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"Earth Story" (1998) More at IMDbPro »TV series


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Overview

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8.2/10   73 votes
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1998 (UK) more
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Earth Story - If only new science programmes were like this more (6 total)

Cast

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Aubrey Manning ... Presenter (8 episodes)
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Additional Details

Runtime:
400 min (8 Episodes)
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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful.
Earth Story - If only new science programmes were like this, 23 February 2009
10/10
Author: blueboot from United Kingdom

A bold statement must follow about the quality of 'Earth Story' and is given at the end of this review.

As the handful of other reviewers have rightly alluded this is an eight-part series dealing with the entire geological history of our planet over the 4,500,000,000 years or so of its existence, combined with how natural life processes occurring over three thousand million years of bacteria (initially they were stromatolite colonies) interacting with atmospheric and geological processes such as the formation and spreading movement of the continents (known as plate tectonics), together with how numerous meteorological, natural chemical and physical processes have come to ultimately shape the world in which we recognise and live in now. This fantastic televised feat is accomplished with great clarity and alacrity by narrator Aubrey Manning, himself a biologist, in only 8 hours! At no time is the viewer patronised.

Over a decade on all the science explained in the series remains current, and is all but unanimously regarded as wholly accurate by the international scientific community.

To unravel a vast web of once unconnected strands of Earth's natural processes that took humans thousands of years to piece together, and do so coherently is a true masterpiece of programme making. We join Manning's quest as he himself attempts to unravel Earth's history across the eons. It's a huge journey, across the vastness of geological time, so different from the perspective of a human lifespan, and is brought home with ease. Visual aids, such as: viewing our planet's oceanic sea-floor spreading by satellites from space orbit, or, the demonstration the compression and (future) collapse of the Himalayas by means of a simple tilted board and a viscous sticky fluid falling upon it, reveal a tremendous imagination in conveying the scientific principles involved to the viewer.

The likelihood is no other programme or series made for the small screen has ever been able to explain so much, or deal with such infinite complexity, so competently and concisely. BBC, Discovery and National Geographic take note. Earth Story sets the gold standard which has yet to be equalled by you. The best material TV can offer. Earth Story did not require overbearing unnecessary intrusive music (often no more than psychotically repeated single piano notes), nor endless micro-second gimmicky flashing views from irrelevant camera angles, nor an over simplistic dialogue that leaves your viewers puzzled and frustrated. Comparatively, these are the substandard methods of docu-TV making of the early 21st century.

Therefore, taking every genre of TV programmes (produced in English) since the dawn of television, whether fiction or fact, EARTH STORY emphatically stands today as the BEST television programme ever made.

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