BBC Evolution: Packham crowned Attenborough's heir
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- BBC's Evolution is a five-part nature documentary presented by Chris Packham, whom the reviewer declares a "worthy" successor to David Attenborough.
- Each episode of Evolution focuses on a single animal to illustrate an evolutionary trait — episode one on elephants and their trunks, with later episodes on ostriches, bats ("the importance of bums"), dolphins (intelligence) and horses (movement).
- The opening episode opens in Kenya at an African savanna elephant watering hole, then uses CGI to trace life back 4.2 billion years to Luca — the last universal common ancestor.
- Packham grounds every segment in tangible science — a fossil, a modern creature doing something similar to an ancient one, or an experiment — while framing evolution strictly as a selection process, "not a method of design working towards a goal."
- The bats episode details how retroviruses invaded a prehistoric placoderm fish, passing on viral DNA that added myelin sheaths to developing nerve cells for the first time and increased computational power across species — "until, at some point, thinking begins."
- The review describes Evolution as television that "makes you feel like a child again," drawing a parallel between Packham's boyhood obsession and Attenborough's as the model for igniting curiosity in young viewers.
Why it matters: BBC's five-part Evolution stakes Packham as the network's next flagship natural-history presenter, built around accessible, fossil-grounded evolution storytelling rather than spectacle alone. The Attenborough-succession question matters for the broadcaster's prestige slot in UK public-service TV; the reviewer finds Packham treads Attenborough's line between respecting viewers and not infantilizing them.
