BBC & PTS Pick Up NHK Coelacanth Doc

The BBC and the Taiwanese public broadcaster PTS have acquired NHK’s documentary Deep Ocean: Kingdom of the Coelacanth.

The 52-minute documentary, produced with ZDF/ARTE and OceanX in collaboration with CMMAI, captures the ancient fish that has lived unchanged for 400 million years. It follows a 72-hour consecutive observation expedition that achieves the first-ever video images of a group of coelacanths and their behavior indicative of reproduction.

The team behind the documentary is the same team that was behind the 2013 documentary Legend of the Deep: The Giant Squid.

NHK’s Deep Ocean team has created eight documentaries including this one, and David Attenborough has narrated all the English versions. Regarding this documentary, Attenborough commented, “I have a special affection for the species. A live ten-minute program about the discovery of a living one in South Africa back in the 1950s was in fact the first program I ever actually directed. So, I count it a real privilege to be invited to speak the English words of the first film to do the job.”

Hiromichi Iwasaki, executive producer of NHK’s Deep Ocean project, said, “Following our success with the giant squid, our next endeavor was to capture the elusive coelacanth in its deep-sea habitat. Anticipating that such a feat would require long and continuous observation, we collaborated closely with dedicated researchers to devise our approach. It took us a decade to realize. Although the project faced two postponements due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this period allowed us to develop an advanced 8K deep-sea imaging system. As a result, we were able to achieve the highest visual quality throughout the entire series.

“I am deeply grateful to the engineers and scientists who contributed to the development of our equipment, to our co-production partners who offered unwavering support to the very end and to the coelacanths themselves, whose unexpected behaviors enriched our understanding and brought the project to life.”