Kingdom (BBC One, Sunday) opens on the sprawling savannah of Nsefu, in the heart of Zambia\u2019s South Luangwa National Park. \u201cFor five years,\u201d a familiar voice tells us, \u201cwe\u2019ve been following the remarkable story of four rival families, all striving to make this place a home.\u201d<\/p>\n
I say \u201cfamiliar\u201d, but this is none other than the voice of God himself, David Frederick Attenborough<\/a>, narrating the latest big-ticket nature documentary for the BBC\u2019s<\/a> natural-history unit.<\/p>\n Compared with the Planet series \u2013 Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Frozen Planet \u2013 a show like Kingdom may seem smaller fare. There is no globe-hopping here: our gaze remains upon the squabbles within and between four factions of wildlife in a single, if seemingly vast and abundant, location.<\/p>\n But any fear that this will lack its predecessors\u2019 scope is quickly banished, as Attenborough and co offer a deep dive into an ecosystem with more than enough drama to fill a series.<\/p>\n After a brief introduction we\u2019re treated to an aerial tour of the various regions of Nsefu, in a manner that doesn\u2019t so much gesture towards Game of Thrones\u2019 opening titles as beat you over the head with them. We meet a lion pride, a wild-dog pack, a hyena clan and a leopard … family. (Our spotted friends drew the short straw when all the cooler-sounding collective nouns were given out.)<\/p>\n We are given pleasingly anthropomorphic introductions to the dramatis personae: Olimba, the leopard matriarch, and her headstrong cubs, Mutima and Moyo; Storm, the alpha female of the roving wild-dog pack now returning to the area for the first time in many years; Tandala, the hyena matriarch, who seeks to hide her food from the rest of her clan during pregnancy; and lastly a stately lioness overseeing her own faction, who must assert dominance both within her own family and against these other threats, and bears the only slightly less euphonic name of Rita.<\/p>\n Where Kingdom excels is in giving you a sense of the complex hierarchies at play. One leopard may take on a wild dog, for example, but cringe in submission against a three- or four-strong pack. A single hyena, meanwhile, holds little fear of even two leopards, but two or more can be run off a kill by a lion.<\/p>\n The swelling strings, the glorious camerawork and the sheer craft of capturing such incredible footage cannot be overstated. This is nature film-making at its best. But it is in the field of narrative storytelling that Kingdom excels. So propulsive are its soapy thrills that you can\u2019t help getting wrapped up on a human level. <\/p>\n When the boisterous leopard Oyo picks a fight with a mud-bathing hippo, my heart is in my mouth. When he and his mother track a hyena standing over a kill, I begin to worry that their spotted camouflage makes sense in the dappled sunlight of dense woodlands but makes them look exposed and vaguely preposterous on the savannah, like American army officers wearing desert khaki at the Pentagon.<\/p>\n How come hyenas are so big \u2013 did I know this before? <\/p>\n Why does Storm, the wild-dog alpha, have a collar around her neck, and how did her pack take to it when she rocked up with it one day? <\/p>\n Good God, will that antelope escape being eaten by her pack? Oh good, it will! <\/p>\n Oh shite, a crocodile!<\/p>\n If all is right with the world, Attenborough will turn 100 in May, just four years younger than the BBC with which he and the natural-history unit\u2019s crews have been synonymous. <\/p>\n In a week that has seen the Beeb<\/a> attacked on variously spurious grounds by ghouls on both sides of the Atlantic, it may be useful to remember what it does better than anyone else in the world, and what would be lost by casting that institution aside for the benefit of people who care less about accuracy in the media and more about stripping its carcass bare and bloodying their noses in its flesh.<\/p>\n That is, of course, my opinion, and as I don\u2019t work for an embattled broadcaster that seems hell-bent on aiding others in its destruction, I\u2019m glad I\u2019m free to give it.<\/p>\n