On demand: "Ocean with David Attenborough"

Renewed signs of ecological urgency: David Attenborough has left the small screen behind to make big-picture presentations, in the hope we popcorn-guzzlers might finally learn to stop smashing shit up and setting the world on fire. It's a format shift that reflects a wider shift in the Attenborough thinking and methodology. Where his early BBC ratings toppers sought merely to inspire wonder at the myriad miracles of the natural world, more recent projects have had to solicit our concern, perhaps even our outrage at what has been done, and continues to be done, to the planet in our collective name. Ocean finds this now nonagenarian greyhair standing on a shore, staring at the sea and wondering "what lies beyond", a phrase that in this stark existential context seems to refer simultaneously to the open ocean before him, his own immediate future and mankind's wider future. The documentary that follows comprises Attenborough's most Cousteauvian (or James Cameron-ish) endeavour, determined as it is to get to the bottom of the big blue. Yet it's also been anchored in those recognisably Reithian concerns its creative prime mover internalised over his many decades at the Beeb, setting its entertainment alongside something more informative, seeking to dazzle us with oceanic spectacle before opening our eyes anew to the threat such spectacle now faces. We're initially hooked by the prospect of 95 minutes' worth of chill or trippy imagery: corals popping, tendrils putting on a lightshow, crabs donning gloves made of venomous anemones to see off their predators. (Another bedrock of the BBC, the DJ John Peel, would surely have got The Venomous Anemones in to record a session.) Some part of Ocean resembles those VHS tapes of fishtanks sold in the 1990s to soothe the frazzled psyches of overworked yuppies: these sections are as mollifying and as invigorating as any dawn plunge. 

But there's also a certain fragility in play, linked to Attenborough's repeated assertions that everything we see is in some way connected. Remove one element from this ecosystem, and many others will disappear with it; take away the plankton who suck up vast amounts of atmospheric CO2, keep on hit-and-hope trawling the ocean bed in scenes that resemble a traumatic setpiece from a Pixar movie, and the whole house of cards will come crashing down. The film, too, has been delicately structured. Half an hour of wonder; half an hour of despair, the filling in the sandwich, something for us to chew over and digest; and then a closing half-hour of cautious optimism. What if we change this? Why don't we try that? What, ultimately, can we do? The answer to the latter, reassuringly, is very little, which is to say leave the seas alone; it's one of those rare occasions where to step back and do nothing is exactly the right course of action. (As my limited grasp of marine biology understands it, nature is fundamentally horny: give it space, time and privacy, keep the trawlers indoors as one would delinquent children, and it'll soon be reproducing at a remarkable rate of knots.) Through it all, the man posing the questions, attempting to steer us, remains a great connector and a great communicator. As with that similarly aging eco-warrior Steven Seagal - star of 1994's On Deadly Ground - Attenborough has to do most of his onscreen work sitting down nowadays, but he's retained the qualities that made him such a revered broadcaster: he cannot hide his excitement nor his despair at the footage his camera team have brought back to shore, and he finds the right words to frame complex environmental concepts and processes in terms even non-scientists can understand. Like the ocean, like the wildlife it shelters, we shall miss him terribly when he's gone.

Ocean with David Attenborough is now streaming via National Geographic and Disney+, available to rent via Prime Video, and on Blu-ray via Altitude.