Reception
The programme was aired in a primetime slot on BBC One, at 9pm on Sunday 1 February. Official ratings from BARB show that it attracted an audience of 6.34 million viewers, a healthy figure for a factual programme. Overnight data suggested 23% of the available audience was watching.
The programme drew effusive praise from critics:
- In The Guardian, Sam Wollaston describes how Attenborugh tells the story of natural selection "through the life and work of his hero, and also through his own life and work, which has always had Darwinism at its core. The two strands have been artfully twisted together, into a beautiful double helix of television that makes perfect sense. Except to the creationist loons."
- In The Times, Andrew Billen praises Attenborough's "grace and fluency," in demonstrating "that what always comes to Darwin's rescue is scientific evidence," and David Chater remarks on how, through the use of archive clips, "the viewer also sees Attenborough himself evolve from a young presenter to a latter-day sage."
- In The Independent, Tom Sutcliffe also praises the presenter: "Not everyone is up to the humility evolutionary theory demands of us, but David Attenborough is, and he made the case well."
- In Ireland, Pat Stacey of the Evening Herald describes it as "a stunning piece of television - epic television - that brilliantly pulled together with pin-sharp clarity the different strands of Darwin's awesome, irrefutable discoveries, as though Attenborough were constructing a model of the double helix. It was beautifully made and utterly thrilling."
Read more about this topic: Charles Darwin And The Tree Of Life
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
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“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)