BBC 'Frozen Planet' accused of filming polar bear birth in zoo with fake snow

BBC's Frozen Planet series has been caught in a faking row after it emerged that a key scene showing a polar bear tending her newborn cubs was filmed in a zoo using fake snow.

The hit documentary has been accused of fooling viewers into believing that the intimate footage of a bear giving birth was shot in the Arctic.

The moving sequence, which is narrated by Sir David Attenborough, was mixed with other shots from the wild during the episode Winter.

However, viewers were not told the birth was filmed thousands of miles away in a German animal park.

The Beeb has denied that the sequence was misleading as it never claimed it was shot in the wild.

According to a spokesperson, putting cameras inside a polar bear’s snowhole den would have been too dangerous for the crew and risked forcing the beast to flee.

The team installed hidden cameras in a man-made den at the park.

"They do it under the snow in these dens of ice, and there’s absolutely no way that we can get our cameras down there," the Sun quoted Kathryn Jeffs, the producer, as writing in a BBC blog

"This wasn’t part of the story we could leave out so there really was only one way to approach it," she added.