While filming Our Planet II, Sir David Attenborough’s team experienced a nightmare when they were attacked by sharks.
When their inflatable boats were assaulted by man-eaters while on a six-day expedition to an island in Hawaii to film an albatross, the film team stated they feared for their life.
The crew was forced to make an emergency run for dry ground to avoid the tiger sharks, which they described as “like something out of Jaws.”
The show’s producer Huw Cordey told The Sun newspaper’s TVBiz column: ‘The original idea was to do an underwater shoot with the tiger sharks waiting in the shallows at Laysan.
‘But the first day the tiger sharks were around, the crew got into these inflatable boats – and two sharks attacked them.
‘It was like something out of Jaws,’ he added, referencing the terrifying Steven Spielberg film about a beach town terrorised by a 20-foot great white.
While everyone on the crew is a professional with lots of experience dealing with animals on these excursions, it’s no surprise that everyone ‘panicked’ when they were assaulted in the little boats.
Cordey added that they had to make a ’emergency landing,’ and as a result, they didn’t get key pictures for the four-episode documentary series – but they did make it out alive.
Sir David, 97, is narrating the new show, which adds to his impressive body of work on the natural world during his decades-long career.
It’s unlikely the national treasure will be packing it in soon, as a producer for his previous show Wild Isles insisted on an interview on Lorraine: ‘David will keep going as long as he can.
‘He’s not retiring, that’s for sure,’ he added.
Sir David is passionate about protecting the environment and the wildlife across the word, and recently warned ‘we now have a few short years during which we can still make a choice, where just enough remains of the natural world for it to recover.’
‘This starts and ends with us,’ he said in series Saving The Wild Isles.
Our Planet II is available to watch on Netflix
