The Hindu : New Delhi News : Love, power, intrigue: it’s a soap opera on animal planet

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Oct 12, 2007
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New Delhi

New Delhi

Love, power, intrigue: it’s a soap opera on animal planet

Standing guard: A still from ‘Meerkat Manor’

Described as the world’s favourite mammal, meerkat is a member of the mongoose family. Although it looks cute and is precocious, this highly social creature can be tough enough to kill a cobra.

An award-winning series, ‘Meerkat Manor’, capturing the squabbles and love affairs of meerkat is going to be premiered on Animal Planet beginning this Friday. Unlike a documentary film on animals, this series is akin to a drama-filled so ap opera. Meerkat gangs have been given different names and their plots of love, power, intrigue is what goes into the making of ‘Meerkat Manor’.

Filmed in cooperation with Cambridge University, this series presents the story of a meerkat mob unlike ever before – from the perspective of the meerkats themselves. With no humans featured in the film, crews were housed in specially built sheds and successfully filmed within meerkat burrows using fibre-optic cameras, to capture . every facet of meerkat life. The first series of the programme proved to be a worldwide sensation. The new 13-part series narrated by Bill Nighy follows the everyday lives of a group of meerkats as they fight for dominance and survival in Africa’s Kalahari Desert.

Standing tall at just 12-inches, the meerkats are very territorial and fiercely defend their home from other meerkat gangs. They eat scorpions, beetles, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, worms, crickets, small mammals, small reptiles, birds, eggs, tubers and roots. As they themselves are ‘snack-size’ for a number of animals, so they always stand guard while the others forage or nap. Martial eagles and jackals are the primary predators.

The endearing Whiskers mob of meerkats is back after making it through a year of triumph and tragedy, mischief and mayhem. And the second season of ‘Meerkat Manor’ features the return of the rival gang of meerkats, the Lazuli, and introduces a new enemy group – the Commandoes, led by the one-eyed Hanibal.

The latest goings-on include a fight between the hapless Youssarian and two roving Whiskers males as they vie for the attention of Cazanna – the dominant female of the rival Lazuli mob and the introduction of the Commandoes who live in close proximity to the Whiskers and incur a vicious fight for territory.

Madhur Tankha

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