Channel 4 to show DiCaprio documentary

Channel 4 is to broadcast The 11th Hour, the polemical documentary about the environment fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio. In the documentary, which the channel will transmit on May 25, leading scientists, environmentalists, politicians and activists advance the argument that the Earth is facing environmental disaster, and ask what can be done.

Notable figures featured in The 11th Hour include professor Stephen Hawking, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai speak about global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction and the depletion of the oceans' habitats. The film also calls for restorative action to change global human activity through technology, social responsibility and conservation.

It lays responsibility for the warming of the planet mostly on the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere and also makes the claim that not since a meteor hit the planet 55m years ago have so many forms of life become extinct. The film, narrated and produced by DiCaprio, was written and directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners. It received critical praise when it premiered at the Canned Film Festival last year, with Times film writer James Christopher describing it as "brilliant and terrifying".

However, it also attracted some criticism, with former Greenpeace member Patrick Moore branding the film as "Hollywood hype" in an article for the Vancouver Sun. Channel 4 has bought the UK broadcast right to the documentary from Hollywood studio Warner Bros. Warner Home Video UK has also scheduled a DVD release of the film for June.

Wild China captures a vanishing world

Given the global meanderings of Attenborough and his ilk, you would imagine that there can be few parts of the planet that haven't heard the gentle footfalls of a BBC Natural History Unit camera crew. BBC Bristol, where the production arm is based, must be awash with indecipherable expenses claims picked up everywhere from the Atacama desert to the Tora Bora caves.

But there is one significant area that remains, if not entirely unvisited, then under-explored: rural China, with its remarkably diverse habitats, wildlife and lifestyles. As the BBC's stunningly shot new six-part series Wild China demonstrates, there's much about a life working in, say, the rice paddies of the Yangtze River flood plain, that hasn't changed for hundreds of years. In the wake of China's extraordinary economic expansion, however, these are landscapes likely to change rapidly over the next generation. Experts forecast that, across the next two decades, some 300 million rural Chinese will migrate to the cities in search of better-paid jobs. And all this will have a huge impact, not just on already endangered species such as the South China tiger, but also on many of the rural traditions (such as hunting with golden eagles) that Wild China features.

The attraction of capturing what may well be a fast-disappearing world certainly helped to carry the series producer, Phil Chapman, though the inevitable problems associated with shooting in an environment traditionally suspicious of foreign film crews. “China isn't yet as accessible as many other countries, so it was difficult. The local politics of filming on location there can be very complicated. But by collaborating with China Central Television, an officially sanctioned production company, we got privileged access to many of the country's most remote areas.”

Each programme looks at a different geographical area, and the Wild China team wasn't always sure what they'd find on their travels. “The sub-tropical south is a poor, and poorly researched, area, so getting precise information about what could be filmed, where and when, wasn't easy,” Chapman says. Eventually they fetched up in a remote area of Guizhou Province. “We were taken to Zhongdong cave, where it transpired we were to be lodged. Arriving as dusk fell, we were led under a wide arch beneath a huge cliff to find an entire village of 18 families housed inside the cave, including a school with six classes, plus a menagerie of cows, goats, pigs and chickens.”

Some of Chapman's most vivid memories are of the “remarkable” people he met - not the powerbrokers encountered at the many formal banquets he attended to ease the wheels of the series' production, but the characters encountered out in the provinces. People such as the rice-farming Song family, “who welcomed us into their wooden home, where swallows are encouraged to build nests in the living room”, and three cormorant fishermen on the Li River: “Mr Huang, Mr Huang, and Mr Huang.”

But it's the animals that are the show-stoppers. “Some sequences, such as images of Chiru antelopes filmed in temperatures of -30C in Tibet's Chang Tang Reserve, and male pandas scrapping over a fertile female in the Qinling Mountains, are probably genuine ‘firsts',” Chapman suggests. Other footage required specialist equipment, such as the infra-red cameras that captured a colony of bumblebee-sized bats living inside a hollow bamboo stem.

Sometimes, of course, Chapman and his team had to rely solely on that vital weapon in the armoury of the natural history film-maker - infinite patience. “Red pandas are shy, rare creatures which live in dense mountain forests and spend a lot of time in the treetops. A key to our success in filming them were the Chinese scientists, who suggested we try an area, at a more accessible altitude, where they'd been spotted during the winter. But, even so, we were able to observe them only fleetingly.”

There's a hint of regret in Chapman's voice here, and maybe even a sense of a little bit of unfinished business. Whether he will ever return to China, he is unsure. And with the Chinese economy set to become the world's largest in a couple of years, quite what the Chapmans of the future will find out in the wilds of this vast, beautiful, complex and challenging country is anyone's guess.

Wild China, BBC Two, Sun, 8.05pm

Louis Theroux goes big game hunting

Maverick TV journalist Louis Theroux talks exclusively to Serena Davies about his upcoming documentary, a look at the hunting industry in South Africa, where foreign tourists pay thousands of dollars to shoot big game on private farms

What made you choose this particular topic?

I’d done a film on high stakes gambling in Las Vegas and I’d done one on plastic surgery in Beverly Hills and I’d been thinking along the lines of what stories are there out there in a similar vein. There’s obviously a lot of controversy around the issue of hunting as there is around gambling and I like these stories where there is a moral dimension, stories that force you to think about your prejudices about a subject and explore the extent to which they are justified.

