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Life on Earth
1979 · TV series · documentary · 55 min episodes · 1 season
The story of life, from the first primitive cells to the plants and animals that now live around us.
8 positivefrom 8 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth.
Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
He definitely influenced my life and choices; some of the strongest memories of my youth in the '80s are tied to his documentaries Life on Earth and The Living Planet. I was lucky to live in the countryside and near a beautiful lake but his documentaries expanded my horizons so much more. I didn't love watching TV but that content was a magic window. They were dubbed by the magnificent voice of Claudio Capone and skillfully commented by Piero Angela, who died recently at 93. Piero was the most prominent Italian science journalist and his own career shaped TV and spanned 70 years. Their work made me and my family definitely more environmentally conscious. I don't doubt this content will have a lasting impact on humanity even if we can't clearly discern its effects right now.
Happy Birthday David! I'm so happy you are still alive and well.
He is far more than just a narrator. His 77-year career created and defined the wildlife/nature documentary as a genre, beginning at a time when television was so new that it really was just him and a few individuals making all the decisions. In his youth, he was given some cash and sent to travel the world in a 2-3 man team, off-grid for months, in the “Zoo Quest” series - the first time anyone had really seen animals, in the wild, on television.
Switching to a desk job, he went on to use his position in the BBC to green-light then-pioneering documentaries like “Civilisation” and “The Ascent of Man” (and still travelled occasionally for anthropological and nature documentaries, that he also green-lit) that remain a huge influence on all documentaries today.
Then in 1979, “Life on Earth” created an entirely new format of nature documentary that has only seen iterative change in the almost-50-years since. The rest, as they say, is history. He’s been heavily involved in the production of so many documentaries in the decades since, only reducing his role as he got older. Even in his 90s most of the series he narrates have short on-location sequences with him.
It’s safe to say that he, perhaps more than anyone else, created the “nature documentary” - both in experimenting with the format, and in green-lighting shows - and therefore shares a huge amount of responsibility for the many positive second order effects. Certainly in the UK, I would argue that a significant amount of public awareness of climate change comes from BBC documentaries. As attested to by others in this thread, generations of scientists and conservationists pursued their professions in part because they were inspired by him (and I can throw my own hat in the ring for this). It was also spoken about today, at his 100th birthday concert, about what an outsized influence his documentaries had on increased worldwide awareness of plastics pollution and the recent UN treaty beginning to address it.
His voice, really, is secondary to all that.
(I really would recommend reading his “Adventures of a Young Naturalist” and “Journeys to the Other Side of the World” books for anyone with an interest in this sort of stuff. They’re combined volumes of books he wrote back in the 1950s and 60s about his Zoo Quest expeditions - both a wondrous first-person view of the travels and interactions with wildlife, but also a fascinating teleportation back in time into a world where air travel and television were brand new, and all of these remote communities were near-untouched compared to today).
Sad news - I hope it continues and they manage to get someone who keeps the quality high. As others have pointed out, the thing that makes In Our Time great is it assumes the people listening are interested in learning something without pointless fluff.
I was watching the first episode of the new-ish BBC TV series Human last night and, although there was some interesting information in there, it was unbearably slow and overwrought - 20 minutes of interesting content stretched out to 60 minutes by overly dramatic speech and pointless visual interstitials with soaring music. Such a stark contrast in terms of information density if you watch the original big BBC documentary series like Life On Earth or Civilisation.
> Life began in that alien environment, and at some point between 3.2 and 2.8 billion years ago, cyanobacteria began to use sunlight to split hydrogen from water, discarding oxygen as waste.
David Attenborough brilliantly explains the beginning of life and the role of cyanobacteria in the first episode of Life on Earth (1979), "The Infinite Variety,"[1] (in less than 20 minutes; doesn't need to be that long, but I wanted to catch him riding the mule, sooooo... strap in and enjoy).
[0] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2i43qc?start=673
David Attenborough's documentaries. Each of them are great. A few especially phenomenal ones: 1. Life on Earth (1979) 2. Blue Planet II (2017) 3. Planet Earth II (2016) 4. Our Planet (2019) [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0135095/ [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6769208 [3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5491994/ [4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9253866/
> How were the first forests made?
In a few minutes, you can find out by watching episode 3 of Life on Earth: The First Forests[1] from time index 20:41, linked here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2i44t3?start=1241
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0846516/
David Attenborough describes anting in Life on Earth, Episode 8: Lords of the Air [1] at 14 minutes in, with accompanying footage.
[1] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2iepvg
Well, all of his are that way when compared to the typical documentary. Anything he wrote (not just narrated) is superb, and if you compare the percentage of minutes that provide real value, you'll see it much higher than most documentaries. Note: I haven't actually done measurements, but I've watched nearly all of Sir David's originals and many others by other presenters/filmmakers.
The prototypical (actually extreme) example is in the original Life on Earth where he is at the bottom of the grand canyon and says something close to "these rocks are too old to have any fossils" and almost immediately cuts to a new scene where he says "Here in Lake Superior, we have rocks slightly newer, and these show the first fossils!". All the other documentary folks would have bullshit where they say, "so, we need to go to a different place…" and images of travel crap before they get to the point.
Y'know, I've never actually seen much of Cosmos, but I'd like to put in a plug for my favourite 80s documentary series, David Attenborough's Life On Earth.