David Attenborough

It’s been four years in the making, now a staggering ‘real life’ Lion King tells the story of how one cub makes it all the way to the top

When the makers of National Geographic’s Lion started out on their four-year mission to tell the story of a pride of lions in the Masai Mara, they did not think they get the real-life version of The Lion King.

But after 52 shoots over 1400 filming days in Kenya and 1,000 hours of footage, they ended up focusing on the journey undertaken by eight-week old male Kio – the first natural history series to follow a lion throughout their full journey from a tiny cub to a king.

The four-part series is the brainchild of The Lion King director Jon Favreau and BBC Studios executive producer Mike Gunton, and has a score by renowned composer Hans Zimmer. Series producer Jane Atkins said it had been a rollercoaster of emotion. “We poured so much love into the project, so I just hope that passion comes through with the way audiences receive it. We want to make films that transport people.”

Lions have a high infant mortality rate, with more than 50% not making it past their second year – and male lions are notoriously hard to follow because they are always wandering off. Jane initially thought the main story would be about a female matriarch but she soon knew that Kio, who was incredibly close to his experienced mother Summer, had potential to become the main star. “I knew it was risky, because of all the statistics, but I was backing that story quite early on. To not have a clue right at the beginning what our end story was going to be was terrifying. But we thought we must be bold, ambitious and able to shift if we don’t get the story that we want. We were playing a very kind of high-stakes gamble the whole time.”

Mike said that when he pitched the project to National Geographic all those years ago, he could only do so in the vaguest terms. “My pitch was not to tell the Lion King, it was to tell the story of a lion pride,” he explained. “None of us knew that it would end up being a male but relatively quickly this male started to stand out as a potential character. But you’d be foolish to just follow him. We were following some adult females, we were following many other lions but as time went on, he became more and more a key character.

“As time goes on, it gets increasingly risky, because you’ve invested more and more in that individual, both emotionally and in terms of footage. As you get closer and closer to the end – which is when you run out of time and money – every day, you think, please don’t die, please don’t die.”

Across the four episodes Kio not only loses important family members, he also loses his home. But over time he proves himself an equal among his older brothers, becoming strong enough to fight rival males and together he and the brotherhood take over a new pride of females, and finally take control of a new kingdom.

Jane said she has found the filming process pulled at the heartstrings in more ways than one. “We were so in love with the characters, by the end I felt really emotional, not just because I was so proud of the team, but also – this sounds strange – I was so proud of this little cub who had made it. He had become this incredible adult male, and it’s like seeing my 14-year-old son, over those years, kind of become a man.”

She said the male lions had to fight hard to succeed, which wasn’t always easy to watch. “You feel incredibly protective, so it is like having your own son, and having to sort of let go of them a little bit.” She could only relax after three and a half years of filming. “We lived and breathed every second of it,” she said. “Jon Favreau was so nervous, he’d say ‘every time you phone me, I feel like you’re about to say something terrible’. His first question was always, ‘is Kio alive?’

At one point, one of the big characters does die and director of photography Sophie Darlington had to overcome her grief to carry on filming. “The way she died was incredibly sad,” Jane said. “We had meetings straight away in the office, and people were crying and there was a lot of upset, and then we had to ask Sophie to go back out to film the aftermath of what happened on Kio and the boys.”

Mike told the Mirror that it was nerve-wracking to make a drama featuring a cast over which they had no control with one of the biggest challenges simply keeping tabs on them. “They’re not collared so we rely on the guides to find them. Every morning before dawn you’d go to where you saw them last, and hope they’re there. If they’re not you drive around and hope that you can find them.”

He said the only script was the one that “nature has written” and explained: “Our job is to just gather and pick the moments of relevant excitement.”

He said the skills of those on the ground were phenomenal. “You are spending 90% of the time with nothing, and then, bang, something will happen almost out of the blue. That’s why the skills of the trackers and the camera teams are extraordinary, they know it’s coming, they’ve got that sixth sense.”

One shocking storyline involves Kio’s mother. “Viewers are going to be shocked by Summer’s story,” Mike warns. “We knew what happened, and it was an interesting filmmaking challenge, how you tell that story without the actual imagery. But you also have to be quite careful politically about how you frame that story.”

