The end of (TV) natural history? Frozen Planet review

As a former television news and current affairs film maker I adore the visual power of the medium. The BBC’s Frozen Planet is about as good an example of the effectiveness of a well-crafted piece of TV as you will find. Yet watching it made me uneasy as well as charmed by its consummate deployment of image, music, sound and language to create a media effect that ultimately seemed remote from the actual subject. [Update: It appears that whole scenes were ‘faked‘. One segment was filmed in a zoo with fake snow. The BBC website made this clear but the film itself was misleading]