Watch a Blue Planet-type natural history film production, and what you see is the distillation of years of work, in the form of a series of breath-taking sequences.
Sharks In British Seas is quite a different animal. This DVD reflects the struggle of one man, Richard Peirce, to document as many of the shark species that live around our shores as possible, with his failures and frustrations exposed alongside his successes.
It starts with the blue sharks that hang out off north Cornwall in summer, and which Peirce takes paying customers to watch from cages, while they breath-hold or snorkel. He claims a 65% success rate in attracting blues.
An obvious target is another summer visitor, the basking shark. As well as underwater shots, we are shown possibly unique footage of this shark's "courting behaviour", though the camera is discreet - all we see are their dorsal fins getting excited.
Downsizing, we head to Skomer to see dogfish, otherwise known as cat sharks; visit smooth-hounds happy to adapt to aquarium life; and watch anglers hook and then free spurdogs in Loch Etive. Fortunately, "catch and release" is the modern way for anglers, though spurdogs caught by commercial fishermen end up as the "rock salmon" sold in chip shops.
London's Chinatown cold-shoulders Peirce's efforts to film shark-fin soup, and he can't find any UK soupfin sharks (tope) to record, so he includes some Californian footage.
He then looks into great white shark sightings, of which only 10% are even credible (though there have been six proven hammerhead sightings).
His favourite shark, the white's relative the porbeagle, hangs out in the Pentland Channel, and if this is a "motorway for sharks", this particular species moves "like a Ferrari".
Richard Peirce's Shark Conservation Society (he also chairs the Shark Trust) has been satellite-tagging these sharks, and he offers some snatched underwater footage as what we must accept to be the best UK porbeagle film available.
He is less lucky with the mighty thresher, spending four fruitless days hunting the species off the Isle of Wight before having to settle for underwater film from the Philippines.
So, few jaw-dropping spectacles here, and a number of compromises, but this is an honest magazine-type documentary that succeeds in highlighting the plight of the dwindling shark populations, and documenting what few divers ever get to see around Britain. Richard searches on, so enjoy this as a work in progress.
Steve Weinman
Elasmofilms
www.elasmofilms.com
DVD, 67min, £19.99
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