Dale Templar describes herself as “outdoorsy” which is just as well considering some of the jobs she has done.
Templar is the series producer for Human Planet, the latest eight-part documentary series from BBC television’s natural history unit.
It tells the remarkable stories of how humans have adapted to live under extreme conditions in every environment on Earth.
Templar has travelled around the world on various jobs and, until very recently, owned a home in Cape Town.
She was in South Africa a few years ago working on a TV series which followed the translocation of wild animals.
“I had a blast,” she says with a huge grin.
Templar has been working at the BBC for 22 years. While she did her postgraduate work in journalism and started off with current affairs and hard news, she found herself gravitating toward documentary work. Remote location shoots for news took her all over the world, strengthening her interest in natural history.
She’s worked as a producer on series such as Inventions that Changed the World and Here and Now, but sees Human Planet as her legacy.
It’s been the most challenging series she’s ever worked on, but also the one she can see people wanting to hold on to because it provides a record of “who people are”.
For Human Planet they filmed in 50 countries, but this time she didn’t get to travel much.
“Someone had to be in editorial control,” she says, almost ruefully.
Every episode was planned very carefully with both of the two teams out off the office most of the time, and stories in the episodes focused on people and how they interacted with their natural surroundings.
“That narrowed down the stories we did. We had to be sure they were real, not the touristy stories.”
They also had to be able to tell the stories quickly, “so a single narrative had to grab you”.
While the filming had to be of an epic nature, they also had to be sure to keep it intimate enough to create a connection with the characters.
The first episode concentrates on oceans and one of the most astounding sequences is a whale hunt off an Indonesian island.
The hunters – who go out in small wooden boats and hunt with unmechanised harpoons – do so on a subsistence basis and only have about six successful hunts in a year. This meant the film crew had to wait around for a while, but the result quite spectacularly shows a single man going up against the largest animal in the world with just a long spear in his hand.
“When I saw the footage come in for that shoot in Indonesia... You just can’t believe it when you see it. Moby Dick was high-tech compared to this,” Templar remembers.
The film crews had to be careful about how they interacted with the people they were filming. While they would ask people to repeat an action, they couldn’t ask them to do something they wouldn’t normally do. Then again, “for them, jumping off a boat after a whale or climbing up trees to get honey is their norm”.
Hundreds of hours of footage were shot in high definition, which shows every little detail, but a lot of it ended on the cutting floor.
“We were looking for perfection, the best shots, the best light, the best definition.”
For Templar, one of the most incredible sequences was in the Brazilian rainforest shoot when the crew filmed forest-dwelling people who have never made contact with any humans outside of their own tribe.
They shot from a distance in a helicopter, never physically meeting the tribe.
“We filmed with a Cineflex camera which allowed them to zoom in from 1km away. It was important, because that protected them.”
While the BBC natural history film unit has been to the far corners of the Earth, this series marks the first time they’ve turned the lens on humans.
“So that’s special and what makes it different.”
The last episode in the series takes a hard look at humans and our relationship with the built environment, which is changing how humans interact with the planet because we adapt our surroundings and not the other way around.
“The year 2010 was the first time that more than half the global population lived in cities,” Templar says.
While the version that recently debuted on BBC One is a series of episodes, each one an hour long, the DVD box set, which releases in South Africa today, contains extended episodes. The extras give a behind-the-scenes glimpse of specific aspects of filming.
So, for the first episode on oceans we see more about the diver who achieves negative buoyancy at an incredible depth – something never seen before on television – and in the Arctic episode we watch the crew stay calm when they are stuck on an ice floe.
Initial feedback from the UK screenings showed the episodes were a hit across the generations.
“It’s lovely to hear people say they sat down as a family to watch it.”
Narration was provided by John Hurt, who, Templar says, turned out to be quite funny: “He didn’t overplay the voice-over... the magician in Harry Potter, the guy the alien burst out of... It was delightful to work with him.”