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Life on Earth (TV series)

Life on Earth
Life on Earth DVD cover
Region 2 DVD cover
Genre Nature documentary
Presented by David Attenborough
Composer(s) Edward Williams
Country of origin United Kingdom
Original language(s) English
No. of episodes 13
Production
Executive producer(s) Christopher Parsons
Producer(s) Richard Brock
John Sparks
Running time 55 minutes
Production company(s) BBC Natural History Unit
Warner Bros.
Reiner Moritz Productions
Release
Original network BBC Two
Picture format 4:3
Audio format Monaural
Original release 16 January (1979-01-16) – 10 April 1979 (1979-04-10)
Chronology
Followed by The Living Planet

Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough is a television natural history series made by the BBC in association with Warner Bros. and Reiner Moritz Productions. It was transmitted in the UK from 16 January 1979.

During the course of the series presenter David Attenborough, following the format established by Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (both series which he designed and produced as director of BBC2), travels the globe in order to trace the story of the evolution of life on the planet. Like the earlier series, it was divided into 13 programmes (each of around 55 minutes' duration). The executive producer was Christopher Parsons and the music was composed by Edward Williams.

Highly acclaimed, it is the first in Attenborough's 'Life' series of programmes and was followed by The Living Planet (1984). It established Attenborough as not only the foremost television naturalist, but also an iconic figure in British cultural life.

Several special filming techniques were devised to obtain some of the footage of rare and elusive animals. One cameraman spent hundreds of hours waiting for the fleeting moment when a rare frog, which incubates its young in its mouth, finally spat them out. Another built a replica of a burrow in a horizontally mounted wheel, so that as the mole rat ran along the tunnel, the wheel could be spun to keep the animal adjacent to the camera. To illustrate the motion of bats' wings in flight, a slow motion sequence was filmed in a wind tunnel. The series was also the first to include footage of a live (although dying) coelacanth.


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