New Scientist recommends Attenborough documentary Making Life on Earth

Today, the style of nature documentary made popular by David Attenborough is so familiar I don’t even need to describe it to you. But it wasn’t always this way. When Attenborough made his series, Life on Earth, which aired in 1979, nobody had ever seen anything like it.

Earlier in his career, Attenborough had been a TV executive, in a trajectory that would likely have seen him sitting behind a desk until becoming Director General of the BBC. But having chosen to follow the path of writing and producing, he went out on a limb with Life on Earth to bring his real love – natural history – to the masses.

He himself wrote the ambitious script for the 13 episodes that would tell the entire story of how life evolved, before even a scene was shot. The production would involve 100 locations around the world, take years to film, and require a gargantuan (for the time) budget of one million pounds. When organising the (now famous) shoot with gorillas in Rwanda facilitated by the primatologist Dian Fossey, it would take three weeks of correspondence to get one letter exchanged. Setting up that shoot took a year and a half. The whole endeavour was a huge gamble, but one he was sure would pay off, not least because colour television was just being rolled out, and what better use of colour than to experience the wonders of the natural world?

I learned all this from a charming new documentary about the making of Life on Earth, produced by the BBC to mark Attenborough’s 100^th birthday on 8th May. It goes behind the scenes with unseen footage, extracts from Attenborough’s diaries, and interviews with those involved. It paints the picture of a motley crew doing something groundbreaking, and, essentially, muddling through by the seat of their pants: Attenborough having to charm his way out of a coup, so that they could try to get the first footage of a coelacanth in the wild; or the time when they were kicked out of their hotel in Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s army. Then there was the poor young cameraman who was tasked with watching “Darwin’s frog” day and night to capture the brief moment when it would give birth via its mouth.

Of course, the risk paid off. Airing twice a week on BBC2, watching the show became an event in itself, with – according to the producers – pubs clearing out as people rushed home to their TV sets. By the end of the series, it was being watched by 15 million viewers.

Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is funny, deeply nostalgic, and ultimately an unapologetic celebration of the man who brought the natural world into the homes of millions.