To understand why scenes and scenarios in Planet Earth II were so affecting, I found myself reaching into an emotional vault I haven’t accessed since the 1980s. The fairy tern, who had come back to her massacred egg and continued to incubate it, even while its yolk was dripping off her feet, brought back a horrible scene in Fortunes of War, identical in every respect except with people instead of birds and Nazi shells instead of predators. Almost everything involving a monkey reminded me of a Godfather film. The great bower bird, not great at all, a bit OCD and usually wrong, was The Diary of a Nobody. There ought to be a word like supra-anthropomorphic, where a creature reminds you more of humanity than humans do, is more readable, has urgencies more urgent.
Planet Earth II is a stunning ensemble of talent, beyond David Attenborough’s sober poetry, which he deploys judiciously, modestly and obliquely, to remind the audience not just that macaques are cheeky, but that the cameramen are shit hot as well. There is more going on than the majesty of nature. I’ve seen a bower bird in real life, right next to its courting nest, and it didn’t come close to the one on the telly. The editing is seamless, the music is delightful, the scripts are arresting, the perfectionism is there in every particular. But I find myself transfixed by its first principle: that we all have a visceral connection to nature, root for it, mourn with it, rejoice with it – even those of us who would previously have said dogs, OK, but iguanas, we could take or leave.
Item one: a lot of these creatures are cute. Raccoons and sloths in particular, baby anythings, and giraffes. All cute. If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that. Just by way of digression, I love the pre-internet nomenclature of the series. Most people would give a show a name that Google would throw up first, before a million hits for the actual planet. Its very name is a throwback to a less transactional age, before search engine optimisers.
Item two: enthusiasm is a terrifically difficult thing to transmit. Like yellow jerseys and trapeze artists, contagious stans are outrageously rare. A colleague said that she and her peers (22-year-olds) genuinely don’t know what they’ll do when Attenborough retires (she actually said “dies”, but I find young people, like nature, a little brutal).
Item three: there is an incredibly strong sense of narrative, each story a self-contained vignette, intensified by its brevity, like a David Means short story or the opening rounds of the X Factor. Viewing figures for Planet Earth II among 16 to 24-year-olds, incidentally, massively outstrip those for X Factor, which the BBC notes for a reason: that they are emotionally quite similar, except Planet Earth is better. The iguana hatchlings chased by snakes were the jewel in its crown, closely followed by the famished lions making an Ocean’s Eleven, last-ditch punt at a giraffe. A chase scene admits no explanation – you track it with your pre-verbal brain and could no more explain why than you could articulate the beauty of a face. But the surrounding dynamics, triumph and disaster, the symphony of co-operation, the elation of escape, underdogs battling desperate odds, these are the cornerstones of narrative, the stuff that drove us to invent language in the first place.
Item four: these battles tear at the elemental conflict between justice and strength. The Independent reported rather gleefully the findings of a YouGov poll, that Tories were most likely to want the predator to win. But most people root for the prey, even when they do vote Conservative (Ukippers, FYI, do not like nature documentaries). Attenborough himself, however, manages a stance of neutrality, an ideal of balance the BBC cleaves to but, elsewhere, almost never achieves. The lions are neither good nor evil. They’re just famished. They’ve paced an area the size of Switzerland. His similes draw you in precisely because they don’t try to woo you. Switzerland is not, typically, thought of as terribly large. It is in the act of trying to imagine pacing its length for pesky antelope that you ascend to a brief oneness with the lion.
Adolescents respond to literature, art and nature very intensely. It’s what they’re known for, and periodically the Daily Mail will provide some hormonal reason for it, and it will be annoying, because you remember feeling like that and you know it wasn’t about testicles, it was about poetry. It was about experiencing the feelings in a fictive or otherwise unattainable world so strongly that you wanted to live there, but couldn’t – the heat of empathy and the chill of unbelonging, at such obliterating strength that the one became its opposite.
That’s the umbrella distinction of Planet Earth II, its overarching achievement; it is a teenage kick, a transport of wonderment that adult life mostly only reminds you of.
