Planet Earth II

For a decade every wildlife programme on television was measured against the first Planet Earth. This is the follow-up, made with cameras the first crew did not have: drones, and rigs small enough to run alongside an animal. There are six episodes, one kind of place each, with David Attenborough narrating. The pictures are the reason to see it, and the reason is enough; we recommend it with one caveat, about the music, which we will come to.

Nineteen camera operators are credited, among them Sophie Darlington, Martyn Colbeck and Mark MacEwen, and what they were able to do is visible inside ten minutes. The old way was a hide, a long lens and a great deal of waiting, and the animal was something watched from across a valley. Here the camera is down at the animal’s height and moving with it. In Cities, langur monkeys fight across the rooftops of an Indian town and the camera follows them from roof to roof.

The sequence everyone talks about is in the first episode, and it works even if you have seen the clip. A marine iguana hatchling digs out of the sand and has to reach the rocks, and between it and the rocks are racer snakes, a great many of them. The editors (Matt Meech, Nick Carline, Nigel Buck and Dave Pearce share the credit across the series) cut it as a chase: snakes low in the frame, the hatchling in the open, a strike that misses by an inch and another that does not miss the hatchling behind. We watched with a hand over our mouth. We were frightened for a lizard, and felt foolish afterwards, but the fear was earned. The camera stays at ground level, so the snakes come in from the edges of the picture as they would for the iguana, and Attenborough says almost nothing until it is over.

That restraint is the best of Attenborough here. Once the animals appear he does what he has always done. He gives each one a plain want, a mate or a meal or a way across, and then gets out of the way. He does not scold and he rarely jokes. When the red crabs of Christmas Island are killed on their march to the sea by an ant that should not be there, he says so in two sentences and lets the pictures do the rest.

The music does not share his confidence. Hans Zimmer, with Jacob Shea and Jasha Klebe, has scored the series as an adventure film, and the strings swell for every chase, soften for every courtship and mourn for every death. The pygmy sloth swimming out to find a female is a lovely, absurd sight, and it is given a theme fit for a coronation. Nothing in six episodes is allowed to stay quiet for long. By the third episode we felt we were being told how to react to things that needed no telling, and we began to resent the strings on behalf of the pictures.

The series also has favourites. Big cats, monkeys, birds and anything with a face get the long sequences; insects and reptiles appear mostly when they can be made frightening. A series this well equipped could have afforded a stranger cast. Seven directors are credited, Alastair Fothergill and Chadden Hunter among them, and they know what an audience wants to see.

People are kept out of the frame until Cities, which is the episode most worth thinking about. It shows animals making a living in places built against them, the langurs among them, and it is the only hour that says plainly what the other five leave you to infer: that the places in them are getting smaller. The series is gentle about this, gentler than it might have been. It wants you to look before it asks you to worry.

Watch it on the largest television in the house with the lights off, and do not let anyone talk during the iguanas. Certificate PG; the hatchlings would dispute it.