Corporation says shots of newborn cubs in wildlife centre, rather than their natural habitat, were 'editorially and ethically justified'
The BBC has denied misleading viewers in its Frozen Planet series by using footage of newborn polar bear cubs shot at a wildlife centre in the Netherlands rather than in the Arctic.
The fifth episode of the highly praised programme, which ended its run last week, cut from footage of a male polar bear on the Arctic ice to a female inside a den caring for just-born cubs. As the view shifts the presenter, Sir David Attenborough, says: "But on lee-side slopes, beneath the snow, new lives are beginning."
Some newspaper reports claimed this was potentially misleading for viewers, who would assume all the footage was from the wild. John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the Commons media select committee, said he felt it would have been better for the programme to be "entirely open".
He told the Daily Mirror: "If this was not filmed in the wild it would have been much better to have made that clear in the commentary."
However, the BBC said the narration had been deliberately "very general", so viewers would not assume it referred to the specific cubs.
BBC editorial guidelines on wildlife programmes say that when it is impractical or unsafe to film something in the wild "it can be editorially and ethically justified to use captive animals". They add: "But we must never claim that such sequences were shot in the actual location depicted in the film."
The corporation did not believe the Frozen Planet sequence contravened these and was "very happy" with the narration, the spokeswoman said.
She also pointed to a separate film on the Frozen Planet website explaining the background to the polar bear cub footage, which shows the hidden cameras being fitted at the wildlife centre weeks before the polar bear gave birth.
There was "no way" the programme could have put cameras in a wild den, the series producer, Kathryn Jeffs, explains in the film: "It would just be completely impractical. Even if we could, you wouldn't want to disturb the polar bears by getting that close. This wasn't part of the story that we could leave out of Frozen Planet, so there really was only one way we could approach it."
The BBC echoed this in a statement defending the programme. The narration was "carefully worded so it didn't mislead the audience and talked in general about polar bears in the wild rather than the specific cubs shown", it said, calling this "standard practice" for wildlife programmes.
Attenborough himself said the process had been necessary for "the safety of the animal".
He told ITV1's This Morning: "If you had tried to put a camera in the wild in a polar bear den, she would either have killed the cub or she would have killed the cameraman, one or the other."
To explain mid-programme that this one sequence was not from the wild would have upset the programme's atmosphere, he added: "It's not falsehood and we don't keep it secret either."