Mike found that while it was extremely challenging – it was also incredibly rewarding. “It’s been one of the most joyful things I’ve ever worked on. I say that because it all worked ou,” he laughed. “Imagine if after three and a half years they all died – I would probably be having a very different conversation.”

Mike, who works on many of the David Attenborough series for the BBC, added: “I know epic gets overused, but it does feel, genuinely, like an epic story. I think it’s a real privilege to do something that is this epic.”

In order to know precisely what they were filming, the team gave each lion its own identification card and quickly becoming expert at identifying up to 50 lions from different prides by name and family relationships.

The four episodes will be voiced by actor OJ Lynch – because Favreau wanted the series to use a “storyteller’s voice,” as if the audience was sitting around a campfire with an elder. Lynch previously played Mufasa in the West End version of The Lion King – and also used to work at BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit. “I knew him when he was a postboy about 40 years ago,” Mike says. “I just thought his voice was fantastic. I wanted a voice that wasn’t a famous voice but could be anybody from that part of the world, and Jon felt the same. We felt this was a story that could have been told at any time – 10 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago. It’s a story of all time.”

– Lion airs on National Geographic as a double bill from Thursday 20 August at 8pm and 9pm, and also streams on Disney +

The history of all living things is examined through five key species chosen for the way they move, feed and reproduce and also for their size and intelligence

Chris Packham famously hates so-called “T-shirt” animals – preferring beetles and bugs to the more box-office elephants, lions and tigers.

But for his major new BBC series examining the history of every living creature’s existence, the presenter had to block that prejudice as he looked back over 4 billion years. In Evolution, viewers will see how every plant and animal evolved – differently – from a single celled organism called LUCA.

And in order to explain this effectively, the five episodes focus on the elephant (size), ostrich (reproduction), horse (movement), bat (feeding) and dolphin (intelligence) to show what changes have happened over the millennia until they started to look a bit like the creatures we recognise today.

“TV likes an iconic species, something to put on the T-shirt,” Chris laughs, acknowledging that he doesn’t normally go for these “celebrity” animals which tend to draw in viewers, but go against the grain for Chris. “On Springwatch we’re always keen to champion the underdog, we make films about slugs and snails and flies and all those sorts of things, so we’re trying to build up that idea in people’s minds that everything counts – not just the fluffy birds in the nest, or the cute pine-marten kits. Survival of the cutest has always been an issue.”

“But had we picked, I don’t know, some innocuous little bug, it wouldn’t have looked great,” he laughed. “I’m not a great fan of T-shirt animals, but I am a fan of using them constructively.”

He even admits that filming the series, in different locations around the globe, brought him one of the best moments of his life, when he found himself right in the middle of a pod of dolphins during a break in filming. “It was absolutely extraordinary,” he says. “There were times when the cameraman was doing something and I was still in the water and I could just actually just be there with them.

“I dived down about four metres and I looked down and I had a dolphin right underneath me, under my chest. And I had couple on one side, I mean they never touch you, but they’re close, and a couple on the other side – and then I looked up and they were above me. And I was like in the middle of a pod of dolphins. You can hear them the whole time, they’re constantly clicking. So you can here that that’s that communication going on.

“It was just five minutes or something, it wasn’t a lot of time, but long enough to actually just engage, and realise that this was one of the most remarkable moments in my entire life. To be in that environment with these astonishing animals. I thought ‘blimey, I’m Flipper’.”

The five-part science show, which must be Packham’s most ambitious programme to date, has clear similarities in scope to Sir David Attenborough’s 1979 series Life on Earth, which set out to look at the earliest life forms. “I’d say it was more modern in its narrative structure,” he says thoughtfully. “Also, we’re catering for an audience that we know we need to surprise. We want to feed them short snippets, which are basically entry information into a bigger story, if you like. Those twenty-second things that get people to prick up their ears. And we want people to down the pub and say, ‘do you know what? I just watched this programme and, you won’t believe it, we couldn’t have a head before we had an arse’.

“I don’t think Life on Earth is like that. That felt very 1970s, because that’s when it was made, this just feels like a really modern, cutting-edge version.”

To film the series the BBC team were very careful about where they went in order to limit the carbon footprint. “Ten or 15 years ago, we would have gone to multiple locations to make a series like this,” Chris says. “But I’m pleased to say that each of our programmes was essentially made in one location.”

