The BBC wildlife series Serengeti is an odd duck. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a dramatisation of a wildlife show. Masterminded by Pop Idol creator Simon Fuller, it contains real wildlife footage that’s been shaped into narratives by writers. Multiple animals represent the same character. John Boyega is credited as a “storyteller” rather than a “narrator”. My colleague Rebecca Nicholson called Serengeti “the Made in Chelsea of nature docs” for good reason. To watch it is to watch the raw majesty of the natural world being smothered to death by human emotion.
This weekend, the show was hit by accusations that it inserted a composite shot of a zebra being swept down a river to heighten the drama of a scene. Serengeti is a bold experiment into humanity’s tolerance of anthropomorphism. If it had worked, similar tactics could have been used to heighten awareness of the climate emergency, maybe by letting James Corden provide the voice of a glacier as it crumbles into the sea. But it doesn’t work. It’s really weird.
The incredible thing about wildlife documentaries is how invested you become in the subjects. I had such a visceral reaction to the Blue Planet 2 sequence where a marine iguana ran for its life from a teeming horde of snakes that I almost burst into tears when I saw one in a conservation park a couple of months ago. And, yes, that series benefited from beautiful photography, snappy editing and a pounding Hans Zimmer score, but it still managed to capture something as elemental as the frantic struggle for survival. That’s what viewers respond to – not a vague sensation that they are watching an episode of Hollyoaks Pets.
And on the subject of animals …
Seagulls are awful. They have managed to get away with it for years, but now one of them has attacked beloved children’s entertainer Dave Benson Phillips, the public has reached a tipping point. There is serious talk of a cull. “Let local communities take action against the fat, aggressive urban sods,” John Woodcock MP said recently.
Frankly, seagulls have brought this on themselves. It isn’t enough that they divebomb pensioners for their chips; they also have the temerity to look and sound like characters from an ill-advised Pixar film about birds that enter the violent world of football hooliganism. Never has an animal been more in need of a makeover. The petition to get all seagulls Queer Eyed starts here.
