Earth Story

I don't know how to start describing this series. I only came upon it recently via the Geography channel. Frankly it's hard to imagine a series like this being made today, because it demolishes the Global Warming hoax and therefore it would not be given a BBC budget. How lucky it is that this series was commissioned and budgeted before the climate change movement got their grip on the media and that nobody at National Geographic noticed just how subversive it is.

Professor Manning demonstrates that throughout its existence of approx 4.5 billion years the Earth has been by turn both very very hot and also very very cold. Its magnetic field has switched from North to South and back again many, many times. Sea levels have risen and sunk an infinity of times. Ice ages have come and gone times without number. And all this without any help from mankind. (Unless, that is, those sturdy cave dwellers in the early Holocene were building gas-guzzling SUVs.) How did Nature manage it?

Needless to say, this series was commissioned and produced long before the current hysteria about climate change had got going. Catch it while you can. It will probably be illegal to watch it at some point in the near future.

The viewer is taken on a voyage of discovery in 8 episodes from the first observations of geological curiosities and Wegener's continental jigsaw to the mechanisms deep in the Earth that drive them. The evidence is there for anyone to see if only you know where to look. Aubrey Manning is superb as a presenter, a biologist making his own discovery that life and the deep geology of our planet are intimately linked - neither can do without the other. Manning not only shows new ideas, but is taking us on his own journey of discovery, his fascination as new explanations unfold draws you into this detective story of our planet's history and the mechanisms that drive it to this day.

The Earth emerges as a quite extraordinary, unique and very special living planet which we should marvel at and respect. This is the BBC at its very best.

An absolutely brilliant mini-series which the BBC has bizarrely chosen not to release as a region 2 DVD in Europe. A friend gave me my Asian copy as a present, having located it only after doing a fair amount of online searching. As the previous reviewer said, this is the presenter's own voyage of discovery as well as our own. The programmes have been exceptionally well put together, the series is logically structured, and the subject matter is never dry or dull. I have an 8-year old nephew who asks to see this each time he comes to visit, in preference to Harry Potter or a cartoon. This should be compulsory viewing for everyone, particularly children with enquiring minds. I only have 2 small complaints: the series is too short, and at the same time it is easy to watch too much of it at once and end up with square eyes! Congratulations to the BBC: programmes like this really justify the license fee.

A bold statement must follow about the quality of 'Earth Story' and is given at the end of this review.

As the handful of other reviewers have rightly alluded this is an eight-part series dealing with the entire geological history of our planet over the 4,600,000,000 years or so of its existence, combined with how natural life processes occurring over three thousand million years of bacteria (initially they were stromatolite colonies) interacting with atmospheric and geological processes such as the formation and spreading movement of the continents (known as plate tectonics), together with how numerous meteorological, natural chemical and physical processes have come to ultimately shape the world in which we recognise and live in now. This fantastic televised feat is accomplished with great clarity and alacrity by narrator Aubrey Manning, himself a biologist, in only 8 hours! At no time is the viewer patronised.

Over a decade on all the science explained in the series remains current, and is all but unanimously regarded as wholly accurate by the international scientific community.

To unravel a vast web of once unconnected strands of Earth's natural processes that took humans thousands of years to piece together, and do so coherently is a true masterpiece of programme making. We join Manning's quest as he himself attempts to unravel Earth's history across the eons. It's a huge journey, across the vastness of geological time, so different from the perspective of a human lifespan, and is brought home with ease. Visual aids, such as: viewing our planet's oceanic sea-floor spreading by satellites from space orbit, or, the demonstration of the compression and (future) collapse of the Himalayas by means of a simple tilted board and a viscous sticky fluid falling upon it, reveal a tremendous imagination in conveying the scientific principles involved to the viewer.

The likelihood is no other programme or series made for the small screen has ever been able to explain so much, or deal with such infinite complexity, so competently and concisely. BBC, Discovery and National Geographic take note. Earth Story sets the gold standard which has yet to be equalled by you. The best material TV can offer. Earth Story did not require overbearing unnecessary intrusive music (often no more than psychotically repeated single piano notes), nor endless micro-second gimmicky flashing images viewed from irrelevant camera angles, nor an over simplistic dialogue that leaves your viewers puzzled and frustrated. Comparatively, these are the substandard methods of docu-TV making of the early 21st century.

Therefore, taking every genre of TV programmes (produced in English) since the dawn of television, whether fiction or fact, EARTH STORY emphatically stands today as the BEST television programme and series ever made.

Earth Story is a masterpiece in the way it clearly describes our present understanding of the geological processes. If anyone had said I would sit through eight programmes about geology, watch them again and then a third time, I would not have believed them. It gives the information clearly and straight, without patronising. This is in contrast with the BBC's current hyper-active style which uses a succession of irrelevant images when dealing with scientific subjects and which has to tell everything three times. In Earth Story the camera-work illustrates the points, the people who made the discoveries explain their contributions well, and it is held together by Aubrey Manning's intelligent narrative. Would the BBC please go back to making science programmes like this? I can only suppose that the voters who gave it less than 10/10 were forced to watch it at school.