David Attenborough fronts the BBC Natural History Unit’s three-part essay on Madagascar, broadcast weekly from 9–23 February 2011 on BBC Two and BBC HD. Each 59-minute film is paired with a ten-minute Madagascar Diaries segment that shows how the sequences were captured, from infrared lemur shoots to drone flights above the tsingy. Executive producer Mike Gunton and series producer Mary Summerill dispatched crews for eighteen months to every corner of the island, including a month with a family of indri in Minsinjo rainforest and days scrambling over razor-sharp limestone pinnacles to keep pace with crowned lemurs.
The island’s 80-per-cent endemicity frames the narrative: leaf-tailed geckos masquerading as moss, giraffe weevils folding improbable necks, and baobabs that store water in bloated trunks. The final programme travels to Cap Sainte Marie, where thousands of elephant-bird shell fragments litter the sand, a thousand years untouched. An accompanying one-off, Attenborough and the Giant Egg, broadcast the following month, follows the presenter’s return to piece together a complete egg he first assembled in 1961.
Composer Sarah Class underscores the series with a chamber score that switches between marimba pulses for chameleon hunts and slow strings for sunset shots over Avenue of the Baobabs. The result is a 180-minute answer to the question posed in Attenborough’s opening: what happens when life is left alone for 88 million years.
Production Details
BBC Two / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2011
Created by: Mike Gurton, James Honeyborne
Showrunner(s): Mike Gunton
Producer(s): Ian Gray, Mary Summerill
Music: Sarah Class
Main Cast
David Attenborough as Self - Presenter
John Brown as Self
Pam Fogg as Self
Tim Fogg as Self
Ian Gray as Self
