The lengths some people will go to for our entertainment

I've begun watching Planet Earth, the BBC nature series. It's awesome, by the way, so if you're into nature shows (and, really, who isn't) I recommend putting it on your movie queue. I've only gotten through the first disc so far, but I've started to notice a trend of craziness among the filmmakers.

The way each hour long episode is broken up is that there is 45 minutes of regular episode, and then 15 minutes of "Planet Earth Diaries", where they tell you a story about some aspect of filming that particular episode. The three episodes on disc one were "from pole to pole" (the introduction), "mountains", and "fresh water". The diary for "pole to pole" was about the camera they used that was originally developed as a spy camera, so they can film from really high up so they don't disturb the animals, which is kind of cool. For "mountains" they were talking about how while they were trying to film snow leopards in the Himalayas, they had to wait for the okay from the coalition forces before they continued up the Pakistan-Afghan border, because the army couldn't have them treking across terrain where they were looking for al Qaeda cells. And in "fresh water" the divers were getting a little disspirited in their quest to swim with/film Amazonian pirhanas in a feeding frenzy, but their morale was boosted when on one dive, a local gator started inspecting around the diver/cameraman's head. See, these were safe gators to be diving with because they are a species that only gets up to 2.5 meters long, and you don't need to start worrying about the gators until they get to be 3 meters long. I enjoy nature programs, but I don't need the film crews to be killed by terrorists or eaten alive by aligators just for my viewing pleasure. That being said, though, crazy people who are willing to do things like that get really good footage.