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Death-defying helicopter rides, underwater killings and peeing in David Attenborough’s washbowl: Mike White talks to Vanessa Berlowitz, series producer of ‘Frozen Planet’.

“Suddenly this ferocious blizzard came out of nowhere. It was as though our helicopter was being thrown around in a tumble-drier. I remember the very stoic Scottish pilot turned to me and said ‘I don’t know what the f*ck’s in charge of this helicopter but it certainly isn’t me!’”

Vanessa Berlowitz risked her life several times over to make the BBC’s landmark natural history series ‘Frozen Planet’. Being battered by katabatic winds in a Royal Navy chopper over South Georgia was probably her scariest moment. There she was, on what looked like a benign, sunny day, when out of nowhere a massive polar storm blew up. “It’s a very strange island,” she says. “Completely frozen on one side, ice free on the other.” Vanessa and her team were in the icy bit, attempting to cross over a high mountain pass to get back to the other side and the safety of HMS Endurance, on which they were based. When the winds came, they had no option but to land. But, says Vanessa, “we had absolutely zero visibility – trying to land on snow in white-out conditions, we couldn’t even see where the ground was! It reminds you that however good your equipment is, the elements are very much in charge. You might think humans have conquered the poles – we certainly haven’t.”

When it hit our screens last year, ‘Frozen Planet’ captured the imagination of millions. It took 30 different teams four years to make the seven-part series, working with everyone from Inuit tribesmen to the Royal Navy. Vanessa herself had a pretty good idea of what to expect, having directed wildlife documentaries for more than two decades. For this series, she spent more than two months in Antarctica, six weeks in Greenland, a week at the North Pole and seven weeks in the Norwegian Arctic, where the thermometer frequently dipped below -50C.

Vanessa’s love of the wild has its origins in a far hotter place. As well as being a professor of architecture, her father was a voluntary game warden in Zambia. “Most children get stories about Thomas the Tank Engine or something tame like that, but I was raised on real-life stories of Africa and its wildlife, and I vividly remember dreaming about this place that Dad had shown me in his photographs and wondering if one day I’d get out there.” She did get out there, and to a great many other places besides. Whilst still at college, she decided to climb every Mayan ruin in Central America. “I mostly succeeded, too – though I nearly killed myself in the process,” she laughs. “I remember becoming absolutely fascinated with the wildlife, archaeology and people, and thinking to myself, ‘What a fantastic thing, to be able to document this’. Although the documenting back then was just amateur photography, I remember thinking ‘I can imagine doing this for the rest of my life.’”

Twenty-ish years later, she’s still at it. But even in that short time, the world has changed – and the rate of that change gives her work an added urgency. “It’s definitely a motivating force, this feeling that we are creating an archive of what exists on this planet, a snapshot of the world we live in. The tragedy is that the snapshot is one that may be unrecognisable in 50 years. We were working with Inuits who would show you a view and explain how as children they would have been able to see sea ice to the horizon, and today the sea ice has gone. I saw formerly icebound places in Antarctica where grass is now growing. I couldn’t get my head around it,” says Vanessa.

To communicate the full scope of what’s being lost, the ‘Frozen Planet’ team employed feature-film techniques: storytelling, drama and epic cinematography. Vanessa: “Everything is meticulously planned. We spent a year in research, talking to the experts. A lot of us have had experience of filming in polar regions, so we had a good sense of what the behavioural sequences were that we were hoping to film, and how we were going to film them.” They prepared a detailed, storyboarded running order in advance. Of course, not everything goes to plan when you’re battling hurricane-blizzards. “In reality, we end up getting maybe 80% of what’s on those storyboards. Nature always comes at you from leftfield, and throws up a few things you have to adapt to. But we go out there with an absolutely regimented plan. It’s a far cry from the old days, when a cameraman would go and sit on a rock for three months, and then you’d make something out of it in the cutting room. Nowadays we’re shooting with several cameras simultaneously, off multiple format platforms. You might have an aerial camera, a boat-based camera, a diving cameraman, and they’ve all got to be coordinated and financed, so you have to know exactly what you’re doing.”

