This happens with quite a few programmes that we have imported from the US. Off the top of my head I can think of Mythbusters and Ice Road Truckers which are dubbed by a British narrator with a lot of the dramatic music removed. All in all it makes the programmes more factual.

Personally I believe this is because of the BBC and to some extent Channel 4 (a pseudo-public tv channel) keeping standards high overall. I doubt the viewing public would accept such dramatised documentaries on the BBC considering its heritage...

What's left of Ice Road Truckers if you remove the dramatic music and dialogue? It's amazing how that show can spend almost an hour building drama about how someone is going to finally fall through the ice, yet in the end some random truck's tire slips in.

I am not entirely sure it is a fair comparison - I would hope the Nat Geo clip seems childish, as the author says, because it is in fact a children's programme, while the BBC one is for a general public. I actually watched many Attenborough documentaries with my daughter when she was younger, and there were often tears involved, what with the cruelty of nature and such. (Attenborough, by the way, must rank as one of the greatest contemporary Britains...)

>(Attenborough, by the way, must rank as one of the greatest contemporary Britains...)

True, it's almost unfair to compare any documentary to his documentaries :-) His books are also great, check out 'The Private Life of Plants'.

Especially when you bear in mind that natural history presentation is only one of the strings to his bow. He was Controller or BBC2 and was tipped to be Director General of the BBC except that he decided that he couldn't stand working behind a desk for much longer.

I guess I haven't seen a National Geographic show in a while. I remember a series following a cheetah mother with cubs and it was heartbreaking her coming back after an unsuccessful attempt at a kill to find one less cub then when she left. That is probably an example of the American style documentary done right the connection you had with the cats helped with understanding how bad the chances were for those predators.

Is it just me or did NatGeo start doing this in recent years? As a kid I remember nature documentaries which were very much like a video zoology lesson. But over the years things drifted farther and farther into entertainment.

Is there a way out of this? Can we do something with the long tail, where there's different edits of a show and you sell the different versions to different audiences?

Entertainment for the masses, education for the rest of us.

I find this to be true with news reporting as well. Compare CNN v. BBC.

Although I must admit that I find the quality of BBC news to be slowly declining (I don't care what Barry from Essex thinks should be done about swine flu, thank you very much), I think the fact that it is directly accountable to the public has a good overall effect on British newscasting - we don't tend to get the vastly exaggerated (or simply false) stories making the leap from tabloid to telly quite so much as seems to be commonplace in predominantly commercial media ecosystems.

The US narration reminds me of Iron Chef. But I learned something interesting from both: some spiders have mobile retinae; and some have ultraviolet-visible markings.