CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Meet the hero dedicated to saving tigers in the real-life Jungle Book By Christopher Stevens Published: 01:23 BST, 13 August 2024 | Updated: 01:28 BST, 13 August 2024 e-mail View comments My Tiger Family (BBC 2) Rating: There's a fairytale quality about India 's national park at Ranthambhore, where the tiger population has been nursed back from the brink of extinction. The ruins of its sprawling, red stone fort are 1,000 years old, home to innumerable monkeys. When two golden eyes blink in the undergrowth, you realise why it all seems so familiar: this is The Jungle Book.
Author Rudyard Kipling was partly inspired by Ranthambhore, and much of its atmosphere is captured in Disney's film. There were no dancing bears or jive-talking orangutans in My Tiger Family, but the thrilling footage of hunts evoked Shere Khan at his most ferocious. Drawing on film shot over half a century by documentary-maker Valmik Thapar and his colleagues, it included sequences showing previously unknown big cat behaviour — including a tiger bounding deep into a crocodile-infested lake to seize a fawn.
Crocs and tigers seemed equally unafraid of each other. One mother with four cubs waded across an inlet with her little family splashing behind her, until an underwater predator snapped one up. But another female threw herself on a monster crocodile nearly 20ft long and almost ripped its head off with her powerful jaws before devouring it.
Ranthambhore was on.