Eyewitness: Prehistoric Life review





Ah, Eyewitness. That 90's British natural history franchise I adore. In the libraries of the 2000's you flourished as both books and VHSs, narrated in the latter by Andrew Sachs*, and would inspire many young kid to love science and the natural world.

* I will never accept the Martin Sheen Americanised versions, which I swear I didn't grow up with as a Canadian.

While prehistoric life has been discussed throughout episodes (including season one's Dinosaur, naturally), today we will focus on the season two episode Prehistoric Life, about the evolution of animals throughout time and the study of them.

The episode relays its information as a broad overview of life over Deep Time, going from:
  • Calculating the age of the earth
  • Stromatolites
  • Cambrian
    • Trilobites
  • Dunkleosteus
  • Carboniferous plants and insects
  • Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs
  • Mammals of the Cenozoic
  • Human evolution
And finally waxing about the creatures that may have never been preserved in the fossil record never to be seen by us and life begining on other planets.its a beutiful bit thanks frantic music and editing, by far the highlight of the episode.

There are detours to related topics, from myths of sea monsters after discussing early aquatic animals to evolution and Charles Darwin, and at the start theirs, as Eyewitness is known for doing.

Eyewitness: Prehistoric Life is evidently from the 1990's, and not just in the information presented. Prehistoric life itself is treated with awe and reverence, something the Dinosaur Rennaisance and the more left-wing views of the decade helped bring about from the more conservative and negative of previous years (or even subsequent ones), ones which treated it in a more shameful manner as primitive and gross.



The flow of time is represented throughout the shaft-like digsite going downwards with fossils being dug out from the substrates. Another recurring motif that ties things together, as with most episodes of Eyewitness have, are ... cockroaches, in ode to their status as living fossils since the Carboniferous. I pity anyone who fears them, as they show up a lot, such as demonstrating how fossilisation works. I don't personally.

Like the rest of Eyewitness, the rest of the episode uses a mixture of props and models from elsewhere, live animals, and moving around the CG Eyewitness museum, and stock footage to convey info and depict well, prehistoric life, the lattermost including Tippett's Prehistoric Beast and Dinosaur (1985) among them. One stock footage piece in particular intregues me, two shots of a ground sloih I don't recognise from any documentary I've seen, and I even mistook it for original at first glance. If anyone would be so kind to tell me where it actuslly came from, thanks.

As ever, Andrew Sachs is excellent as narrator. he is stately yet soft, giving gravitas and humour to each line whenever he needs. The script he narrates (wriiten by Anne MacLeod) is a decent overview of the past with plenty of nuance to it, like the uncertainties of studying.

Series composer Guy Dagul creates a primodial, tribal-sounding score that fits the mysterious nature of prehistory well. 

If I do have any complaints about the episode, the broad and simplified presentation does leave out some pretty curicial events and group, like the Permian extinction.

And of course, a series from 25+years ago is going to have some inaccuracies, but thankfully they're rather well-hidden, as I can'y really name or find any major snafus ouytsuide of science marching on. However, the episode give Archbishop Ussher's date of the earth as being calculated at 4004 BCE, but this isn't true, as I've heard its different and that was a misconception.

Few more misc. criticisms before we are done:
  • The script also refers to Macrauchenia not by its name, instead being the weird phrase "Mixed-Up Mammal". What, was the name too hard to pronounce? You had no problem with the cambrian echinoderm Cothurnocystis. or was that phrase more fun to say?
And this is what it looks like it all its 90's photobashed glory
  • Coal (during the segmenty on carboniferous segment) isn't being treated negatively as the human-created climate change ingrediant it is. Thart's just me though.
  • They try to pass off baby hadrosaur dinosaurs hatching as birds, even though they're obvioisly not them, evidently even to a kid.

  • Accuracy - 6/10
  • Aging - 7/10
  • Narration - 7/10
  • Visuals - 7/10
  • Music - 7/10
  • Rewatchability - 7/10
Eyewitness: Prehistoric Life is a comforting and lovely little educational piece like the rest of the series, that does what it needs to well, and I will cherish watching it until I am unable to.

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