.... and also performs well as a lubricant.

Instead of writing a review about a game or a movie I thought I'd stir things up a bit a write about a television show. No, none of those brain numbing sitcoms that try very desperately to be funny [Two and a Half Men] or any of that apparently 'hard-hitting' emotional drama [Desperate Housewives]. I thought instead I'd review something my country is actually quite good at making, in fact one of the only things my country's any good at making; documentaries.

Human Planet is a factual documentary and is exactly how it sounds as it based around the only creature capable of thriving anywhere in the world; Humans. The documentary is split into 8-parts and ranges from tribes who live on the sea, to villages in deserts where it never rains.

John Hurt

The program itself is quite humbling in that anybody who feels their life is hard only has to watch a single episode of Human Planet to realise exactly how fortunate they are. The program also tries to put 'animal lovers' in their place by showing them exactly why we are the dominant race on Earth, it does this quite easily by the end of the first episode in which you see an eighty-man deep sea diving using only a 50m long straw for air, or the man who lungs have adapted to pressurise oxygen allowing him to stay underwater for five minutes at a time.

Of course the program isn't perfect and it goes without saying that there were a few things that really irritated me. The only one of these things worth writing about was the narration as, with the absence of David Attenborough, John Hurt (incidentally the most stereotypically British man in the world) stepped up to fill his shoes. The only problem with this is Hurt has got to have the bleakest, most monotone voice in history and I'm sure if they made a bonus 'Depressing Planet' episode it would just be a biography of him.


So Human Planet get a very rare two thumbs up from me, with a bonus thumb up for originality; giving it an amazing THREE THUMBS UP. If you're British I definitely recommend checking it out on BBCi player, and if you're not British get your file sharing on it is the 21st century after all.