The elephants in the series opener were filmed in Kenya and the ostriches in South Africa. The horses were in the UK, with three days in France which was reached by train. Then the dolphins were in the Bahamas and the bats were in Borneo.

Chris says his role as presenter on the show, from the team who previously brought us Earth, is to keep the audience enthralled, and showing his own excitement is a big part of that, just as he experienced while watching his hero Attenborough. He particularly remembers a programme made by the veteran broadcaster about birds of paradise, filmed in Papua New Guinea.

“They were my dream birds because they’re mental, they look like space aliens,” he explains. “And I was sat there waiting for it to come on, just thinking, ‘you b****rd, I want to go to Papua, I want to see that.’ But in fact my response to the programme, and a testament to his broadcasting, was that I absolutely loved it because I felt the connection to the birds through his joy.”

Chris found himself caught up in some beautiful moments that will also tug at the audience’s heartstrings, such as when a baby ostrich hatched out of its egg right into his hands. “You’re peering into it, it’s not even in the world yet, and it’s like you’ve had a sneak preview into a life which is going to unfold,” he marvels. “It’s just this little thing moving, and that was really very emotional, that formation of new life.”

Learning new stuff is “the greatest joy” of his job. “I get to work with people who know more about a subject than I do. And their job is to tell me and the team everything they know about it in 30 seconds,” he says. “So my joy is that I attend the University of Zoology every single day that I’m working, and this is updated information, so we’ve constantly gone to the latest science.”

While they don’t skirt away from the technical stuff, like explaining how DNA works, Chris feels it is carefully woven into the narrative. “There’s no dumbing down, but we are conscious constantly of building a narrative which will keep our audience engaged.”

– Evolution, BBC2, Monday 13 July, 9pm

The Prime Minister announced he would be leaving his role

Martin Lewis has moved swiftly to rule himself out of any political role following Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation. Sir Keir confirmed earlier today that he will ‘resign as leader of the Labour Party‘.

The announcement follows a slump in poll ratings and Andy Burnham’s resounding win in the Makerfield by-election. In an emotional address outside Downing Street, Sir Keir announced his departure less than two years after sweeping to power in a landslide victory.

As has happened before, the news prompted widespread calls for money-saving expert Mr Lewis to be put forward as a potential Prime Minister. Fresh data from Focaldata indicates the 54 year old would prove an enormously popular pick amongst the British public, alongside the much-loved Sir David Attenborough.

However, in a post on social media, Mr Lewis firmly ruled himself out of the running by saying, ‘I don’t want to join any political party’. He said: “After a few “throw your hat in the ring!” messages…

1. I don’t want to join any political party

2. I’d rather wire my nipples to electrodes (& not in a good way)

“Tho the geekdom of this pop-culture politics piece is a mix of flattering, funny & scary.”

The Focaldata research revealed that Sir Keir, Reform leader Nigel Farage, and Green Party leader Zack Polanski were amongst the least favoured candidates for PM. Kemi Badenoch was the sole major party leader to achieve a positive approval rating (+2), pointing to wider cross-party appeal.

It read: “Martin Lewis and David Attenborough, who would immediately surpass William Gladstone’s record for oldest serving Prime Minister, are the breakout leaders. They sit head and shoulders above everyone else with best-worst scores of +37 apiece, practically putting them in their own “national treasure status” sub-quadrant.

“Both command cross-party consensus, recording positive scores across every voting intention group. Stephen Fry, Big John, and Louis Theroux also have positive best-worst scores across every major party.

“Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson, and Gary Lineker, somewhat unsurprisingly, varied a lot from party to party. While Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson are viewed positively by Conservative voters, Reform voters, and those intending not to vote, they are viewed negatively by parties on the left.

“Gary Lineker is almost the exact opposite, doing better among Green, and Labour voters although he is still viewed as a good candidate for PM by those saying they won’t vote.”

The survey presented 1,060 Brits with the names of 25 celebrities, TV personalities, politicians, and sports stars. These were then matched up against each other in groups of five, with participants asked in each round who they would most and least like to see as PM.

Nonfiction films and series are among some of the most-watched (and most-discussed) programming on TV. As Emmy season heats up, the directors of six notable contenders share thoughts about their projects.

