BBC's Africa series 'doesn't play on viewers' emotions' He admitted that focusing on the stories of particular animals meant that the television audience would experience a wide range of emotions, from the joy of rhinos socialising at the water hole to the heart-rending death of the baby elephant. "We are obviously concerned that some viewers have been upset, but actually a big series like this is expected to illustrate the breadth of what happens in nature," he said. As soon as you look at an animal not as a species but as an individual, you do get drawn in and your empathy for that individual character will increase. It is part of the process of looking deeper and creating that more immersive experience. Writing in the Daily Telegraph on Friday, Colin Tudge, the biologist, suggested that the death of the baby elephant shown in the programme appeared to confirm the theory that animals can express a range of emotions. Mr Honeyborne rejected criticism that the programme's music "told viewers how to feel" at different points. We've always used music in our films. The music tends to reflect what is happening in the film, so if we're telling an intimate store then the music will indeed be intimate too," he told BBC Radio 4"s The World At One. I don't think we do tell you what to feel, but we do lay open the broad pallet of what is happening in nature. And some of it is joyous, and some of it is tough to watch. Most viewers appear to be happy with a little artifice in their natural history programmes. The first episode of Africa received 6.5 million viewers and there have only been a relatively small number of complaints for such a major series: so far 16 about the background music and 16 about the baby elephant's death. Dr Anthony Seldon, the Master of Wellington College, said the criticism of the "world-class" documentary was "nonsense." "I am all for anything that is going to help people identify more with the plight and the lives of animals, and I think there is a significant degree of insincerity about the critics," he said. You cannot do films with animals without having emotions there, whether it is 101 Dalmations at one end of the spectrum or this at another. It is an uninteresting debate whether it is manipulating people's emotions. The question is: is it good TV, is it informing people about the lives of animals in Africa? And it has succeeded. The more artifice that they use, the better.