the BBC’s later suggestion that the episode was ‘carefully worded’ to not mislead audiences, there is no doubt that episode five of the Frozen Planet series did engage in the manufacture of a certain untruth. In the scene in question, the programme employed an audiovisual montage that undeniably did make the claim, however implicitly, that the filmmakers had filmed the polar bear cubs in the wild. Against a visual backdrop showing a steeply sloping hill covered in snow, and after having shown a bear earlier in the programme digging a den in preparation for the winter, Attenborough narrated that ‘But on these side slopes, beneath the snow, new lives are beginning’. By the time he reaches the words ‘new lives’, the wide shot of the hillside is replaced with a close-up of a bear and its cubs, ostensibly in a  wild ‘den’. There is no reference whatsoever to the fact that the scene is not filmed in the wild, and, on the contrary, the programme goes some length to construct a narrative that suggests both a temporal and a spatial continuity between the various images of the bears.

Is this a triviality, a tempest in a frozen teacup? Monbiot is certainly not uncritical of other aspects of the documentaries which he feels merit a stronger response: for example, what he describes as ‘the complete separation by wildlife programmes of the natural and the human worlds’, a critique which he says he first offered in 2002 (I couldn’t agree more that this is a problem; I myself have been teaching and writing about it since the mid 1990s). This stance, however, suggests that Monbiot, like so many other media critics, has not really thought through the social semiotics, or as I now spell the term, the social semeiotics of natural history documentaries.

Allow me to explain: if the BBC’s continuing adherence to a code that effectively opposes the human and the ‘nonhuman’ world matters to environmental critics, it is because the BBC has the potential to engage in a dualistic pedagogy of nature. Put simply, so long as the documentaries are able to teach, however implicitly, that it’s ‘us’ and ‘them’ when it comes to humans and nature (or the ‘nonhuman’ world), then the documentaries may well serve the cause of right-wing and ‘grey’ perspectives. Not just the perspectives, which is really to say the discourses that support projects such as Canada’s Tar Sands, but those of big game hunters who have long romanticised a nature that is not only completely separate from ‘us’, but there for ‘our’ pleasure (a case in point, the recent scandal over Spain’s King Juan Carlos, who was discovered to be hunting elephants even as he served as the honorary president of the Worldwide Fund for Nature in Spain). A similar point might well be made about the pleasure of virtual consumption via TV series: however green on some levels, if the documentaries position audiences to treat nature as a virtual commodity, then they aid and abet a dynamic that is arguably at the heart of the modern environmental crisis.

Now my research suggests that much of the power of such a pedagogy rests not only on many audiences’ fantasies and desires for an undisturbed Nature (as suggested by Monbiot), but on an unquestioned feeling that what is being shown is really ‘nature itself’. Indeed, the quest for an ‘untouched’ (sic) nature is mirrored by a form of representation that itself seems to cause no disturbance. It is on this level of representation that ‘fake’ scenes can undermine the very foundations of the BBC Natural History Unit’s rhetoric, to not say its cultural authority. From this perspective, far from being a ‘trivial’ matter, the question of ‘fake’ scenes is actually of extraordinary importance to the BBC, and to be sure, to fellow wildlife filmmaking organisations like the National Geographic which engage in much the same practices.

The argument, apparently invoked by John Thompson, that the BBC’s own in-house research suggests that audiences don’t want health warnings, actually corroborates this point. That said, I’d question the extent to which audience wishes can be homogenised, and indeed, I’d very much like to see the research that was apparently in defence of the ‘fake’ scenes. It’s no secret that, depending on the questions asked by surveys, one is more likely to get certain kinds of responses. Would you like to see documentaries full of disclaimers and health warnings? Most certainly not. Do you think that the BBC should tell audiences when programmes haven’t been actually filmed in the wild? Most probably yes. Do you think it matters whether wildlife documentaries are true to nature? A guaranteed yes… and so forth.  To be sure, one would have to ask if ethical decisions of this sort are really to be resolved by recourse to audience research?

It would be problematic enough if ‘faked’ scenes were to constitute a very small part of documentary series such as Frozen Planet. But ‘little white lies’ of one sort or another are very common to the wildlife film industry (and it is that – an industry). The history of wildlife filmmaking is literally replete with a variety of ‘tricks of the trade’ that have been used to fool audiences into thinking that the cinematographers captured in the wild, and quite spontaneously, what was actually a carefully contrived scene, be it ‘studio-based’ or the outcome of the use of baits, or more grievously, of full-fledged traps. The notion of a white lie seems particularly appropriate in the case of the excellent Frozen Planet series. How many, if indeed any of the shots of polar bears in the ‘Winter’ episode, were actually filmed in the Arctic winter? I hope I’m wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that most if not all were shot ‘day for night’ in the Arctic summer, when the wind was up and making the snow blow, ‘storm-like’, across the vast expanses of ice.

Some thoughts, finally, about the BBC’s protestations that it was, in effect, defending the animals’ interests by not filming them in the wild, and that in any case, it did provide the information about the fake den elsewhere.

Where the former argument is concerned, I wonder if the BBC would be prepared to not only condemn, but guarantee that it does not partake in any activities of the kind that led to the fining of the filmmaker Mike Linley by a court in Western Australia. I refer not only to the smuggling, but more generally to the practice of capturing animals for ‘studio-based’ filming. Do such practices – or indeed the much celebrated ‘critter cams’ – really tally with the BBC’s claims to be very concerned about the well-being of the animals it films? If the Linley saga teaches us anything, it’s that just as zoos are always a handy fallback for producers unable to obtain certain shots, there are few boundaries that at least some wildlife filmmakers aren’t willing to cross in the quest for the ‘ultimate’ shots. Critter cams may not physically harm the animals, but from a philosophical point of view it certainly suggests a return to the kind of objectification of nature which I refered to earlier.

Where the argument that the information was provided ‘elsewhere’ is concerned, the fact that the BBC didn’t provide that information in Episode 5 itself would also confirm that the matter is far from being ‘trivial’. What is at stake is a form of story-telling which is not only that – story-telling – but one whose authors know only too well what at least some audience expectations may be. Far from being programmes which simply ‘show what there is to save’, the programmes’ producers must know that they also need to show what sells. This is a major aspect of the whole enterprise – but one that has the potential to contradict the often pious claims made by the National Geographic and indeed the BBC itself to be working for the good of conservation, and the planet more generally.

Copyright © 2012 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved