The Red Notebook

CG animator Richard Spence recently uploaded a 3-minute sequence he created of Sir David Attenborough explaining the entire history of life on earth. You’ve probably seen the sequence before, but this version is in high definition, without an annoying YouTube logo in the corner.

Sir David Attenborough contemplates a tangled molecule.

Last night’s Darwin bicentennial special on the BBC by Sir David Attenborough was every bit as good as we all knew it would be. You know where you stand with Sir David: a landmark television event is almost a given. We shouldn’t take such things for granted, but we do.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life was wonderful, one-hour documentary in which Sir David brilliantly summarised Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection. But it was also a deeply personal programme, in which Sir David took us to his childhood geological haunts near Leicester, reminisced about learning to categorise fossils at Cambridge University, showed us his own copy of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species bought second-hand when he was 18 years old, and drew on archive footage from his classic nature series. He even got to sit in Darwin’s study in Down House. As the greatest science communicator since (and possibly including) Darwin, he had every right to be there.

You might argue that Darwin’s great theory is worthy of a 52-week series of documentaries—and you would be right—but the one-hour format worked brilliantly: Sir David explained Darwin’s thinking, and the modern-day evidence that supports it in a single sitting. The viewer was able to see the whole picture, and understand the whole argument, without getting bogged down in details.

But the real reason we didn’t need a 52-week series of documentaries to explain Darwin’s great theory is that we have already had more than 50 years’ worth of wonderful documentary series courtesy of Sir David—every single one of which has celebrated nature’s grandeur as explained by Charles Darwin.

Darwin famously claimed that On the Origin of Species had been one long argument; Sir David Attenborough’s half-century body of work has been one long celebration of Darwin’s wonderful theory. By anyone’s standards, it is a magnificent achievement.

The guest this week on BBC Radio 4′s Great Lives programme was Sir David Attenborough. Sir David nominated Robert Hooke. Great choice! Hooke’s biographer, Lisa Jardine, also contributed. I’m downloading the podcast as I type.

For one week only, you can listen again to the program, or download the mp3 file.

Observer: This much I know (Sir David Attenborough):

My next project is about Charles Darwin. He says in a letter to Emma, his wife, something like: ‘I sat down on a bench and saw a bird singing in the trees and saw a wide mass of life going on around me, and I thought I didn’t care what the process was that brought this into place because it’s so wonderful.’ If I lost that feeling, I’d go and do something else.

In case you missed it, let me repeat the salient sentence… Sir David Attenborough says:

My next project is about Charles Darwin.

Telegraph: David Attenborough: a wild life

Now 81, Sir David Attenborough has spent most of the past 50 years ‘getting the behaviour of animals’, as they used to call it in the Natural History Unit of the BBC. Here, he looks back at significant moments from more than five decades of definitive natural history programmes, beginning with Zoo Quest in 1954, and ending with his forthcoming series on reptiles, Life in Cold Blood, the final chapter of his overview of life on Earth.

It’s a nice piece about a great science communicator, with some pretty cool photos. Read about Sir David’s encounter with a gun-runner, and what George and Joy Adamson were really like.

The Telegraph also asks readers to suggest ideas for future David Attenborough series. No prizes for guessing my suggestion.