The four and a half billion years of Earth’s existence is an unfathomably long time to hold in our heads. So, we compress it, mentally eliding the epochs between life emerging from the oceans and the rise of the dinosaurs, who have become familiar characters on our screens. The new BBC series Earth takes a different approach: it starts just before the dinosaurs and heads backwards in time.
Its landmarks are catastrophes. The first episode, Inferno, tells the story of the late Permian extinction event, also known as the Great Dying. About 250 million years ago, a series of convulsions set off by volcanic eruptions in Siberia wiped out nearly all life in the oceans and perhaps two-thirds of land vertebrates, including the impressive proto-mammalian synapsids.
But, as Earth’s presenter, naturalist Chris Packham observes early in the episode, “Extinction is a vital part of evolution. If nothing ever went extinct, there would be no room for new species to evolve.”
At one point, as life recovered from the Great Dying, it rained for two million years. The series’ executive producer Rob Liddell says the sheer scale of time “was a struggle for the production team at first – and then you start banding around a billion years, like it’s nothing.” Part of the solution to communicate those time scales was to shape each episode as a narrative, he says.
“One of the things that we really tried to do with this programme is not to look at this as a straight factual show, but to approach it like a drama. So we really looked to create and shape characters – we’ve got protagonists and antagonists; Earth and the life that it supports.”
The sheer keenness of Packham’s interest in it all drives things along. One reviewer complained about the “relentlessness” of the show’s roll through ancient disasters (“I came to resent how much he was enjoying it”), but others have been anointing Packham as “the new Attenborough”. It’s quite a legacy to carry.
“I know!” says Liddell. “I think it must be very flattering for him to have those comparisons. But as he says, Attenborough is very much alive. Chris is Chris and Sir David is Sir David. What I think we can take from it is that people have really been blown away by the clarity of the communication that Chris brings in the series.”
Liddell produced the 2021 Greta Thunberg documentary A Year to Change the World and Is it Time to Break the Law?, Packham’s intense TV essay on the climate crisis, that has galvanised debate in Britain this year. Yet for four of its five apocalyptic episodes, Earth is gentle in its comparisons with the contemporary climate crisis, which Liddell says was a conscious choice.
“What we realised as we shaped the episodes is that each of these formative moments really pivots around a big moment of climate instability,” says Liddell. “The links to climate change emerged during the production of the series – we didn’t actually set out to make those. But in the final part, Human, which traces the rise of mammals, apes and humans, the links to climate change and the lessons from the series are drawn together in a more direct way. It’s important those links are made.”
It won’t take until that final part for the attentive viewer to take the key point from the stories of these upheavals and of ice and fire, which is that the Earth will carry on: we might not.
Earth, BBC Earth, Thursdays, 9.20pm
