(Albert Gea / Reuters)ħ6) Life on Earth Episode 10: Themes and Variations He then clambers over the rubble looking for fossils.Ī baby bottlenose dolphin swims with its mother at Barcelona’s zoo May 26, 2006. Highlight: While casually sitting on a Welsh hill, Attenborough unexpectedly pulls out a wind-up detonator (and a rather chic varnished hard hat), and blows up a bit of nearby hillside. This one covers the first invasions of land, from mosses and liverworts to trees, and from scuttling millipedes to flying insects.Īttenborough count: 8, including standing by a pool of bubbling volcanic mud like it’s no big deal waxing lyrical about moss by a stream and walking among the Petrified Forest of Arizona. Highlight: Attenborough rates the sequence where he and his film crew meets the uncontacted Biami tribe of New Guinea as one of his top ten personal highlights, although four decades on, it feels uncomfortable.ħ7) Life on Earth Episode 3: The First Forests There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for that belief.”Īttenborough count: 14, including standing in a very crowded Trafalgar Square holding skulls of early hominids and their tools looking at cave art and walking among DNA sculptures while looking very strange in a suit. Attenborough acknowledges as much in his parting words: “That may have given the impression that man was somehow the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose other than to put man on Earth.
SHELF LIFE OF BLUE PLANET NUTRIENTS SERIES
The focus on people, in the final episode of his first great series Life on Earth, risks depicting us at the top of a great ladder of evolution, rather than as just another species in the tree of life. Hence the low ranking for this episode, a perfectly decent tour of human physical and cultural evolution, from bipedalism to stone tools to literature. I have a hypothesis that Attenborough’s work gets more interesting the further he gets from humans. Highlight: The tour of Scott’s hut at Cape Evans, where everything has been preserved by the cold some 80 years after his ill-fated expedition.ħ8) Life on Earth Episode 13: The Compulsive Communicators
Bonus points for the sequence in which singing researchers inside the base are contrasted with freezing, huddling penguins on the ice outside.Īttenborough appearance count: 4, including showing off Scott’s equipment and clothes and visiting a research base at the South Pole. In a modern documentary, this material would be confined to 10-minute “Making Of” segments that suffix episodes standing alone, they sit awkwardly with the rest of the oeuvre. The first half contrasts Captain Scott’s ill-fated exploration with modern Antarctic research, while the second is essentially cameraperson shenanigans. (BBC)ħ9) Life in the Freezer Episode 6: Footsteps in the SnowĪn odd episode, this.
David Attenborough embarks on a personal quest, traveling the world to trace the history of a carved figure, thought to originate from Easter Island.
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