THE GOLDILOCKS PLANET

Sir David Attenborough returns to BBC One with a stunning new series that fuses natural history with Earth sciences to help us understand the forces that maintain life.

- Michael Bright

A perfect planet? Well, that’s something to live up to in a universe with trillions of planets. So, does our home – a tiny blue dot in the vastness of space – stand out from the crowd? If the new BBC One series A Perfect Planet is anything to go by, it probably does – after all, Earth is the only planet known to have life.

Brought to us by the producers of Our Planet and The Hunt, the central narrative of this new series is the forces of nature – volcanoes, sunlight, weather and ocean currents – that shape life on Earth. It is this fusion of Earth sciences and blue-chip natural history that underpins A Perfect Planet, says series producer Huw Cordey. So, what can we expect to see? “Stunning photography, of course, but also new stories and animal behaviour that show a perspective of the planet of which many people might not be aware. People see volcanoes as destructive, for example, but they are vital to life and are the architects of our planet.”

One of the most spectacular is Mount Yasur on Tanna Island in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. It’s been spitting out lava bombs, molten spatter, clouds of ash and steam, along with choking gases, for over 800 years, one of the longest continually erupting volcanoes on the planet. In 1774, Captain Cook was drawn to its glow, and the attraction for A Perfect Planet producers was the lake of molten lava bubbling in the crater.