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
Showing posts with label Travelogue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Travelogue. Show all posts
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Taming the Great Bear
A journey across Russia for BBC2 brought Jonathan Dimbleby face to face with shamans, Cossacks – and an amorous female welder. Andrew Pettie meets him...
Jonathan Dimbleby and Russia go way back. The writer and broadcaster, 63, visited Moscow in the early 1980s to film a series for ITV about the Cold War. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. “I found the experience extremely depressing,” he says. “You were constantly hemmed in by security. You couldn’t talk freely and the people would look at you scowlingly, if at all. The crew and I would carefully search our hotel for secret service bugs – it was all very cloak and dagger stuff.”
A quarter of a century on, Dimbleby is back. He has returned to Russia to make a five-part travelogue about the country and its people for BBC2. The change in attitude to Westerners was one of his journey’s many surprises. “On this trip I was completely free to talk to anyone,” he says. “People were very forthcoming, and that was a transformation. The fact that Russia is now a pretty crude market economy was another. Wherever you go you see Western restaurants, Western shops, Western and Japanese cars. Although many Russian cities remain drab and ugly, the material life there is clearly much greater.”
That said, Dimbleby, who proves a knowledgeable and at times shrewdly critical guide, believes that the modern Russian state still has much in common with its Communist predecessor. “Russians are only free to say what they like if their voice isn’t heard, if they don’t matter,” he says. “The state is still repressive: the judiciary is effectively controlled by the Kremlin; the parliament is a rubber stamp; the media is muzzled. Russia is run by oligarchs, the secret service, the military and the political class, who are allied to those groupings. It’s a harsh thing to say, but for me Russia is a crypto-fascist society.”
Dimbleby’s views on Russian politics make for grim reading. But his experiences of meeting ordinary Russians – in all their diverting diversity – were almost uniformly positive. “I felt a great contrast between the structure of the state and the way that it’s going – and I think it’s getting worse, not better – and, on the other hand, the extraordinary hospitality and warmth of the people I met along the route. The series is essentially about that Russia – an attempt to get to the heart of the Russian people.”
One thing no one can accuse Dimbleby of is taking shortcuts. During the course of filming, he and the crew travelled 10,000 miles. They journeyed by car, train, boat, bus and on horseback (with Cossacks) from Murmansk in the north to Vladivostock in the distant east, dropping in on dozens of unlikely people and places on the way. At one moment Dimbleby is taking tea with a group of glamorous St Petersburg opinion-formers. The next he’s meeting a Buryat shaman on the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia. His most bizarre encounter, though, involved being chatted up by a female welder in a sulphur spring once frequented by Tolstoy.
“We were in Pyatigorsk, a spa town in the Caucases,” he says. “I leapt out of the van, stripped to my underpants and went down to this slippery rock and into the water. I found myself sitting half-naked alongside five of the most curious characters imaginable. One looked like a walrus with a great moustache and water pouring over his head. Next to him was a woman twice my size who’d been a welder up in the north. They treated me like someone from outer space who had just nestled amongst them. The welder seemed to like me, which was very flattering of course.”
To Dimbleby’s credit, the series is more than a wide-eyed, Palin-esque adventure. He includes refreshingly schoolmasterly segments on Russian history and some of the country’s crippling social ills. (The life expectancy of the average Russian male, we’re told, is 59. The principal cause of young male death is alcoholism and alcohol poisoning.) This approach is intentional; Dimbleby says it’s vital that travelogues inform as well as entertain. “You’ve got to offer the viewer some meat, rather than just candy floss.”
The undisputed star, however, is Russia itself. The country, as Dimbleby’s epic travels illustrate, is almost unthinkably big. “When you realise that Siberia alone is larger than the United States including Alaska and Western Europe put together, you get a picture of just how huge Russia is,” he says. “It was nothing, by the end of filming, to go on 15 or 20-hour train journeys.” At times Dimbleby sounds almost overwhelmed by the scale of his undertaking. “There were moments when I thought: ‘Oh God, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.’ Because Russia is so complex, so big. But I’m glad I had a go at chewing.”
Dimbleby’s affection for Russia and the Russians is evident and, as the series progresses, infectious. But his love of his subject hasn’t blinded him to its many problems. “I found the experience both daunting and exhilarating,” he says. “I’m not exhilarated by the politics of Russia, by the state. I’m depressed by those. But I was exhilarated by the challenge of the journey and the people I met. Would I do it again? No. Am I glad I did it? Absolutely, yes.”
