On Friday morning, at 9.30am, I bought and watched the fourth episode of the 2011 BBC natural history series Human Planet on Amazon Prime. Just over an hour later, the show was no longer for sale.
This digital extinction seemed to be part of the BBC’s attempt to remove, for the moment, any trace in any place of the eight-part series. The move follows the BBC’s announcement on Thursday that Human Planet will be subjected to a “full editorial review” after allegations that some sequences misrepresented their content. The BBC said on Friday afternoon that all online and high-street stores have been asked to stop selling the DVDs immediately.
The most recent BBC statement acknowledged that a sequence in episode one, in which an Indonesian hunter named Benjamin Blikololong was shown catching a whale with a harpoon, was not now considered an “accurate” representation of the event. Earlier this month, the BBC withdrew episode four from circulation for re-editing of footage of what was said to be a traditional 100-ft-high tribal tree-house, which turned out to have been constructed for the purposes of filming.
The fact that the whole series was still available to buy on DVD almost 24 hours after the announcement of its withdrawal underlines the complexity, in the modern viewing universe, of stopping people watching content that has become contentious. In the past, a broadcaster would simply remove a tape from its archive and order it never to be reshown.
TV now, however, has a tail longer than any creature filmed by the BBC Natural History Unit. Although seven years old, Human Planet was available on Amazon and Netflix (which removed it from the menu on Thursday) – and these are only two of the 25 streaming services or overseas broadcasters that currently have contracts to screen the series.
The speed and thoroughness of the BBC’s hunt once the veracity of the programme was questioned shows how seriously the organisation is taking issues of editorial integrity, even in non-journalistic programming. This vigour can be interpreted as another skirmish in the current culture wars.
Although Benjamin Blikololong of Lamalera and President Donald Trump of Washington DC occupy very different worlds, the former has been retrospectively caught in the backwash from the latter.
The campaign, started and stoked by Trump, to expose what activists call “fake news” in what they term “the mainstream media”, led long-term news providers to emphasise their editorial standards. The BBC has explicitly presented itself as a trustworthy source of reporting in muddled times, introducing, for example, an online and on-air service called “Reality Check”, which scrutinises and adjudicates on claims made by politicians and lobbyists.
This approach was seen by some, though, as more-wholly-credible-than-thou, and has encouraged them to fact-check the BBC’s content for slips from the virtues it advertises. Human Planet can be seen as a victim of this process; even Sir David Attenborough – the patron saint of the genre – has faced some questions over alleged sleight of camera in some of his work.
Some practitioners of natural history TV also complain privately that two pressures on broadcasting are in conflict. The increasing requirement for shoots to meet health and safety rules can, they argue, make it harder to capture footage that is always rawly authentic. The genre’s single most celebrated moment is David Attenborough playing with a family of Rwandan gorillas in Life on Earth in 1978; some believe that it would now be impossible to secure insurance or BBC risk-assessment clearance for such an encounter.
But the most fundamental question the “full editorial review” of Human Planet will have to address is whether a natural history programme can and should be held to the same obligations as BBC News. Drama – another non-journalistic genre that has faced the attention of fact-checkers – now routinely precedes pieces with a disclaimer explaining that some details have been altered for narrative purposes. It may be that one outcome of the row will be an attempt to position nature shows as entertainment, rather than a journalism of fur and ferns.
At the moment, the BBC’s publicly published guidelines for those working in the form warn: “We must apply the same value of truth and accuracy to Natural History output as we apply to all BBC factual output. Audiences should never be deceived or misled by what they see or hear.”
The BBC belief is that these recently revised guidelines – in association with enhanced “values” training for staff – would mean that the contested sections of Human Planet would not now be filmed or presented in the way they were then. A BBC source said: “We’re talking about issues involving a series shown seven years ago.” One outcome of the editorial review may be the release of a re-edited new version.
There is no reason to think, it was stressed, that the controversy represents a wider problem. But, as the truth wars continue, Human Planet may not be the last programme from the past to be harpooned for fake views.
