Wildlife in magnificent detail!
If anyone out there has been watching BBC’s wildlife documentary Life with the same stupefied expression on their face as I have, then maybe I’m not alone in my suspicions. Apart from being enthralled by Sir David Attenborough’s gripping monologue about the sheer variety and wonder that can be found in nature at large in the world today, it is the crystalline clarity and unreal detail on show that has me most agog.
Each of the episodes begin as other wildlife documentaries have for as long as I can remember, showing animals in their natural habitats and exposing their bizarre behaviour through your goggle box television. However, as the legend that is SDA spins his web over the fast moving observational imagery, suddenly everything changes to hyper slow motion and the BBC’s new high definition camera technology kicks in. Out of nowhere you’re transported to the animal equivalent of The Matrix. It is at this point that my jaw invariably drops and I am unable to stifle a “whahhh!” Lizards run on water in minute detail with slow moving water bobbling around them like alien extras from The Abyss, frog’s tongues fire out of their mouths with pin point precision to catch damsel flies like they are the mutant musings of an X-Men writer, and fruit bats swarm like they’re from a Hollywood production of Bram Stokers Dracula.
Essentially, what I’m saying is that it just can’t be real. Watch one of them now on BBC iplayer and I think you’ll agree. It’s just too stunning to be true. Surely, they’ve got some sort of crack team of highly skilled 3D animation wizards to put all of this together in a hidden away office location at the BBC studios in London.
Anyway, whether I’m right or wrong, Life is beautiful, thoughtful and genuinely enthralling. One of the best things on TV at the moment by a mile. However, if ITV’s I’m a Celebrity ever cottons on to the potential of this technology for the bush tucker trials, then I think that the BBC might have a fight on its hands.
Life by Sir David Attenborough on the BBC review: 5/5
