Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure review – the anecdotes are just amazing

From tales of giant tortoises trampling tents to almost getting shot, this is a relentlessly entertaining documentary about one of David Attenborough’s greatest pieces of TV Life on Earth has a good claim for the top spot in any list of the best British TV shows of all time. A giant leap forward from previous wildlife programmes, it gave us the David Attenborough epic as we now know it: every expansive, expensive, dazzlingly informative BBC nature series since has used a template that Life on Earth created. It’s a classic, a landmark, a totem of the creative power the Beeb once had. It’s now 50 years since it went into production, and it’s Attenborough’s 100th birthday this week. You might worry that a retrospective film about Life on Earth could be an hour of solemn awe and hushed reverence.

What you actually get from Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is a relentlessly entertaining cavalcade of top-drawer anecdotes, more like the sort of gossipy celebration that might commemorate the making of Jaws or Star Wars. Victoria Bobin’s rollicking film is the story of a giant pop-culture moment, a gang of mates remembering how they sensed conditions were right to create a blockbuster masterpiece – if they were willing to flirt with failure and even death to get there. Continue reading... Review From tales of giant tortoises trampling tents to almost getting shot, this is a relentlessly entertaining documentary about one of David Attenborough’s greatest pieces of TV L ife on Earth has a good claim for the top spot in any list of the best British TV shows of all time. A giant leap forward from previous wildlife programmes, it gave us the David Attenborough epic as we now know it: every expansive, expensive, dazzlingly informative BBC nature series since has used a template that Life on Earth created.

It’s now 50 years since it went into production, and it’s Attenborough’s 100th birthday this week. You might worry that a retrospective film about Life on Earth could be an hour of solemn awe and hushed reverence. What you actually get from Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is a relentlessly entertaining cavalcade of top-drawer anecdotes, more like the sort of gossipy celebration that might commemorate the making of Jaws or Star Wars. Victoria Bobin’s rollicking film is the story of a giant pop-culture moment, a gang of mates remembering how they sensed conditions were right to create a blockbuster masterpiece – if they were willing to flirt with failure and even death to get there. Life on Earth associate producer Mike Salisbury jovially recalls how he was sent ahead on a recce, because his imprisonment by the notoriously jumpy Saddam Hussein regime would be less of a problem, creatively speaking, than if Attenborough were taken hostage.

That’s the exact moment when David Attenborough becomes David Attenborough, but we almost didn’t see it because, on their way to the airport with the most important film canisters in natural history in their luggage, the team were intercepted and taken to an army compound in Kigali, where for a good while it looked as if they might be shot. They got home and Life on Earth aired, to 15 million enraptured viewers. Explore more on these topics Share Reuse this content From tales of giant tortoises trampling tents to almost getting shot, this is a relentlessly entertaining documentary about one of David Attenborough’s greatest pieces of TV Life on Earth has a good claim for the top spot in any list of the best British TV shows of all time. A giant leap forward from previous wildlife programmes, it gave us the David Attenborough epic as we now know it: every expansive, expensive, dazzlingly informative BBC nature series since has used a template that Life on Earth created. It’s now 50 years since it went into production, and it’s Attenborough’s 100th birthday this week.

You might worry that a retrospective film about Life on Earth could be an hour of solemn awe and hushed reverence. What you actually get from Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is a relentlessly entertaining cavalcade of top-drawer anecdotes, more like the sort of gossipy celebration that might commemorate the making of Jaws or Star Wars. Victoria Bobin’s rollicking film is the story of a giant pop-culture moment, a gang of mates remembering how they sensed conditions were right to create a blockbuster masterpiece – if they were willing to flirt with failure and even death to get there. Continue reading... Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure review – the anecdotes are just amazing