David Attenborough's Asia will make you fall under a familiar spell

It is difficult, by now, not to greet the news of yet another David Attenborough-narrated documentary on the natural world with a slightly stifled yawn and an urge to reach for the remote. Surely, we’ve seen it all before: all the mammals, the amphibians and the insects, all of them in high definition widescreen, blah, blah? Not so, the man himself insists.

In this latest series, which focuses on Asia, 98-year-old Attenborough tells us that there remain “so many untold stories”. To offer proof, he then assaults us with data. Asia, he says, is the world’s largest continent, covering almost a third of the world’s surface. “It has the highest mountains, the richest seas, the most populous cities.” There are 100,000 miles of coastline, and 21 seas, and across it all, people are required to live alongside this wildlife, cheek by jowl – and not always happily. 

While it’s indisputable that Attenborough has said very similar things about Africa and Europe and America, you need watch only a few minutes of Asia to fall under a by-now-familiar spell, dumbstruck afresh with awe. As with MasterChef and Strictly, we come to Attenborough knowing precisely what to expect, and so how can we leave disappointed? The natural world really is endlessly amazing. 

The first episode (of seven) goes mostly beneath the waves to present to us a milieu that may well have inspired Disney, but which now looks to modern eyes as if Disney had inspired it. Frankly, it’s ridiculous down there: so much colour, so much billowing splendour, and so much of it cute, comic, and cartoon-y. As the cameras swim past eels, snakes, squid, and octopi – and Nemo, too, in an uncredited cameo – they come to settle upon something called the Moorish idol fish. The Moorish idol (funnily enough, the same kind of fish as Gill from Finding Nemo) is bright yellow with thick black stripes and a pair of protruding, pouting lips that are constantly puckered, as if forever in hope of a kiss from a passerby. 

Attenborough allows us to duly fall under its spell before he does what he always does: introduce, by whispering, the spectre of predator peril. It seems that the Moorish Idol is tasty in the literal sense, too – particularly for grey reef sharks that converge upon them en masse the way holidaymakers in Las Vegas descend on an all-you-can-eat buffet. There is carnage, and then, suddenly, there are very few Idols left. Those that do survive are described as “plucky” – personally, I would lose the “p”. 

Later, we are spirited on fast currents up into Bali and Java to see some male mudskipper fish that live on land and build themselves, essentially, shag pads in the soil. Then they go out – on the town, as it were – to ensnare a willing female by waving a fetching fin, and take them back to their underground lairs, replete with rather nice mood lighting. 

Attenborough’s minimal contribution throughout remains key. It’s just so lovely to hear him say words like “whirlpools”, “torrents”, “mangroves”, and “plankton”, as he shows us how love is made and how death arrives – in one case, to firefly squids whose bioluminescent lights slowly switch off as they come to the end of their brief 12-month lifespan. The sight of their mass death on a beach in Japan is sad, of course, but also eerily bewitching. 

“And back down in the sea,” Attenborough reassures, “their eggs are hatching” – meaning that, worry not, many more firefly squids are born. 

Finding succour in this natural world when our own human one is so riven with hate and conflict feels, perhaps, more valuable now than it ever did.  

‘Asia’ continues next Sunday at 6.20pm on BBC One