Helicopters are used to film massive expanses of land while high-powered lenses achieve crystal clear close-up shots.
"It allows us to track animals migrating for miles and miles," said a BBC1 spokeswoman. "And for the first time we can film creatures who live in extreme environments, such as goats on the most inaccessible mountain peaks."
Drama is also key - with new offerings from heavyweights Stephen Poliakoff, Jimmy McGovern and Tony Marchant. Poliakoff has written two 90-minute films set in Britain's recent history. Friends and Crocodiles, starring Damian Lewis and Robert Lindsay, charts the shifting power between a boss and his secretary during the Eighties and Nineties as their careers rise and fall.
In Gideon's Daughter, Bill Nighy is an "elegant PR consultant" struggling with the hol lowness of his public life against the backdrop of Labour's election victory and Princess Diana's death. Brit actor John Simm plays a young detective in drama series Life On Mars. After a near fatal car crash, he finds himself transported back to 1973.
BBC bosses are so sure of the show's success that they have already commissioned a second series.
Hillsborough writer McGovern's drama series The Street has an all-star cast including Jim Broadbent, Jane Horrocks, Sue Johnston and Timothy Spall. Tony Marchant's The Family Man sees Trevor Eve playing a charismatic fertility expert in a moving drama about four couples trying to conceive.
A landmark factual drama series, The Impressionists, tells how the art of Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir and Manet horrified 19th century Paris.
