Part of a series of one-off BBC wildlife specials to mark forty years of the BBC Natural History Unit, Polar Bear is a fascinating celebration of these powerful and formidable predators – majestic in their natural habitat.

With little polar bear behaviour ever being caught on film before, world-renowned wildlife producer Martha Holmes, together with cameramen Doug Allan and Martin Saunders, led by polar bear and Arctic specialist Jason Roberts, recorded a number of groundbreaking sequences. In evocative scenes yearlings are seen imitating their parents as they crash into the dens of seal pups, hunt walruses and scavenge on vegetation and bird carcasses.

A land of ice and blizzards, bleak and desolate, there can be few places as remote or as beautiful as the Arctic Circle. Punishing in the extreme, with a winter of perpetual darkness which is then replaced by months of blazing daylight, this BBC production was the first in-depth study of the polar bear in its harsh and unrelenting terrain.