A Year on Planet Earth
Narration … Stephen Fry
Series Produced by
Martha Holmes … executive producer (6 episodes, 2022)
Tom Hugh-Jones … executive producer (6 episodes, 2022)
Sebastian Illis … series producer (6 episodes, 2022)
Doing a parody of Attenborough narration is pretty easy. You just intone, using a dulcet and authoritative voice much like George V might have used. “The Declarative Proper Noun. Few stylistic choices in the world can match the brevity and gravitas of this rhetorical flourish.” And then you just go on from there, discussing how the language has changed in the years since you were baby-sitting Keith Richards.
Stephen Fry, the man who always appears to be looking to his left (it’s that nose) is well up to the job. He has the same sort of matchless voice that Sir David has, and clearly enjoys doing the narratives. The search has been on for someone to take over Attenborough’s role as National Treasure. The astrophysicist Brian Cox was mooted for the role, but it became clear that, brilliant as he was at explaining quantum theory and astronomy, he was clearly uncomfortable bunched up against plants and animals that may contain fleas and teeth. I don’t know if Fry might have the same problem, but they kept him off-camera, doing voiceover only.
The writers were a disappointment. Right from the start, where he irrationally segues from the stillness and silence of a glacier field to hurtling through space at half a million miles an hour (let the writers know that everyone else on Earth is doing the same thing, even when they aren’t standing on ice) to the purely idiotic comment that only Earth, uniquely, has seasons, the writing is pedestrian, bordering on bad. Almost all planets have axial tilts as they revolve around stars, and thus have seasons. Then, too, there is the material, much covered extensively and in similar formats by other nature docuseries.
For all of that, A Year on Planet Earth does well enough. The camera work is professional, and in the rapidly evolving field of nature documentaries, would have been considered awesome and breathtaking just a few years ago. In other words, not quite BBC standards, but you could see them from there. And, after a rough start, the writers stayed with a comprehensible and smooth format of jumping from one particular storyline (penguins, chimps, elephants, leopards, etc) to the next and revisiting, showing the life changes and challenges individuals from the various species cope with. And Fry, who can be one of the funniest men in Britane, employs a gentle and subtle humor here that classes up the joint.
That ITV and Fox Live produced this was surprising and pleasing, especially since it gives a frank and therefore foreboding look at the effects of climate change. Perhaps the right wing stonewall of “global warming” is beginning to crumble in the face of insurmountable evidence.
No, this isn’t Attenborough and the BBC, but it is a good solid effort, and something you’ll want to show to the kids.