The Private Life of Plants (1995)

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General		Extras
Category	Documentary	Main Menu Audio Interviews-Cast-Blue Peter Interview With David Attenborough (6:27) Featurette-Behind The Scenes-Hot Shots (5:00)
Rating
Year Of Production	1995
Running Time	293:44 (Case: 292)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (74:25) Dual Disc Set	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Neil Lucas
Studio Distributor	Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	David Attenborough
Case	Amaray-Transparent-S/C-Dual
RPI	$49.95	Music	Richard Grassby-Lewis

    Having just indulged in one of the finest BBC dramas of recent times, it seems appropriate that I turn my attention to another offering from David Attenborough. We have gotten quite used to him roaming the world chasing animals of all shapes and sizes, with each programme pushing the boundaries of excellence further each time. The emphasis on animals is quite obvious: after all, at the base level they are cute and lovable, but are generally blatantly animated and doing stuff. When that stuff is say the prowling of a cheetah or the graceful movement of the blue whale, it is very easy to be enthralled, informed and entertained. But there is a dominant class of life that for all the world appears to be dull and boring, going about its business with the minimum of fuss it seems. The fact that its business ensures that the world can sustain all the animal life it does of course makes the plants fundamentally the most important class of life on the planet. If the plants did not do what they do - photosynthesise - then none of us would be around to learn about what they do.

    It is therefore fundamental, as well as inevitable, that David Attenborough turns his attention to this seemingly benign class of life as a necessary adjunct to all his marvellous animal-biased series. The Private Life Of Plants, however, delves not only into the essentials of their importance to the Earth, but also dispels the perception that these are dull, boring examples of life that operate in a benign way. You might not know it, but there is some exciting stuff happening out there amongst the plants.

    There are six episodes making up the series:

• Travelling (48:57) - Given the fact that they look so inanimate, essentially fixed in one spot forever, it is quite amazing how much travelling the plants as a group do - and how they do it. Through the ingenious mysteries of nature, plants and especially their seeds have developed a range of motion that would be the envy of many a transportation engineer. They can fly like a glider or a helicopter, they can crawl like an infant, they can explode into action as if blasted from a cannon., they can float along on the currents of the waters or the currents of the air of the world, and they can use the animals to move from place to place, both internally and externally. Amazingly, they can also travel in time, at least in the case of one magnolia. The answers to how to take advantage of motion as displayed by the plants are at times truly wondrous things.
• Growing (49:16) - The plants of course are amongst the simplest mechanisms on earth. They are fuelled by sunlight, converting carbon dioxide into precious oxygen as far as animals are concerned but actually converting the gaseous elements into energy to power the great pumps that they create to collect water and nutrients from their roots and transport them to their leaves. Through the rather straightforward process of photosynthesis, the plants can grow into the biggest examples of life on earth - the Californian Redwood, capable of reaching over 300 feet into the air and weighing over 1,000 tonnes apiece - as well as the longest-lived examples of life on earth - the bristlecone pine that can live to 4,000 years and more. Whatever the environment, no matter the paucity of the essential ingredients of growth, the plants have established themselves as the most abundant life on the planet.
• Flowering (48:51) - To reproduce, animals tend to engage in direct sexual intercourse. For a plant this is not possible, so they have developed other means of fertilisation - pollen, to be transferred between the plants of the same species by a variety of means in order that seeds may be produced and the species propagated. How the pollen is distributed is a matter of many techniques developed over thousands of years. Some are very simple: throw your pollen into the air and let the wind do the job. Others are rather more complicated, and in many cases have developed into specific methods involving specific insects or animals. It's all in the colours and the scents of the flowers, and how desperate a randy insect can get.
• The Social Struggle (48:59) - With so many plants in some regions, it is rather inevitable that there are some plants that don't thrive as well as others. Some will inevitably struggle until death but others adopt the wait and see approach, taking advantage of circumstances when they arrive. At times the struggle for that all-important light can literally be a death struggle, as plants have adopted a wide variety of behaviours to ensure that they survive and multiply. The struggle can involve external factors and one of the important ones is fire - as we have all seen in the immediate period after major bush fires. Many plants have adopted strategies to utilise fire as a mechanism for propagation of the species. Indeed, without fire some plants and the environments they create may actually die.
• Living Together (49:03) - Sometimes a plant cannot survive without forging relationships with other organisms. A classic example is the parasites, who operate generally in an all take and no give situation. In Western Australia we have a brilliant example of that emerging very shortly - the Christmas Tree - but they can be found all over the world. Other relationships are much more symbiotic, sometimes involving relationships between plants and animals, usually insects. By far the most interesting relationships are those involving the fungi - organisms that are neither plant nor animal. Whilst we all know the fungi - most of us eat one of them regularly - we often know them only from the brief times they are in bloom. Most of the time though, they are not obvious to us but they are doing their important work for the plants that have a relationship with them - and some plants have relationships with hundreds at a time.
• Surviving (48:38) - The most hostile of environments on Earth will rarely if ever see animal life, and certainly not on a permanent basis. Chances are that whilst the animals don't survive in such environments, the plants can and do. It can be the hottest desert on earth, or a mountain with the widest diurnal temperature extremes or a place where it rains nearly all the time. It does not matter what the environment, the plants seem to have found a solution - and some of them are rather ingenious.

