I missed the last Planet Earth programme on Sunday, sickness driving me to bed long before it came on, so I’ll have to remember to catch the repeat on Saturday.

After all the publicity, it all seemed to be over very quickly. If the first law of show business is to always leave the audience wanting more then it was a great success.

Am I the only one who thought that last week’s show about the caves broke the spell a bit? Up to then what struck me was the total absence of any sign of humanity. Living in the crowded South-East its easy to imagine that mankind has stamped its presence on everything, but Planet Earth was showing vast and impressive landscapes without so much as a glimpse of a person, building, bridge, road, cultivated field or anything man-made.
During the sequence of the hunting dogs in Africa the shots from the helicopter managed to avoid showing the ground-based camera crew, or even a helicopter shadow.

And then the cave programme showed the camera crew and their journey which spoiled it a little for me. Even so, the whole thing was quite awe-inspiring, and the computer effects just enhanced that when a huge area was being talked about like a wetland the size of Wales or whatever and then the viewpoint zoomed out so you could see that such a vast area was really only a tiny part of South America.

We keep hearing how the television and the growth of travel have shrunk the world, well this programme has made it grow again.

I can remember flying over South-East Asia on the way to Australia in 1988 and seeing the endless hills in a landscape which did not change for a couple of hours. That gave me an appreciation of the sheer scale of wilderness which had dulled over the years until Planet Earth reminded me how insignificant we really are.