You’ll never believe this whale isn’t real… It’s actually a sophisticated animatronic model – like all the creatures here – and you can see footage from their secret cameras in a breathtaking wildlife series
Under the crystal clear waters of the Indian Ocean, not far from the island of Mauritius, a very expensive disaster is looming. A highly sophisticated animatronic sperm whale, one of the key pieces of equipment in BBC1’s brilliant new wildlife series Spy In The Ocean, is sinking deeper and deeper beneath the waves.
Unless those in charge of this piece of machinery with its own computerised brain – which took a year and a half to build at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds – can do something quickly, it’s going to be lost forever…
‘It would have been catastrophic if we hadn’t recovered it; so many people’s dreams were pinned on that creature,’ says Philip Dalton, the show’s executive producer. ‘And there was a real chance we’d lose it. The whale was about to go into a 2km trench it would have been impossible to get it out of.’
Fortunately, two of the production team managed to grab the one-ton creature by its tail and haul it back to the surface, averting disaster. An examination revealed water had seeped into its electrical system, preventing a mechanism kicking in that would have inflated cylinders with air, allowing it to float to the surface.
‘We learnt from what happened and made sure it didn’t occur again,’ says Philip. ‘We fixed the problem and from that point on it worked well.’
The fake whale would go on to be responsible for some of the standout moments in the four-part series, narrated by David Tennant, which uses mechanised versions of various creatures to ‘spy’ on the real thing at close quarters.
It’s the latest incarnation of the successful documentary series that began 23 years ago with Spy In The Den, a one-off documentary made by John Downer for BBC1 that used a ‘boulder’ with a camera in it to observe a pride of lions.
The first mechanised animal, a penguin, arrived on screen in 2013 in Spy In The Huddle, and subsequent series have used versions of wild dogs, dolphins and macaque monkeys.
Episode one begins with the sperm whale joining a pod of real leviathans off the coast of Mauritius, with spectacularly successful results.
A female whale is so convinced the creature floating next to her is flesh and bone rather than silicone and electronics that she starts to communicate with it by ‘clicking’ in the way she would with members of her family. Later, she disappears in search of food, leaving her calf with just a single friend and the fake whale for company.
‘She clearly thought our whale was real and could be trusted to help look after her baby,’ says John Downer, the creative director for this series, which has taken four years to make and was filmed across four oceans.
More than 30 animatronic creatures were created, ranging from a 15cm hermit crab up to the 3m sperm whale (about the size of a calf of that species). But all the machines had one thing in common: a remarkable likeness to the creature they were trying to mimic. Perhaps a little too remarkable…
‘We were filming dolphins surfing off Western Australia, and because they moved at such a speed we had to take our spy dolphin out of the water, put him on a truck and transport him further down the coast so he could take part in the next piece of surfing,’ explains series producer Matthew Gordon.
‘We’d done this a few times when we got a visit from a police officer. He said they’d had reports of people trying to smuggle dolphins and had a good, long look at our spy dolphin before he was convinced it wasn’t a real one. We almost got arrested.’
This latest series makes use of yet more advances in technology. Even the smallest spy creatures are now fitted with state-of-the-art 4K cameras, with one even having an interactive screen installed.
‘It’s a flexible screen on the back of our cuttlefish,’ explains series producer Huw Williams.
‘It switches colours and patterns so that at one point it matches the skin of a male cuttlefish and at other times a female’s, so we can better observe the aggressive behaviour of the male towards the females.’
Advances in technology mean the fake creatures also often move uncannily like their real-life counterparts. Each of the tentacles of the coconut octopus is fitted with a micro motor so its movement across the ocean floor can be controlled and matched precisely to the real thing.
