Smash hit

Justine Evans, the lead camera woman, says that it’s not really the lions I should be worrying about. Evans, a rare woman in a male-dominated business, is regarded as one of the pluckiest and most experienced people in the wildlife documentary world. She has worked extensively at night and with elephants, although the death this week of a British honeymooner in Kenya, who was trampled while walking with a Masai guide, shows how unpredictable elephants can be. Once, while following a herd on foot, Evans narrowly escaped being trampled when an elephant pursued her and she fell. She was carrying a tripod in both hands and “it felt like running through treacle”. She managed to scramble to safety but describes the experience as “terrifying” and her reaction to it as unimpressive. “I was about to be squashed and all I could say was ‘No!’ Couldn’t I have said something more interesting?”

As a child she wandered Richmond Park in the hope of bumping into David Attenborough. Now he regards her as one of the best people he has worked with. “She is extraordinary. She appears to be fearless,” he tells me later. “I’m sure she’s not fearless because it is silly to be fearless and she is not silly. But she is very courageous.” Evans is self-deprecating. “You can’t worry too much about the consequences of everything,” she says.

The danger tonight is that when elephants panic they blunder about in the dark and could collide with a vehicle. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that we can’t see well in the dark either. Justine and her assistant can view what is happening in the frame of their infra-red cameras but they are relying on the rest of us to see what is going on elsewhere and it is very hard on the eyes to look for long through night-vision glasses.

This is why, when the roaring begins, it comes as such a surprise that we are surrounded by lions. The noise is intended to intimidate the herds passing through. The lionesses check out the elephants as they pass, looking for vulnerable targets. They get very interested in a calf and its mother and other adults have to close ranks to shepherd it through the pride.

There is quiet again. The pride appears to have gone back to sleep. But as a mother and an adolescent, aged between 8 and 10 years old, come through, slightly detached from the rest of a herd, two of the lionesses are instantly awake, on their feet and moving in. “Quick! Come on!” yells Evans. Pandemonium ensues. The elephants trumpet with panic as they crash through the undergrowth. One of the lionesses jumps on the young elephant’s back and another grabs its haunches. The hind-leg tendons are severed and the animal crashes to the ground. The rest of the lions pile in. The mother thunders off into the bush, apparently realising that there is nothing she can do to protect her child from this onslaught. “Oh Christ, they’ve got one,” murmurs Keeling as we catch up. The hunt, from the moment the lionesses spotted their victim until they felled it, lasted just 30 seconds.

What follows is not for the squeamish. The elephant takes a further 30 minutes to expire. The death agony is not pretty. The lions chew through tough hide and clamp their jaws round the elephant’s trunk in an attempt to stop it breathing. The sound of the animal’s gargling, wheezing and hissing is sickening and the lions provide a chilling accompaniment of low, contented growling. It is a hellish scene, all the more so for the faint red glow cast by the infra-red cameras. There are scuffles as members of the pride jostle for position on the carcass. When they eventually can feast no more they pull away, their faces covered in blood, gore-stained up to their haunches. Panting with the exertion of gorging themselves, they lick each other’s faces and flop down, exhausted.

Although this is what we are all here to see, there is no question everyone is on the side of the elephants. “It seems irreverent watching a noble beast being killed. Elephants are such honourable animals,” says Keeling grimly. “It’s just unbelievable. The lions are trying to kill every night, even though their bellies are full. They are just machines.” He is already worrying about the graphic nature of the footage. “We will have to be judicious about how we use it. So it’s not too gory.”

A year later, back in Britain, the lions and elephants sequence for the Planet Earth programme Great Plains has been created from weeks of filming. The crew witnessed the deaths of eight adolescents and the lions tested some fully grown adults but didn’t bring them down. The footage has been carefully edited but is nevertheless an uncompromising piece of film, possibly the most shocking natural history footage you will have seen, up there with the film of killer whales hunting sea lions that jolted viewers out of their armchairs back in 1990. David Attenborough, who narrates, says that the film-maker’s job is “to make it tolerable” for a TV audience. “People accuse us of the pornography of violence. But if they saw it [in real life], as you have done, they would see the difference between how we produced it and how it was shot.”

Once again a BBC film crew, working under incredibly challenging conditions, has succeeded in capturing the brutal realities of the natural world in a way we haven’t seen before. If you retain any sentimental feelings about lions, prepare to lose them.

Planet Earth returns to BBC One next month. The DVD is out on November 27. The book, Planet Earth, with a foreword by David Attenborough, is published tomorrow.