It doesn’t take long to identify the main problem with Our Changing Planet (BBC One), the latest series in the BBC’s natural history department.
It starts in the wrong place. The program wants to show us how climate change and human behavior are having a detrimental effect on the planet in a seven-year project. But it starts in the first year. We learned about the problems – dying coral reefs in the Maldives, receding glaciers in Iceland, industrialization in Cambodia – and said that the hosts will provide us with updates over the next seven years.
But if the idea was to encourage us to change our behavior and present us with the horrors of environmental damage, wouldn’t it be better to chart the decline over the last seven years and show us the terrible results so that we can act now?
Television documentaries of this kind are fueled by striking images. Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II drew attention to plastic pollution by showing us shocking footage of its impact on wildlife.
Our changing planet, despite its best intentions, simply does not capture this. Chris Pakum, one of the presenters, inadvertently nailed him with a remark made while standing under a melting glacier in Iceland. “We read a lot about the impact of climate change, but only when you stand here dripping wet listening to this cascading water does it really become clear how urgent the problem is,” he said. But whatever he felt while standing there did not pass through the screen.
The BBC calls this “the most ambitious environmental series” it has ever commissioned, although I’m not sure what it’s all about. There are certainly the most presenters: Packham is joined by Steve Beckshall in the Maldives (good job if you can get it, etc.), Liz Bonin in California, Ade Adepitan in Kenya, Gordon Buchanan in Brazil and Ella Al- Shamahi in Cambodia.
Packham is serious about the procedures, but Backshall – although I’m sure he’s fully committed to the goals of the environmental show, and I’m a big fan of his Deadly 60 children’s show – has a natural enthusiasm, which means he can’t help him behave as if he were on a really great holiday.
The show is informative. I learned about manta’s eating and reproductive habits, the scale of poaching in the Cambodian rainforest, and the changes that hydroelectric dams are causing on the Mekong River. But there was no sense of urgency.
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