‘The Yogurt Shop Murders’ (HBO)

“It’s just a famous, famous story in Texas, but particularly Austin,” director Margaret Brown says of the bewilderingly complex case of four teenage girls slain at a yogurt shop in the state’s capital in 1991. “You heard about it all the time at parties. My best friend was like, ‘That story is rabbit hole upon rabbit hole upon rabbit hole — no one knows what really happened. It’s impossible to figure out.’ I liked the idea of something that was impossible to figure out. But when I started doing the interviews, I was like, ‘This is dark, this is deep trauma.’ I’d never watched or done true crime before. I didn’t realize what it would be like to sit with people who hadn’t known what happened to their siblings and children for over 30 years. I remember [thinking], ‘I’ve got to get this right. I can’t mess this up. There’s just too much pain here.’”

‘The American Revolution’ (PBS)

“Leading up to it, I said I just don’t want us drowning in fife-and-drum treacle,” director Ken Burns says of his expansive treatment of America’s origin story, which draws out the experiences of Native Americans and enslaved people as well as the era’s atmosphere of civic discord. “Clearly it’s not, because we’re so existentially challenged by the moment. But the revolution gives us a sense of perspective. Times were more challenging then. More division. More division in the Civil War. More division in Reconstruction. Yes, the threats are unprecedented, but they’re not totally unfamiliar. Mark Twain is supposed to have said history doesn’t repeat itself, but he’s [also] supposed to have said it rhymes. I love that. So like Odysseus, I tie myself to the mast and resist the temptation to put a little neon sign in the film saying, ‘Isn’t this so much like today?’”

‘Sean Combs: The Reckoning’ (Netflix)

“There was so much noise,” says director Alexandria Stapleton, who tracks hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs’ rise and shocking fall in this series, executive produced by 50 Cent. “I’m scared for my safety, I’m scared for my career. Then there was every journalist, every giant corporation, trying to chase the same story. Because there was a feeding frenzy, there were a lot of people that were not truthful. It was making sure that we were going after the right people to speak with, and then … making sure that they felt safe emotionally. No one knew who I was interviewing while I was making it. In making a project about a man who’s very connected in media and very good at whatever he wants his narrative to be, there was a very deliberate decision to not drop this project until we literally were a week out.”

‘Ocean With David Attenborough’ (National Geographic)

(Keith Scholey / Silverback Films and Open Planet / National Geographic)

“It’s been weird, because I’ve got older, and he sort of stayed the same, like the Dorian Gray picture,” says Keith Scholey, one of the film’s directors, of the 100-year-old broadcasting legend and naturalist. “He’s still got that huge power and presence and commitment. It comes from the heart. He’s got a huge depth to him, in terms of knowledge, experience, personality … but he’s also very self-effacing. The most boring thing in the world for David Attenborough is David Attenborough. He’s interested in every aspect of the truth, and he loves uncovering that and passing that on to the world. He knows how to present in a way that it’s a performance, but it’s not a performance.”

‘Neighbors’ (HBO)

“Neighbor disputes are a great leveler,” says Harrison Fishman, who co-directs this gonzo excursion into neighborhood feuds with Dylan Redford. “If you think about class and race and politics, all that stuff gets thrown out the window when people are dealing with such small, concrete problems. You quickly start learning why people care so much about the things that they’re fighting for. It becomes a bit like a Trojan horse into learning about aspects of America and things about people that have nothing to do with the dispute. Those tangents are so valuable to us, because it gives context to the dispute. But it also helps people understand who everybody is in our country.”

‘Mr. Scorsese’ (Apple TV)

“We would get together and have these very long conversations,” says director Rebecca Miller, who interviewed American cinema’s great poet of tortured masculinity over five years. “But then in terms of the other voices, I thought, ‘Who knows him best?’ There was this wonderful movie called ‘Crumb,’ by Terry Zwigoff. He interviewed [cartoonist R. Crumb’s] ex-girlfriend at a certain point, and I felt like I got a view into the person, not in a gossipy way, but … trying to get a rounded view. If you only get the front-facing part, you’re not going to get a full sense of who they are. It was very important to me that we hear from the daughters or his wife, that there’s a sense of a person in there.”