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1999: The BBC simulates prehistoric wildlife

During the final months of the last century, the BBC premiered a six-part series titled Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) which used computer-generated imagery (CGI) to realistically simulate Mesozoic wildlife in the style of classic natural history documentaries. Millions of people watched digital dinosaurs grazing, hunting, mating, and facing the challenges of shifting seasons, all to the sound of Kenneth Branagh’s narration, which was described as “Attenboroughese” (Matthews, 1999). A year after its release the BBC (2000: 52) not only reported the series as one of their “strongest-ever factual brands” but as an educationally substantial program which had reaffirmed their “role as a public service network.” In the following decade, it also became clear that Walking with Dinosaurs (WWD) was more than just a one-off success; it had generated an entirely new wildlife genre, and many more programs were to be created in its style.1 Considering the substantial influence of the BBC, reflecting on the implications of this new kind of natural history programming drew interest from some academics. Phil Bagust (2008: 217) placed the series within a broad historical context of pre-CGI manipulative wildlife film techniques like “fenced enclosures and staged dramatic confrontations between animals” and viewed WWD as a progression of this historical pretense of objectivity fueled further by postmodern aesthetics aimed at a new gaming-savvy generation which valued special-effects. Although he conceded that the manipulative history to which he referred was primarily from the American tradition, and that the British tradition, which he described as culminating with Attenborough’s Life on Earth (1979), was “less invasive” and had more in common with “the nineteenth-century village ‘nature rambler’ and observer,” (Bagust, 2008: 217) he dismissed this difference by suggesting that it had been eroded by increasingly globalized markets. Similarly, Darley viewed WWD as a product of postmodern practices like “simulation, pastiche and hyperrealism” (Darley, 2003: 229–245), and believed that the series used science as a “legitimization for what [was] being attempted at the aesthetic level” (Darley, 2003: 250). Despite some valid points, such analyses fundamentally lack insight into what the figures behind WWD intended, how their intentions related to their own institutional development, and what this meant for the “circulation of knowledge” (Östling et al., 2018) between natural history filmmakers, the scientific community, and the public. Procuring such insights is the aim of this article.