In a week when one 96-year-old national treasure has been to the forefront of many people’s minds, it was reassuring to note the return of another 96-year-old who deserves that title and is very much still with us.
Sir David Attenborough’s days of crawling about the undergrowth in search of big cats and other wild animals are long behind him, but his voiceover on the natural history blockbuster Frozen Planet II (BBC One) remains an edifice as mighty as any of the calving Greenland glaciers so beautifully captured here.
All the frozen regions
Where the BBC Natural History Unit’s award-winning first series of Frozen Planet in 2011 looked just at the Arctic and Antarctic regions, this second series examines all the frozen regions of Earth.
There have been many other new developments in the past 11 years, not least an ever-growing awareness of climate change and a range of new technologies to help the filming team.
The postscript to Sunday’s first episode was as fascinating as the nature itself, outlining the painstaking process which the FPII team had gone through.
They were seen sitting around on a frozen, mosquito-riddled cliff face waiting for the precise moment to sent their racer drone-mounted camera to capture the crumbling of the glacier.
Capturing the moment
The results of this patience were stunning, however, with a mountainous, skyscraper-sized chunk of ice sliding into the sea. Amid this moment of beautifully-shot high drama, smaller stories of life amid the ice were shown.
There were cute scenes with snow-covered, endlessly adaptable emperor penguins and baby muskox, shots of fearsome hunting killer whales and polar bears, and the hooded seal’s very unusual method of finding a mate using its inflatable nose.
The whole thing was a typically stunning technical feat, set to gorgeous images of endless icy cliffs and floes, a landscape which Attenborough noted we’ve largely only explored from space. Considering all involved, it was a predictably essential watch.
Simon “blimey” Reeve
At this rate, meanwhile, all that stands between Simon “blimey!” Reeve and similar national treasure status to Sir David is another 46 years doing what he’s done so well until now.
Simon Reeve’s South America (BBC Two) is also a sequel of sorts, the companion to 2019’s North Americas with Simon Reeve.
As we’ll see in the second episode, this series was actually intended to follow on directly from that show, until the pandemic called a temporary halt to filming.
Yet in the first episode, Reeve and his crew were able to get around the entire north-eastern area known as the Guiana Shield.
He visits the stunning, table-like tepui mountains of Venezuela, and the entirely French territory of French Guiana (more a part of the EU than the UK, Reeve notes saltily) and its European spaceport.
Poverty, migration, stunning scenery and the legitimate and illegitimate gold trade are all witnessed.
As ever, Reeve takes in chunks of natural history and social reportage, although it’s the moments where he pushes the boundaries – here, asking Surinamese former rebel leader, current gold miner and later national Vice-President Ronnie Brunswijk about the source of his wealth – that his wide-eyed but ever-intrepid style really comes into its own.
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