In my first year at York, a group of my friends formed a football team and named themselves the March of the Penguins (‘the Penguins’ for short. These boys, who were most frequently found uttering the phrases ‘your mum’ and ‘that’s what she said’ were, I thought, not the usual demographic for wildlife documentaries. But this autumn has rolled around and brought with it David Attenborough’s latest show Life- and suddenly nature is cool. It seems that every Monday night most of York is curling up in front of the TV, but not to watch desperate celebrities dance the American Smooth or be buried in coffins of maggots and spiders. Instead they’re watching those same spiders do what they do best; just be spiders.
Queue horrific clips of insects sacrificing themselves for their hungry young and pelicans that eat baby gannets. Whole… and alive.
Attenborough may be a national treasure, and without his melodic silver-fox voice oozing over the shots of sleepy meerkats and hunting seals, Life would undoubtedly suffer, but it’s the cameramen who are the real heroes. Having made use of cutting edge technology to achieve their remarkable shots, it is all too easy to forget that behind the lens is a group of cameraman freezing half to death in the arctic, or being plagued by the very flies they’re trying to film.
One of the star sequences of the series so far, has undoubtedly been the Humpback Whale Heat Run.
In a typical display of hard-to-get dating, the female Humpback races in front of a bevy of amorous males who happily chase her, all competing for the ultimate prize; copulation and impregnation. Graceful though they are, filming anything that weighs forty tons and that can, and will be, swimming at seventeen miles per hour, is a daunting task. Enter Roger Munns who, dressed in a wetsuit, and with only a camera for company, decided to race with the (very) big boys.
When I speak to Munns he is clearly still riding high off the experience, and keeps returning to it as one of the most pivotal moments of his career. When I ask him if filming this sequence was the most terrifying activity he could have engaged in, he responds with a laugh. He does admit that it was pretty nerve racking; ‘you never know how they will react when they see you in the water’ he tells me, with the breezy confidence of hindsight.
Yet Munns makes a good point. The Life team sought to film animals behaving naturally in their natural environments yet any human presence, let alone one accompanied by cameras, rigging equipment and the various other trappings of a crew, should make animals behave anything but naturally. ‘Patience is an essential quality’ according to Munns who recalls spending hours tracking three metre long fish who he endearingly describes as ‘shy’- he will alter describe a cuttlefish as cute!- until it put out and started showing off the camera.
The Heat Run alone took an incredible 21 days to search and shoot, which leaves me wondering whether the Life team feel gratified by four years hard graft in exchange for 8 hours of aired footage, though Munns enthusiasm makes this question, at least on his part, somewhat redundant . His habit for anthropomorphising the animals he shoots suggests a passion and an enthusiasm that makes the endlessness of the shoots worth it. In Life on Location, a welcome behind the scenes addition to Attenborough’s latter series, Munns is captured likening a two ton whale calf to a gambolling lamb. This experience, he tells me, was his best encounter to date. ‘With the calf there was a sense that it was aware of you and not just the other way round’; such a unique and personal encounter is what makes me, along with everyone else who saw the programme, so very jealous of Munns.
With a team made up of people like Munns, with so much enthusiasm for their work, it’s no wonder that Life is proving such a draw. Munns is just as passionate when he talks to me about those cute cuttlefish and the smaller less well known fish, like nudibranchs, that he photographs. Indeed I get the idea that the public’s preconceptions about sea-life can annoy him. When I ask him if he’s ever been injured in the process of his work, thinking of shark attacks and deadly jelly fish stings, he dryly offers me the time a clown fish (let’s call him Nemo) nibbled ferociously on his elbow.
Then when our talk turns to a genuinely scary encounter, filming sharks off the coast of South Africa without a cage, he speaks warmly of an animal which is most people’s worst nightmare. ‘Sharks just need a good PR agent’ he instructs me ‘even some of the major documentaries use sensationalised shots’ he continues, at which point I decide not to warn him that we’re a tabloid newspaper.
Life seems to stand out as being unique in Attenborough’s canon, not least because it’s opening episode, which detailed the most unique adaptations of animals to their surroundings, did little to disguise its atheistic undertone. The animals in Life are cruelly pragmatic, and although the series features the cute and cuddly (baby flamingos falling out of their nests and minuscule lizards), the emphasis is always on adaptation, a thinly disguised ‘evolution’. In a series of astonishing sequences, the most emotional event of Life was perhaps that of the Komodo Dragons, who stalked their increasingly distressed buffalo-dinner for three weeks before it finally died. What was most poignant was the cameramen’s own distress at the circle of life.
So do the cold blooded creatures inspire the same tearful welling in Munns? He thinks for a bit- and then launches into an amusingly heartbreaking tale of the time he lengthily and happily filmed a thorny sea-horse wafting along the currents only to have it eaten, in one mouthful, by a somewhat rude flounder. Luckily Munns’ tale ended happily with the inconsiderate flounder spitting out his too-thorny snack but he does admit that at such times it is hard not to want to intervene.
This question of intervention lies at the heart of both Attenborough’s and Munns’ work. Throughout our chat Munns has steered towards the need for conservation, and once I ask him explicitly he really gets going. ‘I ask myself will my children be around to see these things’ he ponders clearly recalling all that his line of work has privileged him to see. Munns points to the Asian market for shark fins, for rare tropical fish as ‘live fish’, i.e live until ordered in restaurants, as indicators of the need for global conservation.
For cameramen like Munns there is a definite sense that they are documenting things that are fast disappearing. He describes the rapidly decreasing Leatherback Turtles as ‘great prehistoric things’ before adding his poignant warning ‘I’m afraid they’re going the same way as the dinosaurs’. Clearly even the coolest jobs come with a sense of social responsibility.
Yet amongst all this talk of conservation I cannot help but think what the environmental impact of the Life team’s work was. Thousands of miles flown around the globe for the amusement of the British public is only justifiable with this added dimension of documentation.
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