Why BBC’s epic Planet Earth II series was ‘a disaster for wildlife’, according to rival nature show producer

David Attenborough’s blockbuster nature series Planet Earth II is “a disaster for the world’s wildlife” and a significant contributor to planet-wide extinctions, a rival natural history producer has claimed.

The BBC programme concluded in December and drew audiences of more than 12 million viewers but presents “an escapist wildlife fantasy” that ignores the damage humans are doing to species everywhere, according to Martin Hughes-Games, a presenter of the BBC’s Springwatch.

In a direct attack on Attenborough’s flagship series, which features a soundtrack by the Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer and became the most-watched nature programme in 15 years when it was broadcast last month, Hughes-Games said the makers had ignored evidence of mass extinction, most recently from the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London, which reported last year that between 1970 and 2012 there had been a 58 per cent decline in the abundance of vertebrates worldwide.

“These programmes are still made as if this worldwide mass extinction is simply not happening,” he said. “The producers continue to go to the rapidly shrinking parks and reserves to make their films – creating a beautiful, beguiling, fantasy world, a utopia where tigers still roam free and untroubled, where the natural world exists as if man had never been.”

The result is that Attenborough and others “are lulling the huge worldwide audience into a false sense of security”, he said. “No hint of the continuing disaster is allowed to shatter the illusion.”

Attenborough, however, did use the series to make an impassioned plea for greater conservation. At the end of the final episode he spoke of “our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth”.