The BBC has admitted that scenes in its Human Planet series were staged by the programme’s makers.
An episode of the 2011 documentary inaccurately portrayed the Korowai people, a tribe from the Indonesian province of Papua New Guinea, setting up home in a tree house towering 30 metres above the forest floor.
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The blunder was discovered during the filming of a new BBC Two documentary, My Year With The Tribe, in which writer and adventurer Will Millard stays with the Korowai. Members of the tribe told Millard that misleading statements had been made in Human Planet.
In the new series, the tribe explain that the tree houses “are not our home”, and were “commissioned for filming” and built “for the benefit of overseas programme makers”.
During a trip to one of the wooden structures, Millard tells viewers: “That’s why they’re worried [about] how many people come up here and we might fall through the floor. This is not where they live, this is total artifice.”
The revelation has sparked by a review by the BBC. A spokesperson for the broadcaster said: “The BBC has reviewed a sequence in Human Planet depicting this [the treehouses] and found that the portrayal of the tribe moving into the tree house as a real home is not accurate.
“Since this programme was broadcast in 2011, we have strengthened our mandatory training for all staff in editorial guidelines, standards and values.”
The BBC faced a similar controversy in 2011 when an episode from the Frozen Planet series, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, combined wild polar bear footage with film of cubs in an ice den in a Dutch zoo.