There are few things of which Britain is a world-leading exporter these days. Marmalade, perhaps, or nostalgia. But above all else, this country is incontrovertibly the market’s premier provider of wildlife documentaries, from Blue Planet to Planet Earth, Dynasties to The Hunt. Now, the BBC is back with its latest colossal undertaking, Frozen Planet II, a five-episode series sifting through the snow and peering beneath the ice sheets of our vast glacial landscapes.
This new series opens with its narrator, Sir David Attenborough, speaking on camera about the urgency of its themes. It’s an alarming start: not just because of the perils of climate change, but because I’m so used to Attenborough being a disembodied voice. The point of portraying these frozen wastelands, he announces, is “to witness their wonders, while there is still time to save them”. It is a theme that will recur throughout the episode, from the calving of a giant iceberg in Greenland to a polar bear moping on a shrinking ice floe. When the first iteration of Frozen Planet was released in 2011, it confined discussion of imminent climatic disaster to its final episode – now, it will be a running theme throughout.
