08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Five of the best David Attenborough shows to watch
Look, both Blue Planets are excellent. The first was groundbreaking, opening up the underwater world to us in a way that had never really been done before. We saw worlds so foreign that they were practically alien: just think of the whalefall: ie. the sight of millions of critters feasting on a whale carcass in the deep. But Blue Planet II went one better, combining beauty with tragedy in the way that it started to show the effect that human activity was having on the oceans. The sight of a whale mourning its calf – which had, we are told, died from plastic poisoning – was enough to spark calls to ban single-use plastic for good. It's still shockingly powerful stuff today.
