Review of The Spy In The... Collection: Lions / Elephants / Bears

Introduction

How to get close to animals and film them in such a way as to really capture the essence of these animals? Remote cameras disguised in various forms so they seem to part of the natural environment. So, small remote-controlled cameras are disguised variously as boulders, bamboo canes, a piece of trash, fish, and animal dung to name a few. Add the mirrored magi cam to the mix and we have an interesting array of spy technology for the natural environment.

This series is broken into three parts:

Elephants - wonderful creatures whose intelligence is beautifully captured here, there`s a wonderful and poignant scene where the travelling elephants come across the remains of one of their own.

Lions - leading the life of Reilly overall, spending way too much time relaxing in the sun and you forget just how dangerous these animals are until you later see these awesome killing machines in action

Bears - slightly different set-up this time round as this segment focuses on Polar bears, Grizzly bears, Pandas and the South American Spectacled Bear (the inspiration for Paddington Bear).

Video

Some quite exquisite shots including really close up (i.e licking the camera and swiping it with paws type stuff…). Quite stunning really.

Audio

Nice soundtrack mainly by Will Gregory from Goldfrapp and narration from David Attenborough to provide the gravitas required. The music for the lion and elephant section both Goldfrapp moody and African, whilst the bear segment music is positively Baloo-esque.

Features

Nowt, some kind of feature on the various cameras or bloopers of the various failures would have been nice, although you do get to see some of the latter in the episodes themselves

Conclusion

I`m not a particular nature programme fanatic, I`ll watch the odd series that looks interesting; normally something the Beeb put a lot of time into promoting, generally has Attenborough involvement somewhere and also seems to push the boundaries of nature filming just that little bit further. The Spy In The… is just one of those series. The gimmick with this series is the radio controlled cameras that take you to the very heart of the animals being documented. I`m surprised no-one has really tried this before, but it works just beautifully.

I can still remember the episode with Attenborough in the heart of a group of mountain Gorillas. This was breathtaking TV back in 1978 and although I missed the terrestrial run of this in what appears to be 2004 according to Wiki, The Spy In The… had the same impact on me. It really was a joy to watch how animals, and particularly the younger ones behaved without any inhibitions or caution over any potential danger from film crews. All very natural and therefore as real as it`s likely to get.

Once more, the BBC delivers a quality, albeit short, nature documentary series that increases our understanding of the animal kingdom whilst also opening new ideas for future documentarians on how to put together new and more exciting series.