25 YEARS OF CREATIVE FILMMAKING
NAT SHARMAN- REVIEWS
ONE STRANGE ROCK- NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
The Telegraph: Groundbreaking cinematography presents the Earth from entirely fresh perspectives. Pace, angle, colour, texture, light and sound, and sensitively crafted effects showcase nature’s fundamental oddness. Time slows down and speeds up to reveal the invisible. In moving montages, the planet bursts with life in all its teeming variety
Comicbook.com: The cast and crew of One Strange Rock went for a big reach on this series, making a nature doc that compete visually with the BBC's Planet Earth but manages to be dramatically different enough that it won't upon viewing be considered a copycat. They not only succeed but I think that they have ended up creating a new style completely.
The Daily Mail: The greatest show on Earth?
RealityBlurred: If the BBC series Planet Earth was placed into a blender along with the movies Gravity and The Fifth Element; an electronic dance party; and Neil deGrasse Tyson’ cosmological musings, and that was shaped into a swirling mass of deeply personal stories intercut with scientific insight, the result would be close to One Strange Rock (National Geographic, Mondays at 10). It’s a fantastic new unscripted series.
INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY- BBC 1 SE1.1
Independent: “The birds and the bees have never been explained like this before. Seen in this sort of detail human conception looks strangely beautiful as well as monumentally unlikely.”
The Times: “With the help of sophisticated imaging technology, it succeeds in being admirably clear and entertaining without talking down to the viewer. “
The Guardian: “Fascinating and brilliantly informative. The science is remarkable but the human angle even more so.”
Radio Times: ”I doubt you’ve ever seen the story of a baby’s development, from fertilisation to birth, told this well.”
SUPERSIZED EARTH- BBC 1 SE1.1
The Guardian: It was a fine example of what might be termed "Holy shit!" programming, in honour of the only sensible response to a vertiginous tour of big stuff, daunting facts and unwieldy numbers.
VANUNU AND THE BOMB- BBC 2 SE1.3
Time Out: “dramatic reconstructions in the service of documentary content have rarely been as slick and engaging as in this miniseries on the culture of secrecy and espionage surrounding nuclear weapons... [Vanunu’s] journey from Israel to London and back again via Rome is a gripping tale, which is deftly reconstructed here... It feels relevant, topical and controversial, which makes this episode an even more successful short film than the previous ones. Excellent.” AS
HUMAN UNIVERSE- Are we Alone?- BBC 2 SE1.3
The Radio Times: The third programme in Brian Cox’s cosmology series is his best for ages..
It’s not just that he’s better than anyone else at talking about a big question, such as whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy (this episode's theme). It’s also the way his production team finds beautiful ways to illustrate the ideas on screen. That’s the tricky part, but tonight it uses Peruvian mountainsides, schoolchildren with paper lampshades, swimming pigs and a very smart dolphin to help.
HUMAN UNIVERSE- What is our Future?- BBC 2 SE1.5
The Radio Times: There’s a striking scene (one of several) in the last part of Brian Cox’s humanist rhapsody. He is looking back on the Apollo programme and, in a vast Nasa hangar, he walks us along the length of a Saturn V rocket, laid on its side, as he runs through its stages and sets of engines.
CALCULATING ADA- BBC 4 SE1.1
The Times: A mark of a good biographical documentary is that it makes you long for a biopic on the same subject. Calculating Ada: the Countess of Computing was such fun, I bet I wasn’t the only one casting “Ada: The Movie” in their head, although I’d give Hannah Fry first refusal as lead.
The Telegraph: This was a nuanced and complex story.
The Radio Times: The focus of this engaging programme is on her extraordinary vision for what the earliest computers could achieve.