Eleven years ago I found myself in at tent with several others in the Simien Mountains in northern Ethiopia. A few hours after our arrival, some trucks arrived and set up camp nearby. It was a BBC film crew making a programme about Africa's mountains.
A young Australian detached himself from the BBC crew and came to join us in our tent. He was studying the social structure of Gelada Baboons, and was acting as an adviser to the programme makers. A programme about the baboons (and their sociology) had been broadcast the previous week - he had written the script for that. He told us that a team of cameramen (he was full of wonderment at their skills) had gone to the Simiens, spent months filming, and gone back with hours of footage of a family group of Geladas, timelapse sunrises, gathering storms etc. Back in Bristol the wildlife unit started to edit it into some sort of narrative, and noticed that one of the very young baboons was walking with a limp. To make things a little more dramatic, they had dummies of young gelada made, flew a film crew back to Ethiopia, stuffed one of the dummies with goats entrails and the like, and placed it on a clifftop, then filmed it all as vultures came down and pecked away at the 'body'. The commentary on the finished film said something about the survival of the fittest, and that there was no place for sentiment, implying that the young gelada had been abandoned to his fate.
This story has been at the back of my mind ever since whenever I see a BBC wildlife programme.
The relevance to The Frozen Planet? I'd forgotten the young Australian's name until I saw the 'making of' bit at the end, and there he was, Chadden Hunter, in an ice cave near Mt Erebus, then watching killer whales surfacing, and appearing in the credits as assistant producer.