Making Life on Earth: Attenborough's Greatest Adventure

Save

2026

Documentary
Nature

Summary

The making of the acclaimed wildlife series that took three years to film, featuring 40 countries and over 600 species. First broadcast in 1979 and watched by 500 million people, it launched David Attenborough's career as arguably the most successful and influential wildlife film-maker of all time

IMDB

Review

David Butcher

Some readers will remember the impact Life on Earth had when it was first broadcast on Tuesday evenings in early 1979. We’d never seen anything like it. Pubs fell quiet as 15 million viewers stayed home to watch lions, coelacanths, exotic frogs and a presenter who hung out with mountain gorillas.

How did this wonder come about? With great difficulty, is the answer we get from a look at the production from the inside, courtesy of David Attenborough, his producers and crew, who are happy to share anecdotes of the steep uphill battle they had filming wildlife over three years at a hundred different locations around the world- a televisual feat unheard of in the 1970s.

Attenborough recalls how he had escaped a prime BBC desk job and longed to get back in the field, writing the entire 13-part series before a foot of film was shot. It’s a joy to watch him relive the adventure, which proved to be both “a turning point in my life, really” and also, he suggests, in how we think of nature.

imdb-square

8.3/10