CHRIS PACKHAM VERSUS THE WORLD

After conquering wildlife programming, presenter Chris Packham is taking on the planet in Earth, a BBC series that sheds new light on the history of our home. He talks Noa Leach through the show's surprising science and his guilty conscience

- Noa Leach

The camera pans around a purple mountain rising through a lush green forest. But the film glitches... something is wrong. The scene flickers with a hellish inverse: a deadly volcanic eruption. The Earth's crust splits and red light bleeds from its opening. Deadly rivers of lava veil the now-black rock, and ash and toxic gases spill into the air.

This fiery inferno is the deadliest volcanic event in Earth's history, around 250 million years ago. It's just one of many moments that have brought the planet we call home close to death - and one of the five key events that shape the BBC's new Earth series.

This is the BBC Natural History Unit's usual output reborn as a forensic crime thriller, with fossils as evidence. With Chris Packham presenting, Earth exposes the clues hidden in fossil records that reveal all the times the planet - and our long-gone ancestors - have almost been destroyed over the last 4.5 billion years.

In this way, Earth aims to show that our future has already happened, with the current climate crisis eerily echoing the past. But will we survive it this time around? We got the verdict from Chris Packham himself...

YOUR NEW SERIES COVERS BILLIONS OF YEARS OF HISTORY. HOW ON, AHEM, EARTH DID YOU FIT THAT INTO ONE SERIES?

Our mission was to present the series as a biography of our planet. It's not just about how Earth was born, but its bumpy life journey - akin to how it met its first girlfriend, got married, then divorced and then happily remarried.

We wanted to highlight the moments that had a significant impact on the planet - the key geological, planetary and life forces. And how they interact.

For example, when the lava was beneath the surface of the planet, it was burning coal, which raised the temperature of the planet by 10°C. This was catastrophic. But now here we are digging it up and burning it again!