David Attenborough v Morgan Freeman: my winner in the nature wars

Perhaps it’s because fundamentally, over here, we see Earth as a fragile, fascinating cradle of pulsing life, myriad in its oddness and difference; a place in which to learn things, to be curious, to inquire; a place that is always changing, that has been taught to us by Attenborough, and before him, Charles Darwin. Whereas the Americans simply see it as a bloodstained, charred, corpse-strewn arena of death and killing: a garish Hollywood stage set where, as Morgan Freeman purrs, “die-nasties” like the sabre-tooth tigers slogged it out, century after century. It’s the difference between watching in colour, and black and white.

Drinking in Planet Earth III, I experienced intense anxiety. What will we do when Attenborough can no longer narrate the infinitesimal habits of a clown frog fish? Will we have to watch nature as seen by Disney or Spielberg (who exec produces Life on Our Planet), in which terror birds stomp their claws as if in a western?

Attenborough is 97, and still able to croak out the show’s wonderful scripts — there’s “still much to discover”, he says, hopefully. But when he’s presenting to camera, it’s obvious that it’s a huge physical effort for him. At one point he seemed to say he was in Darwin’s back garden, but I’m not sure he was: or at least, he didn’t seem like he was there. It was almost as if he had already passed on and was being beamed to us in hologram form. Maybe that’s what will happen, if that isn’t what’s happening already.

When he does go, though, who else will there be to effuse over the sea angel, a tiny see-through, ghost-like organism whose stomach, when empty, “glows orange”? Or the green sea turtles who, collectively, lay as many as two million eggs in one night? “Two million,” I shrieked. “Their fannies must be gasping.” And then there are the beach lions of Namibia who, in the opening episode, try to land seabirds in the pitch black, every snarling whisker illuminated using extraordinary night-filming technology.

The rest is sublime: lean, whispered scripts stuffed uncompromisingly with facts. Each segment unfolds with infinite variety, so many camera angles, perspectives, broad, scene-setting shots, unpredictable events, dynamite changes of scale. It’s breathlessly nimble: few television programmes can go from soaring Ridley Scott epicness to the diddling humour of a Mexican telenovela in one leap.

I’m not saying Attenborough’s shows are perfect: some of it is a bit twee (a fish burping after a meal as if in a cartoon). And there’s the nonstop doomy reminders of seas rising, temperatures warming, the crew rushing “to intervene”, which I’m not against, unless it is driven by the same lordly arrogance that has got us into this problem in the first place. But what a majestic series this is: a gift.

Every element that makes Attenborough’s shows so effortlessly gripping is lacking in the lumpy, uninspiring Life on Our Planet. How has this show got made? I like to imagine Netflix execs sitting about in a television commissioning suite in Palo Alto, surrounded by toy triceratops, thinking they need to “do nature”. Saying, “Let’s get Spielberg back in as exec producer,” and, “Let’s get Morgan Freeman to narrate it,” without realising the only thing that’s going to persuade children to watch isn’t celebs or money but dedication, interest and love.

They didn’t know where to begin, for a start. We were at once told, amid frantic orchestra music, that “this is the STORY of LIFE”, but later, that the secret of life is “lost in the mists of time”. Can’t they hazard a guess? Attenborough would. He’d take us through the theories at least. He wouldn’t let hundreds of animals drift across the screen, skipping madly about in history, not telling us what any of them were, just hinting at “endless periods of rain”, without giving us any of the juicy detail (I looked it up: during the Carnian pluvial episode there were two million years of rain. No British show would ever gloss over this).

The thing about Attenborough is that he just really likes animals: he wants them to be the stars, not himself, or the score or the voiceover. If you aren’t interested in them, you don’t bother to research them, which means you end up with a sprawling, greedy show that purports to tackle all aspects of life on our planet over the past four billion years but ends up illuminating none of them. It felt like Netflix’s vapid Queen Cleopatra, but with dinosaurs.

Two great shows to finish with: The Hidden Children of Ruinerwold Farm on BBC4 (Tue), and Apple’s inventive restaging of The Enfield Poltergeist (Apple TV+). In many ways both tell the same story: two troubled, psychically weird families get swept up in a mad media storm. But one’s set in rural Holland, the other in norf London.

In the Dutch show we were told about a family of nine children whose father had cut them off from the world for years. We were given some gritty details: how one son lived in a dog kennel for a year, how another was treated “as his wife”. But really it was much deeper than that: what do years in captivity do to the human soul?

The Enfield Poltergeist, by contrast, was high gloss and high drama. Actors lip-synched along to real audio from the “hauntings” while the dowdy detached house where it all happened was built carefully around them. I recommend it for the fastidiously gorgeous look alone.

I must say that what immediately struck me, though, was how willing ordinary people were to let random men pry into the lives of teenage girls. Photos showed grown psychic researchers getting into bed with the two girls from the haunting in their nighties. It made you wonder: what’s more scary, a raging supernatural being or a 1970s red-blooded male?

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