Human

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.

On several occasions I thought we were going to have to wait for the presenter to have a cry before we could move on. It is just too dramatic for me. Is a shame because it is so interesting. Was slightly put off at the beginning by the writer's basic mistake; I'm sure a lot of primary school pupils can tell you that 300 000 years isn't a third longer than 200 000.

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.

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.

Warning : I only watched 20 minutes of it then stopped.

I couldn't watch this which is annoying because I really wanted to. The style was too awful for me. Incessant and unnecessary music. Maybe this is the way the BBC does these things now. Annoying way the presenter approached the camera all the time. Her way of talking.

Go watch Civilisation to see how a documentary should be done.