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What follows is not for the squeamish. The elephant takes a further 30 minutes to expire. The death agony is not pretty. The lions chew through tough hide and clamp their jaws round the elephant’s trunk in an attempt to stop it breathing. The sound of the animal’s gargling, wheezing and hissing is sickening and the lions provide a chilling accompaniment of low, contented growling. It is a hellish scene, all the more so for the faint red glow cast by the infra-red cameras. There are scuffles as members of the pride jostle for position on the carcass. When they eventually can feast no more they pull away, their faces covered in blood, gore-stained up to their haunches. Panting with the exertion of gorging themselves, they lick each other’s faces and flop down, exhausted.

Although this is what we are all here to see, there is no question everyone is on the side of the elephants. “It seems irreverent watching a noble beast being killed. Elephants are such honourable animals,” says Keeling grimly. “It’s just unbelievable. The lions are trying to kill every night, even though their bellies are full. They are just machines.” He is already worrying about the graphic nature of the footage. “We will have to be judicious about how we use it. So it’s not too gory.”

A year later, back in Britain, the lions and elephants sequence for the Planet Earth programme Great Plains has been created from weeks of filming. The crew witnessed the deaths of eight adolescents and the lions tested some fully grown adults but didn’t bring them down. The footage has been carefully edited but is nevertheless an uncompromising piece of film, possibly the most shocking natural history footage you will have seen, up there with the film of killer whales hunting sea lions that jolted viewers out of their armchairs back in 1990. David Attenborough, who narrates, says that the film-maker’s job is “to make it tolerable” for a TV audience. “People accuse us of the pornography of violence. But if they saw it [in real life], as you have done, they would see the difference between how we produced it and how it was shot.”

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