Russia: a Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby starts on BBC2 on Sunday, 11 May at 10.05pm
Jonathan Dimbleby and Russia go way back. The writer and broadcaster, 63, visited Moscow in the early 1980s to film a series for ITV about the Cold War. It wasn’t a pleasant trip. “I found the experience extremely depressing,” he says. “You were constantly hemmed in by security. You couldn’t talk freely and the people would look at you scowlingly, if at all. The crew and I would carefully search our hotel for secret service bugs – it was all very cloak and dagger stuff.”
A quarter of a century on, Dimbleby is back. He has returned to Russia to make a five-part travelogue about the country and its people for BBC2. The change in attitude to Westerners was one of his journey’s many surprises. “On this trip I was completely free to talk to anyone,” he says. “People were very forthcoming, and that was a transformation. The fact that Russia is now a pretty crude market economy was another. Wherever you go you see Western restaurants, Western shops, Western and Japanese cars. Although many Russian cities remain drab and ugly, the material life there is clearly much greater.”
That said, Dimbleby, who proves a knowledgeable and at times shrewdly critical guide, believes that the modern Russian state still has much in common with its Communist predecessor. “Russians are only free to say what they like if their voice isn’t heard, if they don’t matter,” he says. “The state is still repressive: the judiciary is effectively controlled by the Kremlin; the parliament is a rubber stamp; the media is muzzled. Russia is run by oligarchs, the secret service, the military and the political class, who are allied to those groupings. It’s a harsh thing to say, but for me Russia is a crypto-fascist society.”
Dimbleby’s views on Russian politics make for grim reading. But his experiences of meeting ordinary Russians – in all their diverting diversity – were almost uniformly positive. “I felt a great contrast between the structure of the state and the way that it’s going – and I think it’s getting worse, not better – and, on the other hand, the extraordinary hospitality and warmth of the people I met along the route. The series is essentially about that Russia – an attempt to get to the heart of the Russian people.”
One thing no one can accuse Dimbleby of is taking shortcuts. During the course of filming, he and the crew travelled 10,000 miles. They journeyed by car, train, boat, bus and on horseback (with Cossacks) from Murmansk in the north to Vladivostock in the distant east, dropping in on dozens of unlikely people and places on the way. At one moment Dimbleby is taking tea with a group of glamorous St Petersburg opinion-formers. The next he’s meeting a Buryat shaman on the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia. His most bizarre encounter, though, involved being chatted up by a female welder in a sulphur spring once frequented by Tolstoy.
“We were in Pyatigorsk, a spa town in the Caucases,” he says. “I leapt out of the van, stripped to my underpants and went down to this slippery rock and into the water. I found myself sitting half-naked alongside five of the most curious characters imaginable. One looked like a walrus with a great moustache and water pouring over his head. Next to him was a woman twice my size who’d been a welder up in the north. They treated me like someone from outer space who had just nestled amongst them. The welder seemed to like me, which was very flattering of course.”
To Dimbleby’s credit, the series is more than a wide-eyed, Palin-esque adventure. He includes refreshingly schoolmasterly segments on Russian history and some of the country’s crippling social ills. (The life expectancy of the average Russian male, we’re told, is 59. The principal cause of young male death is alcoholism and alcohol poisoning.) This approach is intentional; Dimbleby says it’s vital that travelogues inform as well as entertain. “You’ve got to offer the viewer some meat, rather than just candy floss.”
The undisputed star, however, is Russia itself. The country, as Dimbleby’s epic travels illustrate, is almost unthinkably big. “When you realise that Siberia alone is larger than the United States including Alaska and Western Europe put together, you get a picture of just how huge Russia is,” he says. “It was nothing, by the end of filming, to go on 15 or 20-hour train journeys.” At times Dimbleby sounds almost overwhelmed by the scale of his undertaking. “There were moments when I thought: ‘Oh God, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.’ Because Russia is so complex, so big. But I’m glad I had a go at chewing.”
Dimbleby’s affection for Russia and the Russians is evident and, as the series progresses, infectious. But his love of his subject hasn’t blinded him to its many problems. “I found the experience both daunting and exhilarating,” he says. “I’m not exhilarated by the politics of Russia, by the state. I’m depressed by those. But I was exhilarated by the challenge of the journey and the people I met. Would I do it again? No. Am I glad I did it? Absolutely, yes.”
Russia: a Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby starts on BBC2 on Sunday, 11 May at 10.05pm
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