The clocks change, the nights draw in, and along comes David Attenborough to ease those autumnal blues. Right on cue, he is here, narrating another magnificent series about weird and wonderful nature that allows him to say delicious, fantastical phrases such as “a special set of grasping belly fins”. The continent of Asia covers almost a third of the planet’s land area, and encompasses desert, forest, mountains and frozen wilderness. It is also the most populous continent, forcing humans and animals to coexist “in the most remarkable ways”. In short, it’s a place full of the kind of stories on which nature documentaries thrive, covering all sorts of terrain and ecosystems, and this first episode is an excuse to explore a massive swathe of water, with its 21 oceans and seas.
As ever, this is a masterclass in television, in which every element is cooked to perfection: it is filmed beautifully, edited with wit, soundtracked with flair and narrated with warmth and authority. We see the “flamboyant” moorish idol fish – which will be better known to some viewers as the droll Gill from Finding Nemo – as it congregates in large numbers and is then hunted down by sharks. If watching with children, it might be wise not to point out that the resulting melee resembles a minion buffet. There are baby sperm whales, who are learning coordination skills by chasing mangrove seeds through the water; the adults sleep upright, and look like stray statues that have escaped from Easter Island. There are manta rays, with five-metre spans, which take themselves off to “cleaning stations”, where other sea creatures treat them to the equivalent of a marine spa day.
It is a televisual wonder. I love the creatures of the deep, which suggest that whatever incarnation of the divine creator you choose to believe in had been playing the Rainbow Road level of Mario Kart at the time. The creatues are bioluminescent lava lamps, blobbing around in the blackened depths, communicating in what scientists suspect to be a secret light code that only they can see. As we roam the waters of Asia, sweeping around the planet, the awe builds and builds. “Meet the sea bunny,” says Attenborough, introducing a creature that is half Pokémon, half cake fail, and though it may look cute, is one of nature’s great survivors, putting predators off in a number of innovative ways. It is slow and unthreatening, and its favourite food is the toxic blue coral, which in turn makes it poisonous to anything that tries to eat it.
I sometimes wonder if an Attenborough documentary acts as a kind of Rorschach test for viewers. Do you prefer to marvel at a fish and a snake collaborating as they combine their unique skills to hunt for food, or to endure the grim spectacle of a section on the northern fur seal, the adult males of which would not be out of place in the chaos of Mad Max? In this episode, my heart belongs to the dusky-gilled mudskipper, a resident of the mangroves with endless entertainment value, and the owner of those grasping belly fins. Despite being a fish, in the loosest possible sense, it scoffs at the idea of a primary mode of transport, walking on land, jumping through the air and skipping across the water. It is about 5cm long, but it looks like a dinosaur. Its courtship ritual is a lovely display of choreographed romance, with waving and dancing, and its name should be up in lights.
As ever, the “how we made it” finale is almost as good as the animal antics. This time, we learn how to go about filming the Indonesian Throughflow, the largest movement of water on the planet, a swirling, churning clash of currents, as if someone has pulled the plug out of a massive bath. It is more ad hoc and DIY than you might expect, but the innovation and the dedication are nearly as astonishing as the resulting footage.
It is notable that, in this first episode at least, Asia has toned down the rhetoric that permeated Planet Earth III, for example, of the Anthropocene and human-induced destruction. Here, the rampant industrialisation of the planet has tweaked delicate ecosystems, rather than ravaged them: see an Israeli power station that pumps out water that is 10C warmer than the surrounding seas. While there is little mention of what those heated waters have done on a larger scale, it does point out that it has accidentally benefited the pregnant female dusky sharks that now gather in the area. It mentions busy shipping routes and polluted seas but, largely, this is more gentle, less urgent, than some of its preceding series. I just wonder if a lack of urgency is really what the natural world needs now.
• Asia aired on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
