Human

Most series about human civilisation skip lightly over pre-history in a single epidsode. There is something welcome, therefore, about a programme that concentrates on the story of the earliest humans. Unfortunately, 'Human' just isn't very good. The visuals are spectacular, but that's because it shows us sand dunes and glaciers when talking about how humans once lived in hostile environments, rather than the less extreme places they actually lived. Much of the commentary has a vauge "feel the wonder" vibe as opposed to the more educational content of someone like Jacob Boronwoski. Most annoyingly, presenter Ella ah-Shamahi talks endless about our relatioship with "other species of human", without once defining what she means by the terms "human" and "species". She is thus particuarly unelightening when discussing interbreeding. Ultimately, what we get here is a lot of pretty pictures; but not much to truly enlighten us.

For those like myself that found this a bit slow, it's worth sticking with. If you're not into the sweeping slo-mo landscapes and dramatic music, and just want to get to the bones (excuse the pun) of the matter, I would suggest the following:

• fast forward until the presenter is holding something to show you, or is speaking to someone.

• fast forward until a map or artifact is on screen.

This moves the viewing from wondering and questioning and repeating narrative to the actual information you're watching this for. Yes, you might lose a bit in the storytelling and the overall information, but there's enough there, and there's generally a quick summary of what a discovery means after it's shown. So I'm only really missing the questions and wondering, as the answers are summarised after the showing!

Hope this helps. I find this fascinating, but like others, I really struggled to watch with the slow pacing of this. The landscapes and cinematography are stunning though.

I think the presenter is earnest in her slow and evocative narrative, but when paired with the annoyingly slow, repetitive and overly dramatic background music, and have this repeat every few minutes, for 50 some minutes each episode, for a total of 5 episodes, everything just drags and gets boring very fast.

I was curious to check out this series and ended up binge watching over 2 days. As yo be expected from the BBC production unit, the quality of the cinematography is breathtaking. The big discovery - beyond all the amazing factual content - is Ella Al-Shamahi, who as a presenter and educator, draws you into the world of complex paleontological research and discovery, without ever making you feel patronised.

Ella is a great find for the future of great science documentary making, and the story and her presentation - and utter excitement and glee in her specialist subject - is utterly infectious. A must watch.

This series is a triumph of style over substance, which is to say that it's pretty poor.

Long drawn out scenes, backed with dramatic musical accompaniment, appear designed to emphasise the importance of the subject, but actually do the opposite by detracting from it. Ella Al-Shamahi's commentary is slow and boring. Clearly she is fascinated by her subject, but as a presenter she lacks any of the necessary charisma. It seems that she may be trying to copy the delivery of David Attenborough but, if this is the case, she's a dismal failure. The quite irrelevant background noise adds nothing and is wholly out of place in what claims to be a scientific series. Scenes of the presenter standing in a desert or walking through forests are equally irrelevant.

The substance of the series could easily have been covered in no more than 2 episodes; 5 is simply far too many. Having sat through the first 2, I find myself bored and falling asleep. There is undoubtedly a lot of very good science buried in the series, but that's the problem. It's buried in a vast load of overly dramatic nonsense. Whether this Is the fault of the writers, presenter, director or producer is unknown, but whoever is at fault needs to take a few lessons in how to create a first class science documentary.