Life on Earth (TV series)
| Life on Earth | |
|---|---|
Region 2 DVD cover
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| 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 – 10 April 1979 |
| 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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