This award winning 10-part series from the BBC Natural History Unit is a true wildlife epic, packed with spectacular footage and glorious imagery of the natural world. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, or Oprah Winfrey for US audiences, it took 3000 days of cutting-edge filming techniques shot over a four-year period, covering every continent and habitat to explore the variety and beauty of earth. This really is Life, as you’ve never seen it before.

The ingenious ways animals and plants have devised to survive is beautifully captured, from birds running and dancing on water in elaborate and flirtatious courtship patterns, to fish outwitting predators as they take flight with their fins. There are 50 screen firsts, from mating and birth, to hunting and escape. This series will bring you close to 130 stories of the most elusive and fascinating animals on our planet.

Programme 1 : The Challenges of Life

Watch in fascinating detail the obstacles mammals and plants must overcome to survive. From a capuchin monkey smashing open nuts with a stone ‘hammer’, to swimming with a seal as it seeks escape from killer whales in the icy Antarctic.

Programme 2: Reptiles and Amphibians

In the most extreme conditions, watch how reptiles and amphibians have adopted sophisticated techniques to adapt and survive. From Komodo dragons hunting buffalo, to lizards that can walk on water.

Programme 3: Mammals

Life captures mammals in previously unseen and remote conditions. These include remarkable footage of 30 polar bears captured feeding on a bowhead whale carcass, And fly among the largest migrations in the world as 10-million fruit bats leave the Congo basin.

Programme 4: Fish

Hunt with sailfish, swim with sharks and flirt with secretive sea dragons. From oceans, to coral reefs, to storm-ravaged surf, follow the amazing adventures of fish that can travel at 100mph, sense electricity, fly and even walk on land.

Programme 5: Birds

Life reveals the supreme adaptability of birds, from travelling at phenomenal speeds, to displaying their murderous intent. Join 1000 dancing flamingoes in the lakes of Africa, and watch awe-inspired as spatula-tailed hummingbirds attract a mate.

Programme 6: Insects

Insects have a unique ability to reshape themselves and survive using fearsome weapons in a sophisticated manner. Take to the skies with a million Monarch butterflies in Mexico and witness giant bees fight to the death over their females.

Programme 7: Hunters and Hunted

Every day there are battles between carnivores and their prey fought and lost in jungles, deserts, grasslands and frozen landscapes across the world. See nature in its rawest form as a squirrel outwits a rattle snake, and elephant seal pups are snatched by a killer whale.

Programme 8: Creatures of the Deep

Specially developed time-tracking devices are used as Life explores the hidden depths of the ocean. Watch a seething carpet of starfish devouring a seal pup carcass in the Antarctic, to the ultimate self-sacrifice of a giant octopus who starves to death to tend to her young in the Pacific.

Programme 9: Plants

The drama of the plant world is usually hidden from the naked eye. Life uses time-lapse technology to show unique footage including a Venus flytrap imprison its prey and watch the fastest growing plant on earth grow two feet in a day.

Programme 10: Primates

Primates have a unique set of problem-solving abilities, including tool use and intimate social interplay. Join a chacma baboon shark-egg hunting in South Africa, and gorillas chest-beating that send waves through the undergrowth a mile away.