This happens with quite a few programmes that we have imported from the US. Off the top of my head I can think of Mythbusters and Ice Road Truckers which are dubbed by a British narrator with a lot of the dramatic music removed. All in all it makes the programmes more factual.<p>Personally I believe this is because of the BBC and to some extent Channel 4 (a pseudo-public tv channel) keeping standards high overall. I doubt the viewing public would accept such dramatised documentaries on the BBC considering its heritage...
I am not entirely sure it is a fair comparison - I would hope the Nat Geo clip seems childish, as the author says, because it is in fact a children's programme, while the BBC one is for a general public. I actually watched many Attenborough documentaries with my daughter when she was younger, and there were often tears involved, what with the cruelty of nature and such. (Attenborough, by the way, must rank as one of the greatest contemporary Britains...)
I guess I haven't seen a National Geographic show in a while. I remember a series following a cheetah mother with cubs and it was heartbreaking her coming back after an unsuccessful attempt at a kill to find one less cub then when she left. That is probably an example of the American style documentary done right the connection you had with the cats helped with understanding how bad the chances were for those predators.
Is it just me or did <i>NatGeo</i> start doing this in recent years?
As a kid I remember nature <i>documentaries</i> which were very much like a video zoology lesson. But over the years things drifted farther and farther into entertainment.<p>Is there a way out of this? Can we do something with the long tail, where there's different edits of a show and you sell the different versions to different audiences?<p>Entertainment for the masses, education for the rest of us.
The US narration reminds me of Iron Chef. But I learned something interesting from both: some spiders have mobile retinae; and some have ultraviolet-visible markings.