Recently, I’ve been on a David Attenborough bingewatch of his documentaries, and I thought of wanting to make this poll for those of you guys who have heard of Attenborough’s works before as he was the man who inspired me to love and protect wildlife and nature as a kid back when I first discovered his most well known documentary being Planet Earth (2006).
I liked Natural Break, a 10 minute programme about various subjects. One programme included a film of captive thylacines. Another included a trapdoor spider and grasshopper with sound effects. It left David Attenborough convulsed with laughter
It's not an option to vote for but my favourite, by far, is Wildlife on One. All 253 episodes were narrated by David Attenborough, so I wouldn't hesitate to call it an Attenborough series. I think a big part of why I love it so much is because of its fairly short runtime per episode (each is only half-an-hour long). That means an episode can focus on a species that may get overlooked were only a full hour slot available. I cannot imagine, for example, there being hour-long episodes about springhares (Kalahari Bigfoot, 1989), frigatebirds (Birds Behaving Badly, 1999), peacocks (The Tale of the Peacock and the Tiger, 1995), nautilus (Nautilus: 500 Million Years Under the Sea, 1987), the Mona ground iguana (An Island Shall a Monster Make, 1980), brown hares (Shadow of the Hare, 1993), red-tailed hawks (Redtail, 1985), Thomson's gazelles (A Graze with Danger, 1994), white-fronted bee-eaters (The Bee Team, 1988), jellyfish (The Swarm, 1993), Southern ground hornbills (Thunderbirds, 1996) or bulldog ants (Encounter Underground, 1982). And that is just a fraction of the interesting animals that got their own episode throughout the show's runtime. If I had a magic wand that could bring back one former wildlife documentary series, it would be this one.
I must say I throughly enjoy the various editions of ZooQuest. This was when the world was first introduced to David Attenborough and everyone fell in love with his documentaries. ZooQuest brought forward natural history documentaries as we know it today and I always get the feeling that ZooQuest feels like a proper adventure as it was so early on in wildlife filmmaking. Two of his documentaries that I have enjoyed as of late have been Wild Isles and The Green Planet. British wildlife was sorely missing out in David Attenborough's roster of programs and it really helped inform many people that the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world and that as the British public anyone can help make a difference no matter how small. The Green Planet was superb and also helped people understand that plants aren't static and motionless with some interesting species like the Amazonian giant water lily included.
For me it has to be the Private Life of Plants (1995). The Green Planet (2022) is a worthy successor, and brings a lot of the science and techonology up-to-date, but the 1995 series broke new ground in showing plant behaviour in ways it had never been seen or attempted before. The scene with Dodder, acting as menacing as any threatening animal, is still something of chilling wonder. The Life of Birds (1998) is also a perennial favourite, the soundtrack CD was one of the first albums I ever bought.
Yep, I also love the Life of Birds as well. That scene with Attenborough describing the lyrebird's incredible vocal capabilities in Australia never gets old.
For me, the most memorable has to be the original Life on Earth; at the time I was a postgraduate researcher at Bristol, and almost a dozen of us met up every week to watch the latest episode at the house of one of the lecturers. Lots of sequences were shot in Bristol, and one of my fellow postgrads actually appears in the series (or at least his finger does to give scale to a small frog!)
I preferred the programmes showing many species of animals, rather than more recent programmes with long footage of a few species. I'm also in two minds about the 10-minute section at the ends of programmes, especially those showing programme makers sheltering from the rain.
