We seldom ‘watch television’. The ubiquitous internet provides constant news updates and DVDs provide films and series when we want to watch for entertainment. But occasionally the good old BBC has the power to attract me back to the small screen and that was very much the case this evening with a BBC 2 documentary about polar bears. In The Polar Bear Family and Me wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan follows a polar bear family over three seasons in Svalbard. This evening’s programme included extraordinary footage of a polar bear trying to work out a way of getting at Buchanan has he filmed from the inside of an ‘ice cube’ (a protective perspex cage). You can see the scene here. It is the equivalent, I suppose, of cameramen being lowered in steel cages into shark-infested waters. I doubt whether this sort of programme would get made if it were not for public-funded television and yet it is top-notch entertainment, as well as highly educational.
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