Original air dates : 3 October – 19 December 1990
Having made two extremely successful series about natural history Attenborough’s team needed some new challenges. They had been filming animals and their environments, but the animals weren’t really DOING anything.
As an undergraduate, in the 1940s, Attenborough’s main field of interest was to observe animal behaviour in the field. But this was what naturalists did, not scientists. Scientists were more concerned with the anatomy of animals. When an animals in the London Zoo died it became even more important when it was passed to scientist for dissection. This made it so important to have the Zoo Quest expeditions collect animals they had not possessed before. In those days scientists had already laid the foundations of behavioural studies in a field that even had its own scientific name: Ethology.
There had been advances in many fields that would enable them to make the next series: Filming technology had just recently overstepped the problem of filming in the dark, companies were competing with each other in producing more light sensitive films. They had also acquired a lens that enabled them to film insects without losing the depth of the background field that may distort the animal’s size in the viewers point of view. Film makers could also benefit from technology that was breaking new grounds in medicine, using endoscopes. These could be used for example to penetrate insect houses.
This series consists of 12 episodes that each deals with its separate ‘trial’ in every animal’s life.