For Vanessa, the series’s “undercover star” was of one of the smallest creatures they encountered: the woolly bear, the world’s longest-living caterpillar. It was her husband, Mark Linfield, also a director-producer on the series, who made this happen. “He was obsessed with trying to capture that sequence when we worked on ‘Planet Earth’, and it became a bit of a running joke, especially when he managed to continue his obsession on ‘Frozen Planet’,” says Vanessa. The woolly bear is a very tricksy creature to film, living as it does in the most extreme parts of the Canadian Arctic. “Never have more teams gone out to film one tiny animal. But the sequence is like magic. This animal allows itself to become completely frozen over in winter, then thaws out for the growing season, 14 years in a row – after which it lives for a day or two, mates and dies. The woolly bear epitomises the extreme struggle that creatures have adapting to the frozen parts of our planet. It’s a wonderful example of how extraordinary the natural world is and how brilliant some species are at adapting to it.”

Some sequences, captivating though they were, proved too much for the final cut.

“Ultimately we are showing nature red in tooth and claw,” says Vanessa. “I’m very sensitive to the fact that people – particularly those who live in urban environments – are very detached from the realities of the natural world. It can be quite shocking to see an animal kill another animal. What you see on the screen is a fraction of what we actually film. What hits the cutting-room floor is significantly more gory.” She talks of seal-hunting killer whales. “We filmed over 22 separate attacks and what they do underwater is extraordinary. They hunt as a family and they’re very concerned that the young whales don’t get injured by the seals. You have to remember that a full-grown seal is massive – 10ft long, with ferocious teeth. People often think that seals are these doe-eyed, defenceless things, but in fact they’re vicious fighters. So the orcas have developed an elaborate hunting strategy to tire their prey out, and then they drag the seal under water and flay it alive, holding its tail and shaking the skin off, trying to avoid any contact with the teeth. That’s pretty difficult to watch, and there’s absolutely no way it would ever have got onto the screen.”

Going to the loo at -60°C is harder for a woman than it is for a man. The technique is pretty straightforward: “Strip down to your thermals and do it very fast.” Vanessa describes being holed up in an ice camp 60 miles south of the North Pole, where there was one barrel where everyone used to go and pee. “There was a terrible blizzard which we were waiting to clear so we could escort David Attenborough to the Pole itself. Everyone else was in the mess tent and I’d struggled my way back to our shared tent alone and I just thought ‘I can’t face going out again to the pee barrel.’ It was so cold. So I have to admit to utilising David Attenborough’s wash bowl. He came back into the tent just as I was trying to sneak out to empty and wash it, but luckily he was more amused than anything else.”

The big message behind the show is that the polar regions – among the world’s last great wildernesses, are changing beyond recognition. ‘Frozen Planet’ may well be David Attenborough’s last major expedition – it’s also the last chance to see these places before they melt away. “Our greatest role is to give people an understanding of these places and to inspire an emotional connection, hopefully that in turn leads to a desire to save those places. We work with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, trying to coordinate ‘Frozen Planet’ with their efforts to save marine habitat. This can then influence governments, our own included. So the show works both at a personal level, where a child comes up to me and says ‘I love penguins, I don’t want them to disappear’, and at a political level, becoming party to major strategic decisions. I would love to see the interest that we inspire become converted into real action.”

ALASTAIR FOTHERGILL AND VANESSA BERLOWITZ DISCUSSED THE MAKING OF FROZEN PLANET AT ST GEORGE'S BRISTOL ON MON 13 FEB, IN SUPPORT OF AVON WILDLIFE TRUST. FFI: WWW.STGEORGESBRISTOL.CO.UK

Ciopyright Mike White 2012; pics copyright Chadden Hunter & Jason Roberts 2012.