Primates — Season 1

Chris Packham narrates a programme looking at the family of mammals, beginning by revealing the extraordinary strategies monkeys, apes and lemurs must use to survive in the most unexpected places. In South Africa, rarely seen bush babies go in search of food in the lean times of winter, while times are also hard for a troop of bearded capuchins in Brazil's scorched badlands.

Chris Packham narrates a look at the complex social and family lives of the animal group, including leaf monkeys competing to babysit a bright orange infant and rally to defend it from a python, and gibbons learning daredevil treetop acrobatics with their playmates. In the Amazon, a female spider monkey elder leads its troop to aquatic plants brought within reach on raging floodwaters and shows them how they can feast on this unlikely bounty by using their remarkable tails as safety ropes.

On Thailand's East coast, Dr Amanda Tan reveals something rare in the animal kingdom: tool use. A population of long-tailed macaques have, for generations, used tools to harvest shellfish. And in Brazil, researcher Vedrana Slipogor plays videos to some of the world's tiniest monkeys - common marmosets – as she tries to understand the subtleties of primate personality. In Madagascar, drones mounted with thermal-imaging cameras might be the key to protecting some of the world's most elusive lemurs. And in the rainforests of Tanzania, we witness the moment when primatologist Dr Russell Mittermeier becomes the first person to have seen every type of primate on the planet.