Into the wild

From its earliest days, the BBC set out to chronicle the natural world - an ambition that, as DAVID HENDY explores, reached new heights from the late 1970s with David Attenborough's string of wildlife blockbusters

- DAVID HENDY

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 Radio Times 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 Life on Earth, 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 a dominant player in the global broadcasting marketplace.

In some respects, Life on Earth started rather unspectacularly. Since this was the story of evolution, the first episode was largely about single-cell organisms. The next featured sea snails and shrimps. In fact, the series would be more than halfway through before it served up that familiar medley of giant lizards, lions, and zebras that viewers of natural history had come to expect. Nevertheless, only two episodes in, the renowned critic Clive James was writing in the Observer of watching "enthralled... Slack-jawed with wonder and respect". Nor was he alone.