The BBC Darwin Season is a series of television and radio programmes commissioned by the BBC to celebrate the bicentenary of the great naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his revolutionary book, On the Origin of Species in November, 1859. In partnership with the Open University, the BBC produced a special documentary, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, narrated by David Attenborough, and three major series. Other presenters involved are Andrew Marr, Melvyn Bragg and Jimmy Doherty. The overall commissioning editor for the season is Martin Davidson, the BBC's commissioning editor for specialist factual (in-house). Contributing units of the BBC are BBC Science, the Natural History Unit, the Religion and Ethics department and the children's channel, CBBC.
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“The word “conservative” is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.”
—Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
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“Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)