David Attenborough

Life on Earth.

For more than 70 years, David Attenborough has been exploring the planet and its living inhabitants, filming and marveling at a world full of natural treasures.

In the process, he's become a natural treasure himself.

As host and as narrator, his whispery, enthusiastic voice is instantly recognizable.

And his nature series over the decades have been widely popular, from The Trials of Life and The Life of Birds to The Planet Earth, The Blue Planet, and this year's Ocean with David Attenborough.

His first on-camera work was in the mid-1950s as host of the BBC nature series Zoo Quest.

That program wasn't shown in the United States, but a taste of it is available in the new documentary, Life on Earth, Attenborough's Greatest Adventure.

Here he is on ZooQuest as a very young man.

Eventually, he gave up traveling the world with a film crew to become an administrator for the BBC.

He commissioned such ambitious and pivotal projects as Kenneth Clark's 13-part Civilization series.

But his concept of TV eventually drove him out from behind the desk and back into the field.

I interviewed him for a book in 1991, and he said then, of his BBC executive approach, quote, it was our responsibility to say, what haven't we done and why aren't we doing it, unquote.

And one of the things No One in TV was doing was a global TV series that told the entire story of evolution.

Attenborough continued, the wonderful thing about making natural history documentaries is that there is something in any sequence for everybody at every conceivable level of age, education, and interest.

So he embarked upon Life on Earth, which began production 50 years ago.

It took more than three years to film, visiting 40 countries and capturing more than 600 species.

It was the way it was filmed, in part, that was so groundbreaking.

It used new lenses from Canon, new color film from Kodak, and experimented with new developments in film speeds, time lapse, and microphotography.

Life on Earth premiered on PBS in 1982 and was seen globally by over 500 million people in more than 100 territories.

This new special has Attenborough looking back on life on Earth, and literally looking at it as it's projected in a screening room.