Shocking cheats

The most egregious example of cheating in wildlife photography was the 1958 Disney film Wild Wilderness. They wanted footage of lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea — heaven knows why, since lemmings do no such thing. Since the crew were in Alberta, where neither sea nor lemmings can be found, they bought the little creatures in from Manitoba, and filmed them on a giant turntable, so it looked as if there were thousands instead of dozens. Then they chucked them into a river, which slightly resembled the sea, and there they drowned.

The makers of wildlife programmes had a more robust attitude to their subjects then. In Bill Oddie’s One Hundred Years of Wildlife Films (BBC4, Saturday) we saw an early American series in which a husband-and-wife team filmed lions and rhinos in close-up. They had to be in close-up because, just as they began to look peeved, the wife raised her rifle and shot them dead.