David Attenborough’s new series, Life in Cold Blood, starts soon on BBC. It’s the last of the Life on Earth series and is about reptiles and amphibians, the only major animal groups not yet covered. Nature has a feature on the new series and its host:
Attenborough is very much as you would expect from his on-screen appearances—knowledgeable, eloquent, a consummate storyteller and extremely excited about wildlife. He is as happy enthusing about a turtle mating frenzy as he is about the grisly habits of the caecilian, a burrowing worm-like amphibian whose young feed by tearing strips of fatty skin from their mothers. And what about the most interesting thing he’s eaten himself? “Big moth caterpillars in New Guinea. You put them on a fire and they come out like Twiglets.”
His latest subjects, including snakes, lizards and frogs, might be less of a draw for some people than ‘meerkats and monkeys’, but he seems to relish the challenge. “In a way, it’s a great advantage because it means that a lot of their stories haven’t been told. It’s a measure of what, in my view, public service broadcasting should do. It shouldn’t just be about making programmes about popular animals.”
I read the last sentence of the article with particular joy.