Hero (Eyewitness)

A hero is a recurring element that appears in all Eyewitness episodes. It can be an animal, plant or inorganic object. The hero is often one of the main drivers of the episode’s narrative, and are regularly revisited throughout the course of the episode. In some episodes, there are multiple heroes that take over from previous ones, or a single hero that changes form.

The hero always inhabits the main body of the Eyewitness Museum, but in one episode (Ape), the hero passes through one of the picture frames to seemingly interact with stock footage animals.

## Season One

**Cat** has as its main hero a domestic cat, which opens the episode and interacts with several sets such as the ship. While some big cats do appear quite prominently, they do not have the same amount of screen-time as the domestic cat does.

**Fish** uses the king of fish, the Atlantic salmon, as its main hero. The salmon is followed from its birth downriver to the sea, so allowing the diversity of fish from fresh and saltwater to be shown, before the salmon returns upriver to spawn.

**Horse** has, as its main recurring element, a small toy carousel decorated with different model horses that represent different important horses of nature and culture, including a zebra, a unicorn and a hippocampus.

While **Dog** has many different domestic dogs appearing, a single dog known as Connell makes a repeat appearance as the episode’s hero. At the end of the episode, he goes off with a human that is implied to be his owner.

**Jungle** uses squirrel monkeys as the episode heroes. The episode follows the monkeys from the edge of the river in the jungle’s flooded basement through the different layers of the jungle to the emergent zone. Multiple monkeys were used, including individuals from both the Bolivian and South American species.

In **Bird**, the main hero is a duckling from a domestic mallard, shown hatching from its egg. The egg finally finishes hatching close to the end of the episode, and the duckling has finally learned to walk by the time the episode finishes.

**Amphibian** has both a European brown common frog and a European green toad as its shared heroes. While they appear together at the beginning of the episode, they both appear in separate situations for much of the rest of the programme. An animated tadpole, growing from spawn into a strawberry poison-dart frog, could serve as a secondary hero for the episode.

**Insect** has relatively little in the way of heroes, with perhaps the most common recurring creature being a small darkling beetle that introduces the concept of what an insect is and also introduces the car-beetle transformation sequence.

**Shark** uses a model shark’s fin, depicted cutting through the water, as the main element that drives the show’s narrative. The full body of this shark is never shown, so it is unknown exactly which species it is supposed to represent.

**Elephant** has both an adult female Asian elephant and a young male African bush elephant appear. While the African elephant was the favourite of the production crew, the Asian elephant also had an important role, being the only one of the two elephants to be ridden by a human rider.

**Reptile** uses an Asian water dragon as its main hero. The opening sequence shows it emerging from a crack in the earth and breathing fire, and it returns there at the very end of the episode. Near the end of the episode, the water dragon loses its tail in an attack by a rock python (an effect actually achieved by the computer).

**Dinosaur** uses, as its main hero, a plasticine theropod dinosaur referred to as Legs in the making-of documentary. It appears to be a cheerful creature, often laughing, winking to the camera and, on one occasion, humming the episode’s theme tune to itself while walking. It also growls occasionally. Being made of plasticine, it is squashed flat by a much larger unseen dinosaur at one point of the episode but later manages to reform back to its original shape.

**Skeleton** uses as its hero a CGI skeleton known as Smedley in the making-of documentary. Smedley first appears in the opening sequence, his skull formed from a carefully-arranged collage. Smedley is later shown to have his own room in the Eyewitness Museum, but escapes to follow the Día de los Muertos carnival. He dances to the episode’s theme music when he finally encounters the carnival at the end of the episode. Perhaps ironically, he seems afraid of skeletons, running away from one that he discovers in a closet during the episode.

## Season Two

**Desert’s** hero is a dromedary camel, which is at times duplicated to make it appear as if there is a herd of them. While it mainly appears in a natural state, it does also appear fully-loaded as a beast of burden.

**Tree** uses a model oak tree as its hero, carefully created to include roots and even individually-made leaves. The early stages of the growth of an oak tree are also shown in this episode.

The hero of **Ape** is a young female chimpanzee, who leaves her birth troop mid-way through the episode to find a new community. By the end of the episode, she finds herself a new family and climbs through one of the Museum’s picture frames to integrate herself with these chimps.

**Mammal** changes between multiple heroes, all starting out as six identical-looking mammal egg cells. The cells are revisited as a new baby mammal is born. It starts with a family of house mice and is followed by domestic cats, a red-necked wallaby, a human toddler, a CGI bottlenose dolphin and finally an elephant.

**Butterfly and Moth** follows, as its hero, a monarch butterfly as it hatches from an egg into a caterpillar, which feeds and grows until it becomes a chrysalis and finally hatches into an adult butterfly.

