There are some programmes that you know were always meant to be. So it is with Serengeti, a wildlife documentary that doesn’t just dabble with anthropomorphism, as most natural history programmes do, shamefacedly, but embraces it wholeheartedly. Here it is at last: savannah soap! And it’s fab.
It’s partly the work of director John Downer, who has long pioneered techniques such as the use of boulder-cams, drones and remote micro-cameras attached to animals to create a radically subjective and kinetic style in wildlife filming, unlike the traditional approach where a single lens pans hopefully between Sir David and the rustling bushes. Downer’s credits include Earthflight, Pride, Snow Bears and the Spy in the Wild series. But zippy though those shows are, these new technical possibilities have been awaiting a corresponding creative vision. Here it comes!
The mastermind of Serengeti is none other than Simon Fuller, who created the Spice Girls and invented the Pop Idol phenomenon. It was Fuller who had the idea of converting this dramatic new footage into outright drama — and the means to make it happen, via his production company, XIX Entertainment.
His aim, he says, is to make the lives of wild animals more relatable, showing us “their commitment to family and providing for loved ones, their instincts for survival and the joy they take from the simple things in life.” Just like Love Island, really, if not so feral.
The filming, on a private game reserve in Tanzania, took two years, using these new techniques to get the multiple points of view and startlingly subjective angles on each incident that all compelling TV drama needs. Only afterwards were writers brought in to shape the material into, frankly, fiction, interweaving multiple strands, as they establish memorable characters and take us through storyli nes. So the footage is real — but the stories we are told about it, that have been edited out of it, are invented. Human, you might say.
We meet Kali, a single mum who happens to be a lioness, expelled from the pride for playing away, trying bravely to care for her four cubs all on her own. Then there’s Bakari, a romeo who happens to be a baboon. His love interest, Sabira, has switched her affections to an alpha-male, leaving him bereft. How can he win her back? It’s all go.
Everybody has troubles. Hyena Zalika has to step up to leading the pack before she’s ready for it, when her heroic mum sacrifices herself for the greater good.
Elephant matriarch Nalla dotes on her baby — but his teenage brother, Tembo, feels sidelined by the new arrival and must find a role. We’ve all been there.
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Fuller has orchestrated all this ruthlessly — and literally. There’s a mighty Lion King-style soundtrack and specially written songs, cooing “Seren-get-ee!” and expressing the feelings of the animals when their own growls and howls need supplementing.
Then there is the “storytelling”, voiced by John Boyega. It’s the animals themselves that speak through him — if not the whole Serengeti, in the first-person plural. “This is our story, a drama set in the heart of our world, experienced as we live and breathe it,” Boyega tells us, bringing a surprising south London inflection to the plains. Greetings card-style observations follow. “For all of us, embracing our destiny can be the hardest challenge of all”. It can, can’t it?
You have to admire this, in a way. Anthropomorphism wasn’t invented by Disney, as many sourpusses claim. That fabulous Lion-Man figure, carved out of mammoth ivory, is at least 35,000 years old. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, may once have said: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” as a way of suggesting animals inhabit an entirely different world. But here comes Fuller to prove otherwise. At last. Animals have just the same feelings as us! Only finer.
