COSMOS magazine
Get COSMOS Teacher's Notes
G Magazine
  • Add this story to Slashdot
  • Add this story to del-icio-us
  • Add this story to Digg
  • Add this story to reddit
Email this page
· ·

Reviews (books, DVDs etc)

ON DVD

Reviewer:

Bob Guntrip

August 2006

The Blue Planet

BBC
Distributed by ABC/Roadshow Entertainment
2005, rated PG
AUD$90.95
690 min
Buy from Amazon
The Blue Planet

There is little doubt that the world would be a poorer place without the BBC's natural science documentaries, as it would without the well-modulated passions of David Attenborough.

And, while the two have often united to produce some of the best telly we're likely to see, they've rarely pulled off anything as impressive as The Blue Planet, which screened on the ABC last year and is now available on DVD.

Its eight 50-minute episodes offer an, ah, in-depth look at the masses of water that cover 71 per cent of our planet's surface and the creatures that inhabit them.

As some 97 per cent of this water is in the world's four oceans and seven major seas, that's where the BBC's cameras went. And the results are spectacular. Heaving waves, plunging bathyspheres, blue whales caught soaring out of the water in slow motion are among the visual highlights.

But there's much more than that, of course. Each episode investigates a particular aspect of life in the deep, after the first episode has laid out the broad facts and figures, identified the major currents, patterns of migration and types and availability of major nutrients, we're off, first into The Deep, then The Open Ocean, Frozen Seas, Seasonal Seas, Coral Seas, Tidal Seas, and the Coasts.

The Deep is indicative of the sorts of wonders that stud this astonishing series. We begin by following a shallow-water dweller as it plunges beneath the waves looking for food. Before long, David tells us, the water temperature plummets and the pressure soars. But it's the darkness, the complete absence of light, that is the most remarkable difference.

Sensory antennae take different shapes down here, and because of the sparsity of food, body shapes begin to change.

We see a gulper eel swim by, its cavernous mouth yawning alarmingly. Fish with headlamps casting beams of coloured light appear - and techniques of hunting and defence are explained. More people have stood on the Moon, we are told, than have visited the ocean floor.

This is vintage stuff that holds firm to the BBC's ancient precepts of educating, informing and entertaining. Miss it at your peril.


Sex and bugs and flock and role

David Attenborough most recently appeared on our TVs in the BBC's Life in the Undergrowth, which finished screening in Australia in March 2006. This five-part series is available on DVD (BBC, distributed by ABC/ Roadshow, a$49.95). It's a series Attenborough says he has wanted to make for a long time. "If we and the rest of the backboned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well," he says.

"But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse." Incredibly, there are 1.6 billion invertebrates for every human, and in these five 50- minute programs we get the most insightful look at them yet.

Attenborough takes viewers to Taiwan to see swarming purple crow butterflies and to Africa to watch Matabele ants raid a termite colony. 'Cold-light' and 'chip-in-the-tip' cameras are among the new technologies that help reveal the secrets of the microscopic world around us.

Surging tides of animals, albeit of rather larger dimension, are the hallmark of Massive Nature, a BBC series that screened during 2005 and is also available on DVD (BBC, distributed by ABC/ Roadshow, a$24.95).

The six 30-minute episodes in this series capture the spirit of nature on a grand scale - millions of sardines migrating along the coast of Africa, a million flamingos descending on Lake Bogoria in east Africa, and 300 million salmon battling to return to the Alaskan river in which they were born.

Last but not least, a local product, Sex in the Bush, "a light-hearted romp through the weird and wonderful sex lives of Australia's wildlife" (ABC, a$24.95, rated PGR). Each of its four 25-minute episodes covers a different aspect of the courtship/ reproduction cycle. It's all here, from emu and seahorse fathers who do the mothering to the marsupial mouse who has sex non-stop until he keels over dead.

This series, avers the ABC, "will challenge your assumptions about what is natural, normal and even possible".