**Volcano** has very limited presence of any ‘hero’, with the occasional presence of a free-standing volcano being the closest thing to a hero. It periodically blasts out lava, and the volcano can have parts removed to show the inner workings of volcanoes.

**Rock and Mineral** uses as its hero an artificial boulder, named Smashy in the making-of-documentary. It is shaken loose from a rock face in the episode’s opening, and appears multiple times to roll through or fall onto things of importance in the episode.

**Seashore** has a common shore crab serve as its hero, as it can travel through all the different reaches of the intertidal zone. Much of the episode follows its attempts to avoid predators. At the end of the episode, it is shown crawling down a beach and to the safety of the sea.

**Pond and River** has as its hero a metamorphosing origami figure. For much of the episode, it is depicted as a small boat filmed on-location in various rivers and streams. It refolds itself into a fish to explore the underwater life of the river and, at the very end of the episode, becomes a bird to follow evaporating water back up to high ground.

**Weather** uses a cockerel-shaped weathervane as its main hero – the cockerel responds to external stimuli and will slump miserably when it turns cold. At the very end of the episode, it is struck with lightning by Zeus and turns into a real cockerel.

**Arctic and Antarctic** has a pair of heroes – a husky represents the arctic, while the Antarctic is represented by a king penguin. The two do not interact at all during the episode, and by the end are depicted as living on opposite ends of a frozen globe.

**Prehistoric Life’s** main hero is an American cockroach that appears multiple times through the episode. While a single cockroach seems to be the main focus, there are points where a large number of cockroaches appear together.

In **Shell**, the main heroes are a spur-thighed tortoise and a Belgian hare, a breed of domestic rabbit. They serve to represent Aesop’s Fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, demonstrating how the shell’s slow and steady approach have allowed them to win the evolutionary race. Both animals sometimes appear together, with the rabbit even laying up next to the tortoise on one occasion.

## Season Three

In **Flight**, the main hero is probably a young Barbary dove. It is shown as a small flightless squab, but by the end of the episode it has grown up and learned how to fly.

**Bear** uses both an American black bear and a grizzly bear as its heroes. The grizzly bear is known as Hercules. The two often appear together on-screen, with the black bear probably being the more commonly-recurring element of the episode.

**Sight** has less of a focus on a hero than most other episodes, with the barn owl probably being the most common recurring element. It interacts with the optical illusions but spends much of the episode flying around the museum to try and catch a mouse.

**Island** uses a message in a bottle as its main hero. It is rolled across the floor several times, including once by a sea lion. At the very end of the episode, it is thrown into a large body of water in the museum and starts to drift away.

**Survival** uses a red fox as its hero. The fox spends much of the first half of the episode following and trying to find a cockerel that repeatedly eludes it, while the second part of the episode includes it eluding a pack of pursuing foxhounds.

**Mountain** has a human rock climber wearing a bright outfit, who climbs up the recreated mountain in the museum. At the very end of the episode, he reaches the summit of the mountain and celebrates by holding aloft his ice axe.

**Monster** shifts between multiple heroes as the episode progresses. It opens with a house spider, which creeps around the museum and frightens a child before being chased through a crack in the wall by an imperial scorpion, the second hero. This one avoids being attacked by a cat but is then apparently caught and eaten by a bearded dragon, the third hero (the dragon actually eats a dark-coloured cricket rather than an actual scorpion). The bearded dragon is eventually chased through another wall crack by a striped hyena, the episode’s last hero. Near the end of the episode, it is shot by a hunter but apparently survives. The spider, bearded dragon and hyena all appear at the end of the episode.

**Human Machine** uses a human mime artist, painted as a wire-frame and moving in a robotic fashion. As a supposed ‘machine’ the wire-frame is shown to appreciate violin music and to be either annoyed or frightened by the clown that also recurs several times in the episode. By the time the episode ends, having learned about the human body and what it means to be human, the wire-frame laughs merrily to himself before turning and running back into the museum.

**Plant** has a dandelion as its main hero. It is depicted both by living dandelion plants and by a CGI seedhead, which bursts spontaneously to scatter its parachuting seeds.

**Ocean** uses a model bathysphere as its hero, which descends from the ocean surface down to the very bottom of the sea before heading back up and emerging above the water near the end of the episode.

**Planets** has a futuristic starship as its hero, travelling from the sun through the Solar System before finally setting out into the unexplored wider universe.

**Life** uses a red-footed tortoise as its hero. It is revisited a number of times, including the very end of the episode where the tortoise appears to survive some type of cataclysm.

**Natural Disasters** includes a rabbit as the main hero. It is shown encountering and surviving a range of natural disasters including a flood, a volcanic eruption, a blizzard and a meteorite strike that destroys part of the Eyewitness Museum.