Sir David Attenborough explores the surprisingly vibrant seas that surround the British Isles. The vast watery wilderness around us is over three times the size of our land mass, and yet to many, our oceans remain a mystery. Full of colour and teeming with life, the seas of Britain and Ireland are crucially important to a range of wildlife. This episode goes beneath the waves to uncover the thriving habitats that exist along our 22,000-mile coastline.
In winter, clear evidence of the ocean’s abundance can be seen on a beach in Norfolk. Thousands of grey seals congregate on the shoreline to give birth. Britain and Ireland are home to 40 per cent of the world’s grey seals, and the number being born on our shore rises every year. Once the newly born pups are weaned, the females are ready to breed again, and heavyweight males enter violent, bloody fights to win a stretch of beach, and the females along with it.
Beyond the beach, the vibrant shallows contain several important habitats. Rich beds of seagrass are nurseries for a range of animals, while also acting as very important carbon storage areas. They are also home to one of the strangest fish in our waters, the seahorse. We follow a male and female as they perform a balletic mating dance in the water, delicately entwining their tails. The stakes are high, as these animals mate for life.
In a touching piece to camera, Sir David bids a fledging Manx shearwater chick farewell as it embarks on a 6,000-mile journey across the oceans to South America. There is no better example of how important the British Isles and its abundant seas are to the survival of wildlife worldwide.

Dive with David Attenborough into a world where a single life can last a thousand years. See things no eye has ever seen, and discover the dramatic, beautiful plant life of Earth. In the first episode, Sir David Attenborough shows how more kinds of plants are crammed together in the tropical rainforests than anywhere else on Earth. The result is astonishing beauty and intense competition - a plant battleground.
New filming techniques allow us to enter the plants’ world and see it from their perspective and on their timescale. From fast-growing trees to flowers that mimic dead animals, this is a journey into a magical world that operates on a different timescale to our own.

Water plants create some of the most beautiful, bizarre and important habitats on earth. To hold on in torrents, plants use a kind of superglue. Some are armed with vicious weapons to fight titanic battles for space. Others form perfect spheres and escape from animal enemies by rolling. Where nutrients are washed away, plants turn into hunters of animals, laying traps and even counting to ensure their success.
In this episode we explore those watery worlds with David Attenborough, from Croatia to Brazil, from Colombia to Thailand, the brilliantly coloured flowers smother lakes, and in one magical river in Brazil, the water bubbles like champagne as plants create the atmosphere itself.

The last episode explores Mescaline, the psychoactive molecule in San Pedro and peyote cacti, a sacred medicine that Native Americans have had to fight for the right to use. At the Indigenous practices there's always an elder, someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding. There's usually a group, a community is involved, There's always an intention, a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred, in order to achieve altered states of consciousness, which contribute to worship in various ways, or celebration or healing.
But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all. In the old Greek histories of Eleusis, people who were initiated there got the drink, the kykeon, and then they had the illumination. The precise recipe is a mystery, but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries, a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment practiced by some of the world's greatest minds including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago? Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness considered threatening to the powers that be? Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear?
Psychedelics has a major part in how we can heal as a community, how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country. The current renaissance of psychedelics could not come at a better time as the world confronts a crisis in mental health. But psychedelics have much to offer. The psychedelic experience changes the mind in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works. All these altered states allow us to probe what is the greatest mystery in all of nature. The emergence from mere matter of something as miraculous as consciousness. But an even bigger question is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis of how we think about our place in nature. One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject, the spirit of all species, not just our own. And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.

In the second episode, panic strikes the community as a full-blown catastrophe looms. Locals mobilize to confront the authorities and protest the nuclear power industry.
Twenty-eight hours after the accident began, the lieutenant governor appeared at a news briefing to say that the plant's owner had assured the state that 'everything is under control'. Later that day, Scranton changed his statement, saying that the situation was 'more complex than the company first led us to believe'. There were conflicting statements about radioactivity releases. Schools were closed and residents were urged to stay indoors. Farmers were told to keep their animals under cover and on stored feed.

From a primate that’s no bigger than a mouse, to a chameleon that can fit on your fingertip, the natural world is full of fantastically small animals. Biologist Patrick Aryee explores the fascinating secrets behind these miniature marvels and shows that they’re not the underdogs you might think they are. Super Small Animals follows him as he meets the leading experts on these pint sized superstars, and finds out what makes them some of the most successful on the planet.
First up, he reveals the huge benefits that being small can bring. There’s the little lemur whose diminutive frame helps it to exploit a unique gap in the eco-system, the tiny hummingbird that uses its size to out-maneuver the competition, and the world’s smallest seahorse that never has to leave home. He also explores why small animals are proportionally the strongest in the world, and introduces a peanut-sized beetle that can pull over a thousand times its own weight.
Next he explores the challenges that animals face when they shrink in size, and the ingenious ways they overcome them. We find out how the smallest armadillo in the world manages to control its temperature in the searing desert sun, and the how the world’s smallest fish can survive in nothing more than a puddle, because it never really grows up. Patrick meets a secretive hippo that lives in the dense jungle, and looks like it’s been shrunk in the wash, and some of the world’s smallest snakes that give birth to enormous babies. He also meets a scientist that studies how really tiny spiders have a surprising trick that enables them to travel an incredible 40 miles per day, using almost no energy.
Then there are the animals that refuse to be pigeon holed as small, and manage to punch way above their weight. He puts some astonishing invertebrates to the test, to see how they work together to become much bigger than the sum of their parts and meets a pint-sized predator that takes on some of the largest and most dangerous creatures on the planet, getting hands on to discover how its build helps it to be brave. Finally he uncovers the incredible lengths that deep sea anglerfish go to in order to be big and small at the same time, and has an endearing encounter with a tiny carnivore that manages to be small in just one direction.
Whether their size helps them to hunt, hide or survive, all these remarkable animals prove that good things really do come in small packages.