Join Stephen Fry for the greatest story on Earth: the story of life itself. A twelve-part exploration of the incredible diversity of living beings on our planet

Our journey starts four billion years ago with the earliest signs of life deep in the ocean. Along the way it will take in Earth’s extraordinary range of life forms, from microbes to invertebrates, birds, amphibians, mammals and humanity itself

Prepare to hear incredible stories: bacteria that make decisions; plants that count; insects that farm; fungi that eat nuclear waste; fish that live for 400 years; salamanders that re-grow their brains; birds that plan for the future; and great apes that can talk and write

Episode 1: The Bird and the Mountain Life begins

Deep in the mid-Atlantic, a kilometre below the surface, lies the Lost City – a shimmering forest of ancient hydrothermal vents – and perhaps the birthplace of life itself. We open with the story of how our planet transformed itself from a burning hellscape into the only place in the Universe where we know life exists

Episode 2: The Invisible World The realm of the impossibly small

Plunge into the realm of microbes – the oldest, most abundant, and most successful life forms on the planet. It was bacteria that first mastered photosynthesis, flooding the atmosphere with oxygen, turning the sky blue, and making complex life possible

Episode 3: The Green Planet How plants changed the world

From the first green smear floating in an ancient ocean to the Global Seed Vault buried deep in the Arctic permafrost, the story of plants is astonishing. Turning sunlight into food, rock into soil, and thin air into oxygen, plants have quietly powered most ecosystems on Earth for three and a half billion years

Episode 4: Alien Nations An exploration of the strange and marvellous world of invertebrates

From Darwin’s earthworms transforming the soil beneath his Kent garden to the breathtaking biodiversity of coral reefs, we explore the strange and marvellous universe of animals without backbones. With multiple hearts, blue blood, compound eyes, and body plans that seem conjured from science fiction, invertebrates challenge every assumption we have about what life should look like

Episode 5: Notes from the Underground The mysterious kingdom of fungi

We venture into the kingdom that Western science has long overlooked. Fungi are neither plant nor animal — and yet without them, neither could survive. They are the great recyclers and transformers of the living world: breaking down the dead, rebuilding the soil, and threading through every forest floor in vast networks that sustain plant life on a planetary scale

Episode 6: Creepy Crawlies The parallel universe of insects

Enter the parallel universe of arthropods: the beetles, ants, bees and spiders that outnumber us a billion to one. Insects are not just survivors; they are farmers, engineers, and pollinators without whom our food systems would collapse. Yet insect populations are in freefall

Episode 7: Scaling the Depths How fish filled the oceans

A dive into the epic story of fish – the first creatures with backbones, the inventors of jaws, the colonisers of every ocean, river and lake on Earth. From salmon navigating thousands of miles by magnetic field and memory, to swordfish that heat their own eyes to hunt in cold deep water, to the European eel whose reproduction remains one of nature's great unsolved mysteries

Episode 8: Inbetweeners The double life of amphibians

Explore the double life of amphibians: the animals that made the first great leap from water to land. Frogs, toads, newts and the mysterious worm-like caecilians, all share a secret weapon: their skin – a miraculous organ that breathes, drinks, tastes the air, fights infection, and communicates, all at once

Episode 9: In Cold Blood The rise of the reptiles

The dinosaurs may have gone but lizards, crocodiles, turtles and snakes have found ways of adapting and thriving that are more than a match for their giant cousins. The Age of Reptiles lasted three times longer than that of mammals, and 600 times longer than our own.

Episode 10: Kingdom of Song The soaring success of birds

We begin in a Late Cretaceous Antarctica of lush rainforests and warm seas, where a honking flock of waterfowl remind us that not all the dinosaurs perished – one branch survived to become birds.

Episode 11: Family Business The age of mammals

The story of the rise of mammals: from the tiny shrew-like survivors sheltering in the shadow of the dinosaurs, to the world-shapers that followed.

Episode 12: Homo Musica The story of us

65 thousand years ago, a small group of humans crossed open ocean to reach Australia – the furthest point yet from our ancestral home in Africa, and perhaps the first true voyage into the unknown