Frozen Planet, “Polar Bear-Gate” and the lamentable British tabloid culture.

It has recently come to light that some of the sequences of Frozen Planet include footage which was filmed elsewhere, other than in the wild, as the programme’s content was leading people to believe.   A few of the most contested instances of this practise include shots of a polar bear in a zoo, timelapse photography of ice particles forming and a caterpillar hibernating over winter.

This recent storm in a teacup has nothing to do with the ethics of producing a wildlife documentary, and everything to do with the British media’s political climate.

Frozen Planet’s use of this material is a matter of practicality.

If you watch Frozen Planet’s hibernating caterpillar and think “yes, that’s what they’ve done: they’ve found a caterpillar in the middle of the Arctic and set up a camera which probably costs hundreds of thousands of pounds and paid a crew to undergo the whole operation for months on end among the harshest conditions on Earth” - then you are an idiot.

If you take this view, I’ll spell it out for you with another example so it’s nice and clear: it’s really difficult to find a polar bear in their natural habitat, film that same polar bear day after day from a helicopter and in extremely treacherous weather conditions AND make a story out of it which people will enjoy watching.

Frozen Planet is a drama documentary: it takes the nature documentary format and makes it more engaging and enjoyable for modern audiences by creating characters and narratives for their featured subjects.  Whether they’re talking about a family of whales, a tiny lemming or the Arctic landscape itself, the programme personifies the subjects through storytelling conventions, thus allowing the audience to relate to the subject.  Frozen Planet very much fulfils the principles that Lord Reith set out upon creation of the BBC as a public service broadcaster in 1927: to inform, educate and entertain.

In order to comply to a storytelling format, sequences have to be logical and linear.  If there are certain crucial moments missing in a sequence, the story doesn’t make sense.  The producers can either describe the missing moments through narration or splice in footage which was taken elsewhere in order to finish the sequence.  As Frozen Planet’s essence lies in aesthetically pleasing visuals with minimal narration, the producers’ choice is clear in this case.

This kind of logic isn’t good enough for the British tabloid culture, however.

Throwing around terms like ‘fakery’ and ‘misleading’ and getting a right kick out of putting the word ‘gate’ at the end of things, the journalists involved in this so-called scandal are ignorant children at best, political and commercially motivated puppets at worst.

The BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson has suggested this is all retaliation to the BBC’s coverage of the Leveson inquiry into Press standards.  Drenched in delicious irony, the Daily Mail, that great arbiter of truth, tried to spin his words into a gossip story.  There are probably many examples of how various papers and media outlets have taken this non-story and milked it for their own agendas, but I do not have the willpower to wade through the trash in order to pick out the particularly filthy bits for you.  You can help yourself to that bit of enlightening research.

This all sums up the general decay of Press standards and the rise and rise of tabloid culture.  It’s no more than gossip-driven, morbid, invasive pulp with a particular fetish for scandal-porn.  ‘Polar Bear-Gate’, if anything, strengthens the validity of the BBC and the need for public service values to be upheld above populist and commercial imperatives.

If the press genuinely believe the BBC have orchestrated Frozen Planet’s stories in a misleading way, it is a step backwards for media-savvy-ness.  Frozen Planet is clearly a drama documentary. It deals with stories. It’s quite clear there is a dramatic and necessarily fragmented element to the show.  To suggest that Frozen Planet doesn’t make this clear enough is either very stupid of an individual journalist or insulting to their paper’s readership – or both.

I’d like to see these journalists attempt to burrow under the snow to film an over-protective wild polar bear and her cubs resting in their den.  Although, they’d probably do quite well as they’ve already proved their proficiency in sticking their noses where they don’t belong (see: Leveson inquiry).