    If you are familiar with the previous releases from David Attenborough then you have already got a fair indication of the sort of quality that is on offer here. Obviously if you are going to try and make some apparently boring plants interesting, you are going to have to break new ground in how to record the machinations of the plants. We get plenty of that here. Some of the photography is absolutely amazing, and you certainly do have to wonder whether there could ever be anything better than this involving plants. There are some obvious highlights in the series, such as the staggering photography of the wasps in the fig flowers, but just about everything here is terrific and highly entertaining and informative.

    Coupled with a generally very good transfer in all respects, this is another excellent outing by David Attenborough and the BBC Natural History Unit that will certainly be an excellent addition to any collection.

Video

    The transfer is presented in a Full Frame format that is of course not 16x9 enhanced. With the dearth of information available for the technical side of the series, I do not know if this was shot in widescreen or not, although I suspect not.

    The transfer is really a very good one in most respects, with the definition and detail of course needing to be of the highest order - which is of course delivered. Sure some of it is not of an exceptional standard, but there are only so many miracles that you can expect of material shot in terribly low light conditions as exist on the floor of the great forests for instance. Sharpness is generally very good, with nothing that really smacks of softness - although certainly a more recent programme would perhaps have been even sharper than this. Shadow detail reflects the locations of the shooting and nothing much can be done about that at times. There was a degree of lightish grain floating around, but mainly in low light footage that perhaps is excusable. Overall, the transfer is quite clear and does not suffer from low level noise.

    One area that was a slight disappointment was in the colours, which were at times a little less solid in tone that I would have expected and certainly not as vibrant as I would have hoped. However, I suppose that with so much footage shot on location, the scope for consistently solid tonal depth could be compromised somewhat. As it is, there is nothing really wrong with the colour - it's just not as colourful and as vibrant as I would have hoped. Looking to examples that I am familiar with, the Kangaroo Paws, Cats Paws and Christmas Tree with which I am very familiar simply did not have the brightness and vividness of colour that I see outside my window during the year. There are no problems with oversaturation or colour bled in the transfer.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer, although once or twice something more than shimmer and not quite pixelization appeared to break out briefly (such as at 32:48 on disc one and 21:18 on disc two). There was a degree of minor aliasing in the transfer at times, but nothing that really could be considered obvious. It was mainly simple things like in the stems at 16:22 on disc two where the issue was a little more than mere background stuff of no consequence. There were no obvious film artefacts in the transfer.

    Both the DVDs in the package are RSDL formatted, with the layer changes coming at 74:25 on disc one and 78:46 on disc two. There is just a brief pause in the playback as the layer change is negotiated that barely impacts upon the whole presentation at all.

    There is just an English For The Hearing Impaired subtitle option on these DVDs. They are generally quite good, with minimal change to the narration done to accommodate the whole lot easily in the flow of the programme.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    An English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack is the sole option available on the DVD. If the bass included in the soundtrack is any indication, this is a surround-encoded soundtrack.

    Everything in the way of the dialogue comes up well in the soundtrack and it is all easily understood. There are no obvious audio sync issues with the transfer.

    The incidental music for the series has been provided by Richard Grassby-Lewis and does the job that is required of it. Whilst the theme is quite decent and reasonably memorable, the rest of the score is understated and entirely supportive.

    The extent of the bass information in the soundtrack was a reasonable and welcome lift to the overall presentation that, rather inevitably, does not offer a lot of dynamic. I mean, just how dynamic can plants get in a aural sense? Well, in a few instances a heck of a lot more than I was expecting! Still, aside from the narration and incidental music, not a lot is happening here. Quite clear and open, there is nothing much to fault the soundtrack over.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Not an overly wonderful package but then again after the quality of the programming itself, I doubt whether anything could really expect to be worthwhile.

Menu

   Rather decent efforts with some reasonable audio enhancement.

Interview - Blue Peter Interview with David Attenborough (6:27)

   Given the source of the interview, I was not expecting too much and so was not really surprised when not much was offered. Interview is perhaps overstating the mark somewhat as there is little in the way of interview and more in the way of excerpts from the series, as befitting what was really a promotional effort for the series. Presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, it is not 16x9 enhanced and comes with decent Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. Technical quality is not great with some obvious false colouration issues in David Attenborough's shirt, along with the odd dash of moiré artefacting.

Featurette - Hot Shots (5:00)

   A regrettably too short effort that lifts the lid on the secret of how they did the photography of the bluebells in England. No, it was not exactly done outside, but rather a controlled environment built outside. It, too, is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 that is not 16x9 enhanced, and comes with good Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. There is a bit of aliasing going on in the picture but nothing really bothersome.

    As far as I can find out, the series has not been released on DVD in Region 1 and the Region 2 release is identical to the Region 4 effort.

    The Private Life Of Plants is yet another excellent natural history documentary from the incomparable David Attenborough. It is not unfair to suggest that perhaps the way you view plants might be well and truly changed by this series. With the technical quality being generally very good, there is absolutely no way that this should not be recommended for inclusion in every DVD collection.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall