Over at the Assistant Blog,  Jonathan is heaping well-deserved praise in nearly equal quantities upon David Attenborough’s new series Life In Cold Blood and Nancy Banks-Smith’s review of it in the Guardian.

The TV show itself was magnificent, with the sort of stunning camera work which we would expect from the BBC’s natural history unit, but now with the added dimension of heat imaging cameras.  The technique was used a lot, staying only just this side of too much, but the results were extremely illuminating.

I suppose I knew it on some level, but never really thought much about how the life of reptiles and amphibians is so dominated by the issue of heat.  A few clips of Predator-cam footage and it was made clearer than a whole pile of books could make it.   Surely this is popular science at its very best – attractive visuals leading the viewer into some quite profound insights.

The fact that the programme has, so far, been less obsessed with spurious superlatives than Planet Earth is a good thing too.

Almost as remarkable as the cold-blooded animals on show, was the token mammal – Dave himself.   He is now 81 but appears as lively as ever and if anything he is more prolific now than before.  Some of these series must take 5 years to make but another one comes to the screen just about every year – he must have a Tardis at his disposal or something.

I do appreciate that on series like Blue Planet and Planet Earth Attenborough didn’t have to do all the globe-trotting himself and just came in to add a voice-over to the results of everyone else’s labours, but even so the man is just a legend. ((As our kids would say))

As if all that is not good enough, after the programme finished we were told about a new series on the way by the makers of Equator, called Tropic of Capricorn.   Even more good news is that its a four-parter – Equator really was far too short.  I’m greatly looking forward to seeing Simon Reeve in action again, and keeping my fingers crossed that the other series gets a repeat on the back of the new one.