How we made Frozen Planet

David Attenborough, presenter

Even though I was 84, being at the poles wasn’t too hard. It’s not as if I ever had to walk far or pull a sledge. If you wear the right clothes, you can tolerate low temperatures – though if something goes wrong and you lose a glove, you might equally lose a hand.

Trips to the north pole are a commercial operation run by the Russians: they put up a tented camp there every year. It’s quite a populated place. There were 50 or 60 people: us, scientists and adventurers who want to say they’ve been to the north pole. But if you told me I was at the south pole when I was actually at the north, I wouldn’t know. They are almost exactly the same. There’s nothing there, just this wide, flat landscape.

When we made Life in the Freezer, we spent a lot of time on South Georgia, just north of the Antarctic circle. It was thick with life: elephant seals, king penguins, whales, albatrosses – absolutely throbbing and very exciting. But the poles were odd, or not odd so much as boring. I think there have only been only one or two birds recorded at the south pole in the last 10 years. One may have ended up there after following the smell of aeroplane fuel.

Regarding the episode about climate change, if you’ve seen how complex, exciting and beautiful the natural world is, yet you know that every year there’s less of it because of what humans are doing, it would have been irresponsible not to say something about it. Climate change’s effect is overwhelming, and programmes like this can raise awareness.

Alastair Fothergill, executive producer

The scenery in the polar regions is unmatched anywhere else on our planet. In the north, the polar bear is the star: the largest land predator there is. Until Frozen Planet, a lot of its hunting hadn’t been filmed. Meanwhile, in the south, the stars are the penguins. We knew we could get lots of funny shots of them. When the males build their nests, they steal each other’s stones – because a big nest impresses the females.

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We captured other things that had never been filmed before: killer whales cooperating to create waves that wash seals off the ice; and the brinicle, which is a kind of icicle that drops from the ice to the sea floor. As it spreads out, it freezes all the invertebrates to death. We shot it in timelapse and it looked like something from Harry Potter.

We were working in wind chill of -50C. If you took a glass of boiling water outside, it would explode instantly. And you can’t touch metal with exposed fingers. Since a lot of animals feed in the ocean, we had to work at the edge of the ice, too.

You can only film at the north pole for about a month: the sun doesn’t rise until March, and from mid-April the ice is breaking up. In fact, the ice split between our tent and the runway. We had to jump to get across. And polar bears are extremely dangerous. They’re unique in that they’re the one animal that actually likes to eat human beings. We learned how to shoot rifles and used flare guns a lot to frighten them away.

Mount Erebus in Antarctica was amazing: an active volcano in a world of ice. We used a helicopter to get up there and then had to do an emergency landing in a very bad storm – that was certainly a moment. But you have to take risks to get something genuinely fresh. Natural history, done well, is a vital tool for conservation. Hardly anyone had seen a snow leopard before Planet Earth. Now the World Wildlife Fund gives away cuddly toys of them.

The Hunt, David Attenborough and Alastair Fothergill’s new series, starts on BBC1 on 1 November.