Hunting really divides people in Britain. We keep pets and we name our animals but we’re not too worried about industrial hunting practices. Though that is starting to change. We made this film last year, before Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall began their campaigns drawing attention to meat farming practices.

Certainly at the time we were making the film last year it was not to my mind self evident that the life of a kudu running around on a game farm in South Africa and shot by an American tourist for its horns is much worse than a battery farmed chicken here, cooped up in a cage with its claws and beak chopped off. In fact the kudu’s got it significantly better, I would have thought.

How did making the film alter your attitude to big game hunting?

I came away from the programme thinking that although I wouldn’t choose to hunt, I wouldn’t want to see it made illegal. The argument that [the game farmer] Pete Warren makes in the programme that the private ownership of game and the raising of game on farms is actually a very effective way of maintaining game stocks and preserving endangered species is a strong one.

Although I do feel there is more they could do to ensure the hunters themselves are confident. I don’t think half-blind people should be out there. In many hunting circles it used to be considered unsportsmanlike like to shoot from the truck. In Ernest Hemingway’s day it was a definite no-no. But nowadays those rules are all out of the window.

There is a lot of talk of the hunter’s “killer instinct” in this programme. Do you think this is something that would get expressed in other ways if the hunters didn’t have the opportunity to kill animals?

No I don’t. In some ways there’s a mystery at the heart of hunting and this programme which I don’t completely unravel. The bottom line is I don’t really understand why people want to shoot these animals.

The source of the pleasure is definitely not the act of doing harm though. I’m not being an apologist for it but even I can see the hunters that I met really strove to make the kills as clean as possible. There is a big premium on the idea of the clean big kill. No one would inflict unnecessary pain. They wanted the animals to die as painlessly as possible.

How do you persuade people to be involved in a programme such as this?

There’s always a negotiation that goes on to persuade people we are coming to the subject with an open mind but without surrendering too many pawns. We don’t want to misrepresent the fact that we will draw our own conclusions.

Big game hunters and the hunting industry in South Africa know a lot of people regard what they do as terrible, and the media have tended not to do them any favours. So it was an uphill struggle to win trust from the people, and to get into the world. The director and the associate producer went out there and met lots of people and tried to explain what we were doing and most of them said no and then we ground down Rhian (the game farmer who features in the film), who opened his doors to us and made it possible.

How did the experience of making this film compare with some of the others you have worked on?

With most of the worlds I’ve explored the people are possibly doing harm to themselves, either by gambling their money away or making themselves look a bit odd, or damaging themselves emotionally by becoming prostitutes. But in hunting it’s different because there are animals involved and hunters aren’t harming themselves, they are harming another living creature. I felt like this took us into a slightly different place: it was a bit tougher for me to work out what I felt about them.

Any upcoming projects you can tell us about?

They are still works in progress. I can’t get specific. The season is still open on making another programme about the right kind of intriguing public figure. I’ve sent two letters to Heather Mills and I was thinking of sending her a third one but at this point I think I’ve got to accept she’s just not in the mood at the moment. It’s all give and no take at this point.

Louis Theroux’s African Hunting Holiday is on BBC1 on Sunday, 6th April at 9.00pm

Animal Planet treads risky waters

Animal Planet's desire to become less warm and fuzzy means exposure to some unaccustomed issues, like danger on the high seas and journalistic fairness reveals David Bauder. A network crew returned to port in Australia last week after tagging along on a mission to interfere with a Japanese whaling expedition in the Antarctic. A miniseries about the experience, Whale Wars, is expected to air this fall.

To make the series, Animal Planet worked with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, activists who are considered either heroic defenders of wildlife or dangerous meddlers, depending on your politics. On this trip, the group tossed rancid butter on Japanese ships to make the decks slippery and to spoil whale meat, and diplomatic intervention was needed after two society members climbed aboard a Japanese ship. "There is an inherent excitement in what they do," said Charlie Foley, Animal Planet's vice president of development. "It's always dangerous, and there are also questions about whether this is something they should be doing. It's not a prototypical Animal Planet story, and that's one of the reasons we were attracted to it."

Best known for its annual cacophony of cute, the Puppy Bowl, Animal Planet is particularly popular among children and older viewers. But that's not where the money is in television. Animal Planet craves young adult viewers, so it is promising "gripping entertainment" and is trying new series that "bring out the raw, visceral emotion in the animal kingdom." Other networks passed on Whale Wars when pitched by Tennessee-based producer Rivr Media primarily because of the danger and cost of insuring a camera crew, but Animal Planet pounced. Its sister network, Discovery, has a major hit with Deadliest Catch, about dangerous work in a forbidding ocean environment.

The Antarctic mission, Foley said, is "like a giant game of Battleship," with activists hunting Japanese ships over a vast ocean. The scenery is spectacular, he said. The physical risk to crew members (a camera knocked overboard turned out to be the biggest casualty) is not the only chance Animal Planet is taking with Whale Wars. The network puts its reputation on the line by collaborating with an organization that some say has aggressive tactics. Animal Planet was there to observe and document, Foley said, comparing the network's role to journalists embedded with military units.

He promised to be "as evenhanded as we can be" and defended the decision to show only one side. "I'm not sure we wanted to be telling the story of the Japanese whalers," he said. "We wanted to go down there and tell the story of what motivates these people who are trying to stop the whaling."