Comedian Matt Lucas takes on the persona of natural historian Armstrong Wedgewood to give the voice-over for Round Planet , a different kind of nature programme. The 10-episode show dips into BBC’s rich natural history archive to present nature in a fun way with asides from Wedgewood/Lucas.
In the first episode, ‘Arctic’, in between fretfully demanding his panini, Wedgewood comes up with gems such as, “Arctic creatures aren’t bothered by the cold. Rather, they fear the warmth caused by human activity that is setting the Earth’s freezer to defrost,” or “The polar bear looks like she is having a whale of a time which if you ask me is a strange expression as whales look rather bored.”
Narrating a polar bear hunting seal, Wedgewood says, “Dramatic pause — I should get a BAFTA for that line alone.” He goes into a rhapsody about the narwhal, the strange-looking whale with a single long tusk from its canine tooth, which has it dubbed the unicorn of the sea. “Narwhal is one of the best words in natural history,” Wedgewood declares and goes on to use it in multiple ways.
The woolly bear caterpillar that freezes over winter to thaw in summer is succinctly described as “a wandering eyebrow.” The short 26-minute episode, shows slices of life of the seals, polar bears (the cubs are a cuteness overload), narwhals, musk-ox and Arctic fox. The other episodes in the series are ‘Yellowstone’, ‘Wildebeest’, ‘Oceans’, ‘Madagascar’, ‘Bears’, ‘Forests’, ‘Penguins’, ‘Great Apes’ and ‘Islands.’
The light-hearted tone, which apparently angered David Attenborough, who has written and presented a series of natural history documentaries with the BBC, offers a different way of looking at the marvels of our planet.
Round Planet premieres on January 21 at 9 pm on Sony BBC Earth.
