Wild Isles returns that ancient and much-beloved creature, the Sir David Attenborough, to his natural element. While the many shows he’s made in recent years have mainly kept him studio-bound or caged in the voice-over booth, the new series has the man who won’t be put out to pasture back in the field.
He hasn’t been out in the wild much of late. After all, he’s 96. The last time he was out in the field, that field was probably still a forest. One full of species that are now on the endangered list.
But Wild Isles takes him, gently, back to where his fascination with nature started – the English countryside outside Leicester he first explored as a boy on a bike in the 1930s.
“Back then, it was easy to find hay meadows rich with wildflowers and swarming with butterflies and insects of all kinds,” he says in publicity for the series. “But since then, we have lost more than 95% of these wonderful habitats.”
There are quite a few more alarming numbers in Wild Isles’ survey of the fauna and flora of Britain and Ireland. So much so, that it proved controversial when it started screening in Britain last month. The BBC came under fire for supposedly kowtowing to Conservative government pressure and relegating a sixth episode about the causes of the decline to its iPlayer streaming platform rather than broadcasting it in primetime.
That sixth episode was always planned as a non-broadcast addendum, say the BBC and the show’s makers, whose co-producers include the World Wildlife Fund and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Nevertheless, the show has been Britain’s top-rating show since it started, helped by the probability that this might be Attenborough’s farewell to on-location work and his own state of the nation address.
He begins the first episode, “Our Precious Isles”, atop the chalk cliffs of Harry’s Rocks on the south coast of Dorset. That first instalment ends with him in his element, seated among friendly puffins on the slopes of Skomer Island off the Welsh coast. It’s a shot that reminds of so many of Attenborough’s past adventures. Many of those were steered by veteran producer Alastair Fothergill, who, after the likes of Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet, had long wanted to take a similar epic approach to Britain and Ireland.
Getting his nonagenarian presenter to Skomer, he says, took some preparation, because access from the island’s boat landing meant climbing 87 steps. Attenborough, who had a double knee replacement in 2015, trained on the stairs at home – a little puffing to see some little puffins. A doctor and a defibrillator came along for the ride to the island.
For one other location, Attenborough didn’t have far to go. He introduces the second episode, “Woodland”, from underneath a favourite ancient oak tree in London’s Richmond Park, near where he lives.
He’s known the tree for about 70 years, about a 10th of its life, he says, before adding yet another sobering fact: that since his birth in 1926, the UK has lost half of its ancient woodlands. It now ranks as one of the least-forested nations in Europe, as well as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
Despite that, the series doesn’t lack for the sort of blue-chip, high-tech creature footage we’ve come to expect from 21st-century Attenborough shows.
And although many Antipodeans may view British zoology through the memories of bedtime books – and there may be frolicsome foxes, rabbits and badgers – this isn’t a benign Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame idyll shot in high definition.
There are wild horses and boars making a mess of the Forest of Dean; white-tailed sea eagles pursuing barnacle geese over Islay in a sequence which plays like an avian Battle of Britain dogfight; orcas sneaking up on seals in the shallows of the Shetlands – swimming on their sides so their dorsal fins don’t break the surface and give them away before nabbing one and using it to show the rest of the pod how to drown it.
As well as violence, there is, of course, sex. Take a bow, ash-black slugs of Dartmoor for an acrobatic act of copulation involving two 30cm-long creatures with male and female sexual organs coiling around each other while hanging from a branch. Or female adders dragging the male of the species through the Northumberland undergrowth by their penises.
No, it’s not the sort of thing you see in Wind in the Willows. But Wild Isles’ creatures great and small and the disappearing places they live make for a riveting ramble with a venerable guide.
Isles files
Wild Isles has five episodes entitled “Our Precious Isles’', “Woodland”, “Grassland”, “Freshwater”, “Ocean”.
Each hour-long episode comes with a behind-the-scenes segment showing how camera crews captured the images featured in the preceding show.
Total number of days filming: 1631
Locations: 145
Longest shoot: 71 days filming salmon in the north-east of Scotland.
Biggest creature: Basking sharks in the seas off Cornwall, the Hebrides and west coast of Ireland.
Wild Isles is streaming on Amazon Prime.
