Into the wild
“Life on Earth marked the inauguration of a long lineage of epic wildlife series fronted by Attenborough for the BBC”
At ten past eight in the evening on Tuesday 16 January 1979, British viewers were invited to embark on the opening stage of what would turn out to be one of the most spectacular and groundbreaking journeys in British television history.
The 50-minute programme was advertised in as the start of an ambitious attempt across 13 weekly episodes to explore “the incredible variety of living things, and fossils, which throw light on the ancestry of life”. The series was called its presenter David Attenborough. It decisively announced not only a new phase in natural history TV but the beginning of a decades-long era in which the BBC and, in particular its own Natural History Unit, would become
