On one of my parents’ many bookshelves in the house I grew up in, wedged between a copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course and a Robert Carrier part-work, a hardback book with a slimy bulbous-eyed frog on the front can be found.

The book by David Attenborough was my introduction to the ground-breaking TV series Life on Earth. I never watched the programme when it was broadcast in the late seventies. Bedtime was always before its transmission.

Instead, all I knew of the TV series and its legendary presenter was the book that accompanied the series. To my now shame, the alien-like creature on the front cover didn't endear it to me. I chose to give the book a wide berth. Delia Smith looked far more approachable.

In fairness, I was only seven years old at the time. Looking back now nearly forty years later, it’s easy to see how the programme made an impact on my parents. Domestic video hadn’t entered our household (we wouldn’t get a Ferguson Videostar until 1983), so with no easy way to watch the programme again, relieving the experience via the dedicated book was the next best thing.

Life on Earth was one of the biggest TV partnership projects mounted by the BBC when it was made during the mid-seventies. Consisting of over a million feet of film shot on visits to more than 30 countries in three years, the 13 fifty-five minute episodes were seen by an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide. Life on Earth was followed by The Living Planet in 1984, The Trials of Life in 1990 and seven other series in the near twenty years that followed.

After watching two episodes of Life on Earth, then Observer critic Clive James wrote in his 1979 review (found in On Television),

“Slack-jawed with wonder and respect, I keep trying to imagine what it must be like nowadays to be young, inquisitive and faced with programmes as exciting as these. There can't be the smallest doubt that this series will recruit thousands of new students for the life sciences.

"Fresh-faced and paunchless, Attenborough looks groovy in a wet-suit. Female viewers moan low as he bubbles out of the Pacific with a sea urchin in each hand. Against all the contrary evidence provided by James Burke, Magnus Pyke and Patrick Moore, here is proof that someone can be passionate about science and still look and sound like an ordinary human being.”

It’s easy to underestimate the impact such a series had on audiences and to overlook what the constituent parts of that appeal might have been. Put crudely, Cambridge-educated Attenborough knew his stuff, looked good on camera and brought audiences close to animals they had never seen before.