Life on Earth (TV series)

Did You Know?

• A shortened version of the series, edited into three episodes, aired in 1997 using the original footage and commentary.
• The series was released on DVD in the UK as a four-disc set (BBCDVD1233) on 1 September 2003, and on Blu-ray on 12 November 2012.

Filming techniques

Special filming techniques were devised to capture rare and elusive animals. One cameraman spent hundreds of hours waiting for a Darwin's frog to spit out its young. Another built a replica mole rat burrow inside a horizontally mounted wheel, allowing the wheel to be spun to keep the animal near the camera. A slow-motion sequence of bats' wings in flight was filmed in a wind tunnel. The series was the first to include footage of a live coelacanth, though it was dying. Improved film stock produced sharper and more colourful wildlife footage than had been seen before. The programmes pioneered a style in which Attenborough began describing a species' behaviour in one location and then cut to another location to complete the illustration, maintaining continuity despite months and thousands of miles between shoots.

Gorilla encounter

The best-remembered sequence occurs in episode 12, when Attenborough encounters a group of mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey's sanctuary in Rwanda. The primates were accustomed to humans from years of study. Attenborough had intended only to get close enough to narrate about the opposable thumb, but while advancing on all fours he came face to face with an adult female. He discarded his script and delivered a whispered ad lib to camera. The next day, the female and two young gorillas groomed and played with him; Attenborough later called it one of the most exciting encounters of his life. Only a few seconds were recorded because the cameraman, low on film, had been saving it for the planned thumb description. In 1999, Channel 4 viewers voting for the 100 Greatest TV Moments placed the gorilla sequence at number 12, ahead of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and the wedding of Charles and Diana.

Critical and commercial reception

The series attracted a weighted average of 15 million viewers in the UK, an exceptionally high figure for a BBC documentary in the late 1970s. It was sold to over 100 territories and watched by an estimated 500 million people worldwide. However, because the BBC signed away American and European rights to Warner Bros. and Reiner Moritz, Life on Earth did not generate the same revenue as later Attenborough series. It was nominated for four BAFTA TV awards and won the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Documentary Series. In 2000, the British Film Institute placed it 32nd in a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes.

Music

Edward Williams composed an avant-garde score that matched the series' innovative production techniques. He used a traditional chamber ensemble of harp, flute, clarinet, strings and percussion combined with electronic sounds. The pieces were crafted scene-by-scene to synchronise with the imagery; for example, in a sequence on bird flight, the instrumentation mirrors each new creature's appearance. Sounds were processed through an early British synthesiser, the EMS VCS 3. Williams had 100 copies of the score pressed as gifts for the musicians; one LP reached Jonny Trunk of Trunk Records, who negotiated a licence from the BBC, and the soundtrack was released on 2 November 2009.