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Has national treasure Sir David Attenborough has been telling porkies?

National treasure is not a phrase I use lightly but if anyone does qualify for the title it's David A. So yes, our national treasure has been under fire for apparently being complicit in a lie!

What? A scandal engulfing David Attenborough? Whatever next?

'fraid so. This week The Daily Mirror turned its formidable investigative talents on the Beeb and found that programme makers had filmed the birth of a polar bear in a wildlife centre, rather than in the Arctic, as the show appeared to suggest.

Why did they do that?

Well apparently it's tricky even for the BBC's adept cameramen to film a bear being born from under a thick sheet of Arctic ice. Chairman of the BBC Trust Lord Patten said the alternative to using the wildlife centre footage would have been 'dead bears or dead people with cameras'.

Fair enough. So how has DA responded to the furore?

Sir Dave has defended Frozen Planet's fake polar bear footage - by comparing BBC nature documentaries to films. He said combining the real Arctic scenes with archive footage would have spoiled the mood.

What did he say exactly?

Attenborough said: 'It ruins the atmosphere, and destroys the pleasure of the viewers and destroys the atmosphere you are trying to create. It's not a falsehood and we don't keep it secret either. But to say actually in the middle of that sequence, I mean how far do you take this?'

So whose side are you on?

Well the BBC does own up the use of archive footage on its website, so maybe we shouldn't be too angry. The BBC also said the script was 'carefully worded' so as not to mislead the audience. But this hasn't been enough to appease some fans of the show.

That sounds fair enough doesn't it?

It would be clear cut if it weren't for the BBC's own editorial guidelines on wildlife filming. The guidelines say that when it is impractical or unsafe to film something in the wild 'it can be editorially and ethically justified to use captive animals'. The guidelines continue: 'But we must never claim that such sequences were shot in the actual location depicted in the film.'

The BBC's director general Mark Thompson said the BBC had consulted the public in the past to find out if they would like on-air captions to flag up scenes that were artificially created for natural history programmes.

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