> British Bolshevik Commissars

Balanced/By-default Conservative more like.

Hear Hear ..anyone with half a brain who saw how the Polar Bear buried itself in the driven snow would realise that it was impossible to film the birth ...apart from the obvious dangers even if it could be done ...

but here we actually hve footage of a seal giving bearth to a baby poler bear and this is the real scalddal and yet the bbc or channel four wiht its BALLS screenng this event not even murdock would brush his face on thi cross specias birth scanale and wh would they do this anyway unles an atempt to balance the animals up there are more seal than poler bears in general hhundreds more so if they can use a seal to pop out some new bourne poler bears then I think it as to be a good thing but why the media will nottouch this I do not understand like some grand conspiracy and the euqstion really should be HOW DOES THE FOETUS GET IN THERE not put up the seal by attenbrouge with a gloved hand or sugesting that a seal and a bear would have sexual intecoruse because they organs are the wrong shape and speking as someone who has touched the member of a poler bear you do not want to get this mixed up and so posibbly someone is harvesting the semen of the bears and then tipping it on the sleeping female seals in order to pump them with full of baby but i think the anser to this is what the TELEGRAPH needs to be focussing on and not what david atenborough does when he leaves his house AM I RIGHT?

The Beeb and Sir David have nothing to apologise for, I watched the excellent programme and nothing was said in it that was controversial about global warming. Camera crew are not going to risk ther lives and the lives of the baby bears. It was all pretty balanced unlike some of the closeminded blinkered flat earth skeptiks that we unfortunately have to put up with. The World would be a better place without them.
The baby polar bears were cute and mum was doing her best to feed them; its tough out there when you know that your next meal may not come up for six months.

Climate deniers at the Telegraph clutching at paws .. one of the best natural history programmes ever made and somebody just has to have ago .. strange species humans

Hilarious to hear the argument that the BBC covered up the "fakery" by MERELY revealing it on their website.

Sure, like nobody has internet access in 2011. And it's not like the BBC ever mention their website is it!

Let's say the BBC were ashamed of their dastardly, sneaky sleight of hand and desperately wanted to cover up their deception. Consider two possible approaches they might take:

1. Reveal the fakery on the website. A website which is promoted with extreme zeal, relentlessly mentioned at the end of TV programmes, a website which is the first thing that appears when I type "b" in Google, and which receives (at the last count) a gazillion trillion hits per minute.

2. Don't reveal the fakery at all.

Hmm, tricky...

Some people simply have the desperate need to be SHOCKED AND APPALLED by the news, and are suckered in by pseudo-scandals, contrived to fulfil that very urge, by journalists who really should try writing about something more interesting.

I see Flasbuck has been let out again this Care inthe Community is terrible. Bloody Bleeding Communists is what you are looking for, I suspect.

To be honest, I think Frozen Planet is a great series, no matter how they filmed the content. Do we really want the filming crew to sit next to a polar bear giving birth? When filming dangerous animals you have to know your limits and you cannot risk everything just to get great pictures.
I think Frozen Planet shows how beautiful planet earth can be and 99.9% of it was actually filmed in the Arctic and Antarctic. The documentary gave me a great insight into a world that I have never seen like that before and it also helps people understand the environmental importance of the north and the south pole.

So Johann Hari must now have a job at the BBC natural history department then. He should fit in well there with all the other BBC fakers and fascist left liars.

The correspondent above who has held a polar bear's willie. Any chance of giving him a regular feature slot?

Just how manufactured is this argument? When 'Life in the Freezer' was made in 1993 it was revealed then the birth of the polar bear cubs in that programme had been filmed in a zoo so this should have come as no surprise to anyone who watches David Attenborough seeing it on 'Frozen Planet'. In fact that was exactly what I was thinking when I watched the births this time around. How pathetic of the Telegraph and shame on the Mirror which splashed with it on its front page today.

Fascist left liars?! I thought I was just watching a blindingly beautiful nature programme. So perhaps the amazing efforts of the film crew did not stretch to the birth of polar bears in their natural environment but this surely was never motivated by political ends. Call me naive but I believe the bbc set out to create a wonderful insight into the frozen planet. One that I for one feel privileged to have enjoyed. Leave the politics to the house of commons and if you cannot enjoy the programme for what it is do not waste your valuable politically tortured brain on it.

Come, come, it's quite simple. There was nothing wrong with the shots but David Attenborough should have owned up to them. Why didn't he?

My son tells me he did the filming on this one and the reason it was done this way was because the bear could have eaten the cubs if an attempt had been made to do this in the wild where she was more likely to have been disturbed in the process. In these circumstances if this footage was going to be made at all, they really had no choice. Do the viewers want to see this minor miracle or not, because this was the only way it was going to be done without risking a tragic outcome?

Faking it in the lab – I was castigated when I was critical about this sort of stuff back in the nineteen eighties, after I came into work at a well known London nature film company and was shown a room full of imagines that had emerged over the weekend – (when no staff were working). I also remember the bewilderment of a now, very well known cameraman, who had found his shrews had died over an Easter weekend, when I ventured that Nature did not work 9-5, or that they died of loneliness after all the attention he had given them making his award winning clips. We have all done it, or more exactly, overdone it, but thankfully it is much rarer now. Nevertheless, being sensitive to animals as subjects and not just objects, is still not so common in nature film making circles. I have my own theories on how this came to be, but they would be too strong for public consumption. It is however a form of exploitation and not so dissimilar to the paparazzi. Having said that, I do like most of the cameramen and women I know – they are special people doing a wonderful job. The emphasis though on Nature, as a sentient form, purely bound by evolution, is just so puerile. I know it, they know it, they just can’t admit it, Nature is magic…