Earth, BBC2 — sit down and observe 4.5bn years of history

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Earth is an ambitiously sweeping five-part documentary survey of 4.5bn years of history — from the first sunrise to the dawn of human industry. It is a riveting, fluctuating, often violent tale retold through CGI re-enactments of primordial formations and cataclysms, and the first-hand testimonies of landscapes and geological structures that serve as time capsules chronicling the planet’s constant changes. 

We begin, rather ghoulishly, with a mass prehistoric extinction event called “the great dying”. It is 252mn years ago, and hell truly is on Earth. The land is scorched by coursing lava, the oceans are poisonous cauldrons, the ozone layer in tatters and there is “prolonged and torturous death on an unimaginable scale”.

As visually thrilling as all this computerised fiery carnage is, it can leave the viewer a little cold. Nature documentaries are often adept at playing on our feelings but what we see here is too remote, too alien to view in the emotive terms used in narration. The catastrophes only begin to hit home when analogies are drawn with the current environmental crisis. That “the Earth has seen worse” is scant comfort.

The documentary is cautionary but it also acts as a showcase for the remarkable, cutting edge research that enables us to access the scarcely fathomable past in such detail. There is also a more abstract sense of awe here — the world’s mutability and endurance; its chaos and abundant beauty. 

Presenter Chris Packham doubles as both an engaging teacher making complex discoveries accessible and a giddy schoolboy who can scarcely contain his excitement as he holds an ancient rock or shares an extraordinary nugget of information. At times, he can be too bombastic and performative — not least when declaiming something with his arms aloft to the sky. A flair for the dramatic is no bad thing, but there are moments here where there’s a touch more Partridge than Attenborough.

★★★★☆

On BBC2 from July 17 at 9pm and iPlayer thereafter; new episodes air weekly