With only two episodes to get stuck into, David Attenborough returned to our screens once again to present us with Life In Colour. A move away from the sweeping scale of Blue Planet and Planet Earth, this new series treats us with a more personal approach to his documentaries; a first-hand exploration into the visual splendour of our planet's natural world.
It feels that over the last few years David Attenborough has gone into hyperdrive, constantly producing groundbreaking, large-scale documentaries before we’ve even had a chance to finish the last one! Perhaps it’s so one day nobody has the chance to notice he’s retired. He’s doing everything in his power to ensure we don’t forget how special this planet is and, once more, he’s back doing it again.
But this time he's done away with the grandeur of old, instead giving us a two-episode up close and personal account of how the animal kingdom exploits colour.
Have you ever wondered why Flamingos are so terrifically pink? How peacocks have evolved with such flamboyant plumage? Perhaps you want to know how fiddler crabs communicate using light or what a zebra's colour does to predators' vision? In under two hours, he answers these questions and many more with quite a few surprising answers.
Typical of anything Attenborough produces, Life In Colour is just as visually exciting, vivid, colourful or therapeutic as it is genuinely informative. It can all be summed up in one particularly mind-blowing segment divulging how a tiger appears from a deer’s perspective.
Spoiler alert: due to the deer effectively being colourblind tigers appear green. They truly are 'The Predator' of the animal kingdom. Don't worry, he shows us exactly how they look to a deer and it may well change the way you view tigers forever!
You see the thing is, although Life In Colour will amaze you with how truly diverse and colourful our natural world is, it's more about the colours we can’t see. Here, Attenborough explores how colour is just another tool for many species to survive.
Thanks to the cutting edge research that's presented to us in the form of polarised light cameras, we're invited into a hitherto invisible world to us humans. They utilised a unique camera system just for Life In Colour to detect areas of polarised light and show us how animals use this to communicate with one another. What's most unique is how they then adapted these polarised cameras to work underwater. In doing so, they break new ground and even capture how fish see our world.
And of course, they can also see how their coral reefs are being decimated and slowly bleeched more and more every day.
Attenborough's Life In Colour feels refreshingly akin to his original format of documentary, getting up close and personal with the animals himself. We see him in Scotland discussing how our climate has endangered populations of white rabbits that need the winter snows to camouflage and survive. We're walking with him as he wonders tropical shores on a quest to find some scarlet macaws with his binoculars. And we watch in awe as he points out the warning spots on a magnificent little ladybird.
His transcendently graceful nature is always enough to remind us of how special our planet really is, making Life In Colour yet another unforgettable documentary in his ever expanding filmography.
Is Life In Colour Any Good? You can always rely on David Attenborough.
Attenborough's Life In Colour is now available to stream on BBC iPlayer