Friday, 5 April 2019

Attenborough's "Our Planet" on Netflix tonight

The BBC wants to do more when it comes to covering the environment:
Futures Forum: BBC prioritises environment with new natural history programming

David Attenborough is very much the voice of the BBC on these issues - and he's very much the voice of the UK,  as when he spoke out at this year's Davos meeting:
Futures Forum: Climate change @ Davos

Later this spring, he will not be holding his punches:
Climate Change - The Facts: David Attenborough to present BBC1 documentary - Radio Times

And tonight he'll be doing the same, but on Netflix:
Our Planet Sir David Attenborough explains reason behind Netflix documentary | TV & Radio | Showbiz & TV | Express.co.uk
Why Sir David Attenborough was drawn to Netflix - The Scotsman

He has clearly been frustrated by the culture at the BBC:

David Attenborough's new Netflix series Our Planet is a direct rebuke of the BBC

With Attenborough’s brilliant new wildlife series on Netflix we finally have a show that doesn’t sugarcoat the natural world’s biggest challenges, and the first episode is a clear challenge to those who have

BY STUART MCGURK

Stuart McGurk is GQ's Associate Editor and the 2017 PPA Magazine Writer of the Year. Follow him on Twitter @stuartmcgurk
Tuesday 2 April 2019

Imagine, for a second, that a documentary about our solar system left it until the last five minutes to mention that, by the way, a meteor the size of Jupiter is on the way and it’s set to knock Earth directly into the sun, before rebounding off into almost every other planet in the solar system, in a rather remarkable intergalactic trick-shot.

It’d be slightly odd, wouldn’t it? You’d be sitting there, screaming at the TV: “Guys! Guys? Maybe the whole documentary could have been about this? Maybe you could have called the series Our Impending Fiery Hell Doom rather than The Planets?”

This is the feeling you’ll have watching the brilliant new Netflix series Our Planet – four years in the making, footage filming in 50 countries, voiced by Sir David Attenborough and made in conjunction with the WWF and your own overbearing sense of guilt.

The WWF part is particularly important: rather than the BBC’s practice of guiltily slipping in five minutes of a turtle caught in plastic at the end of 40 minutes of HDR wildlife porn, Our Planet puts human impact front and centre. The result – far from it being “lecturing” or “preachy” – simply makes you acutely aware how incredibly odd most of the BBC’s flagship natural world shows are: documentaries that document the Titanic by focusing on the on-board entertainment.

Still, a wildlife doc that does nothing but talk of potential doom is not a fun one, and the first episode of Our Planet walks the line expertly. It also ends with a sucker-punch that puts the BBC’s five-minute-environmental-aside model to shame.

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