Best TV Tonight: Silverback

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Silverback is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm. Stream it on iPlayer.

Award-winning wildlife cameraman, Vianet Djenguet (Planet Earth 3, Attenborough’s Life In Colour) has been invited by a team of conservationists in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park to closely document their effort to save the critically endangered eastern lowland gorilla from extinction.

Silverback on BBC iPlayer

This is an opportunity of a lifetime for Vianet who has held a deep spiritual connection with gorillas since he was a child.

With unprecedented access to film this ‘habituation’ process - in which the conservationists follow a group of gorillas every day in order to get them used to humans - Vianet attempts to form a bond with the family's notorious alpha-male, a 450lb silverback called Mpungwe. Once the silverback is habituated, the family will be deemed safe for tourists to visit, providing vital revenue to fund the care and protection of all the remaining eastern lowland gorillas, the largest primates on earth.

By living amongst this group of 23 gorillas, day-in, day-out, for 3 months, will Vianet and the team be able to overcome this fiercely protective male gorilla, and succeed in their effort to protect these incredibly threatened animals?

This project is more than a job for Vianet who was born and raised just over the border in neighbouring Republic of the Congo. As such, Vianet has experienced first-hand the consequences of political instability in his home country and understands the impact of war on a region’s wildlife. Vianet is well aware of the threats the gorillas face: poaching, deforestation, human disease and armed militia, still fighting in the aftermath of the conflicts that have raged for decades.

Therefore, it’s critical that the park’s gorilla conservation project also supports the local human population. In other words, the gorillas must pay for their own survival by generating income to pay for their own conservation, as well as funding initiatives that aim to lift the local communities out of poverty.