Planet Earth: A Celebration, review: Covid-19 gives new meaning to this fantastic spectacle
"Rewind the flamingos! We want them again! And again!" shrieked my children as we giggled at the wacky pink flock of Andean birds promenading across our screen towards the end of Planet Earth: A Celebration (BBC One). They think it’s impossible to see this avian branch of the Ministry for Silly Walks too many times and though I usually lack patience with repeated telly, I found myself feeling the same about this wildlife fantasia that lavishly fulfilled its promise of “inspiration and escape”.
The show spliced together eight of the best scenes from Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II and they were all so loaded with wonder that it didn’t matter at all that we’d seen them before. We could just sit back let the waves of extraordinary spectacle whoosh over us as the soothing voice of David Attenborough whisked us from the golden Namib desert to the aquamarine water of the Pacific Ocean.
The whole thing was set to new music by composers Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea and featuring piano by this year’s Mercury Prize winner, 22-year-old rapper Dave. Apart from the jokey Latin guitar that accompanied the flamingos’ bizarre mating ritual, I didn’t notice the soundtrack much, but it was heartwarming to see footage of the socially distanced musicians of the BBC orchestra reunited – their notes mingling and embracing where their bodies could not.
We all had fun working out how each of the featured species would handle the pandemic rules. Meeting only to mate, the snow leopards would have aced social distancing, while the seething colony of iguanas would have racked up some serious fines. The clever octopus who covered herself with shells to hide from a shark would have made brilliant face masks while the bottlenose dolphins – surfing turbulent seas “for the sheer joy of it” – looked like they’d have made the most fun of homeschooling.
In recent years, 94-year-old Attenborough has regularly ended his programmes with warnings of the damage we humans are doing to the Earth. But this time there were no images of turtles choking on plastic. Instead of doom, we were offered hope. We were shown how other creatures survived by working together and using their brains. If the flamingos can make a go of life at 4,000 feet up in the Bolivian mountains, waking in water that has frozen solid around their stilt-like legs, then surely we humans can survive Covid-19 and rethink our destructive ways. We watched the credits roll feeling tickled thoroughly, optimistically, flamingotastically pink.
