Animal Babies: First Year on Earth review: even the cutest of animals can't win the battle against man
One of social media’s major gateway drugs are cute baby animals, of which there were unsurprisingly plenty in Animal Babies: First Year on Earth (BBC Two). Once I got over the concept of otters being numbered among the half-dozen of “our planet’s most iconic animals” (narrator Wunmi Mosaku did her best with a script prone to silliness and anthropomorphism), there was much to enjoy here. What could top the sight of a Kenyan baby elephant slipping over in mud like a pachydermic Oliver Hardy, or a tiny Ugandan mountain gorilla emulating its father in beating its chest, the aural equivalent of tapping a yoghurt pot vs beating a bass drum?
Rather like the excellent Dynasties, it emphasized hierarchies and social interactions, only this time applied to newborns, as infant hyenas, otters, elephants, macaques, gorillas and Arctic foxes were followed over the first year of their lives, across three episodes and four continents. The visuals were sumptuous and the sense of intimacy occasionally extraordinary, yet there was little sense of genuine jeopardy; after all, you don’t kill off your leading character in the first episode unless you’re Jed Mercurio.
But the storytelling was adept, informative and not overly sentimental: a taut-turned-tender encounter between an elephant and her estranged sister; the mystery of Arctic foxes knowing how to pounce through the snow instinctively; the son of the alpha female in a Sri Lankan macaque troop learning how to use its position. But amid the threats presented by rivals, by predators and by the elements, it was man that once again represented the greatest danger of all, devouring jungle by the acre, discarding plastic by the ton and disregarding climate change at our – and their – peril.
