Freeze frames from Sir David Attenborough’s new BBC series show him braving the Arctic Circle while it was -18C.
Filming for The Green Planet took place in northern Finland in 2020, just after the area had experienced its heaviest snowfall for 38 years.
At one point Sir David, 95, had to stand in a waist-high snowdrift while a drone captured a scene.
Episode producer Rosie Thomas said it was a battle to protect the naturalist from the cold.
She said: “He had hot water bottles, heated blankets and he was wearing about six coats.”
But it could have been even worse. Rosie said: “I was there 10 days and it snowed every day apart from the day David was there and the sun came out.”
Executive producer Mike Gunton told how it was “quite an undertaking” for someone of Sir David’s age to film in such extreme conditions.
He also said the crew were lucky to get the footage because filming took place just before the pandemic.
Mike said: “We got off the plane just as they were beginning to shut everything down, so that was the last foreign filming trip we did. We got back just in the nick of time.”
Sir David was 93 at the time the scenes were shot in February 2020 to show an extreme edge of the temperate climate zone.
The footage will air in tomorrow’s episode, which also features a very hot South Africa.
Rosie said: “It’s a habitat that relies on fire to burn through it. We filmed a story about a fire lily which waits underground for 20 years. It’s the first to come up after a fire. Three days later, in this completely burnt landscape, these little red flowers emerge.”
Tomorrow’s episode will also feature new discoveries about how trees communicate using underground fungi known as the “wood wide web”.
*The Green Planet: Seasonal Worlds, BBC One, tomorrow, 7pm.
