A Natural World?

What does the narrative style of BBC documentary Africa say about the human desire to understand?

Another year, another David Attenborough documentary. The genial octogenarian has now been making television programming for the BBC for an impressive 50 years - 2013 will be his 51st. To spend more than half a century at the forefront of documentary programming is remarkable by anybody's estimation; to consistently claim millions of viewers for his work is testament to his outstanding abilities as a narrator and his mastery of his subject..

Wildly (excuse the pun) popular documentaries are rare beasts indeed. The turnoff for many, perversely in the eyes of some, seems to be the lack of a fictional element; the pace can be cumbersome, the story an uninspiring or derivative one told by someone more at home in a youth hostel than a plush studio in London. Yet the figures for his work are amazingly consistent; Planet Earth managed an audience of approximately 8.5 million and Blue Planet topped 6.5 million viewers overall.

Obviously it's crazy to suggest Attenborough has no part to play in this success - otherwise the Discovery Channel would be a smash hit (it isn't). Conventional storytelling is still the dominant form in a postmodern media that has already finished with its Big Brother offspring just a decade after bringing it to incredulous voyeurs in 2000 (and perhaps that asks questions of how far television has really moved in the last decade). But it's also true that realism, incidental truths, form the structure many people perceive in their daily lives and much of television has benefited from it.

Conservatism still abounds, however, in many areas of documentary films, particularly with regards to scoring the work. Africa, the BBC's latest ratings-magnet midweek documentary, makes intelligent use of its scenery to create 'found' orchestras on occasion, employing the percussive rustle of bird flight and the sparse bursts of water to nice effect. But predominantly it employs more traditional methods (although if I hear a trombone in a hippo's presence again I may write to them to demand an explanation for their laziness).

Much of what's not changed can be found in the twin pillars traditionally known as plot and character, and this is arguably where documentary appears to have captured imaginations. Right from the start documentary makers have recognised a need for an emotional - recognisable - core in this alien environment, and that's perhaps the most revealing point of natural documentary film.

Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, released in 1922, was the first to create a narrative out of a 'real' existence, although this followed other humans in the north of Alaska as they survived the planet's harshest seasons. Flaherty had his 'cast' act out their lives before the camera, perhaps aiming to strip the artifice of film and replace it with something closer to our own existence, as well as presenting his audience with something they had never know existed. Controversy arose when it was revealed Flaherty had woven fiction into his work, renaming the cast and building a cut-out igloo for his 'family' to live in and be filmed in comfort - but it didn't stop it becoming an enormous critical and commercial success.

And that thread runs through much of today's work, although now the narrators seek to describe what they see, without first setting the scene. It's absolutely a more naturalistic scene for it, and captures what we want from reality. But it's undoubtedly true that the heart of both historical and contemporary work lies in the emotional element; the desire to understand and relate.

Increasingly superior camerawork and visual technology's made natural beauty - the early draw with documentaries - a great more vivid and I feel there's much to be said for the clever deployment of handheld and steady shots - balletic movements abound, wave-like, throughout Blue Planet, and Africa utilises vast overheads to reveal colour-kissed landscapes much akin to abstract art. This in itself is an intelligent form of communication - a quietly accessible art for the 'chattering classes' as one journalist put it.

But its when bringing the creatures themselves into play that the traditional core of documentary film is best shown. Anthropomorphism's a lazy way to describe much of what occurs in the miniature arcs at work throughout these series - but to all intents and purposes that's what we're seeing, and whilst that's done great positive work in helping millions make sense of the world around them, or simply marvel at the wondrous palette of colour frequently on show, perhaps something is missing as a result.

Does this in itself change our perception of an untamed environment? Honesty's too clumsy a word but a certain fragment of truth spins away (me effectively saying honesty in more pretentious terms) when capturing and recording 'to the beat', to be watched on comprehensible terms. Frequently there are key themes being observed which have huge bearings on our lives; death, birth, conflict, all subject to the brutal Darwinian existence nature still adheres to.

Perhaps that final point underlies all others; the planet is simply too tough for us to countenance on anything but our own terms. Stories must be created, clearly for entertainment reasons but seeing nature at its brutal work - killing, breeding to maintain race, leaving children for dead - is beyond our emotional reasoning. Nothing's as much of a turn off as incomprehension.