OUR PICK

BRAD NEWSOME

One Strange Rock

Wednesday, National Geographic, 7.30pm

Blue Planet II seems to have struck a chord around the world, renewing interest and wonder at the Earth's marvellous beauty. Hopefully that interest will extend to this breathtaking new series, which showcases many of our planet's most spectacular sights – as seen from up in space and from down here – and which explains the ways in which they are intimately connected. It's one of the biggest piles of eye candy ever assembled, but it's a whole lot more than that. At first it seems an ungainly beast presented by a particularly strange coalition – Will Smith on the one hand, and on the other former International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield and a veritable space shuttle full of other astronauts. And when this first episode interrupts Hadfield's compelling recollection of a spacewalk emergency to cut to a shot of a bloody newborn baby taking its first breath you might feel that executive producer Darren Aronofsky really needs to get a grip. But from that point on it all makes spectacular sense. This episode is about oxygen, and the story begins in a salt desert in East Africa, where we see a salt trader's camel train become enveloped in an enormous dust storm. That same dust crosses the Atlantic to fertilise the Amazon rainforest, which is in a sense the lungs of the world, but not in the way we tend to think of that. Little of the oxygen produced by the rainforest leaves it, but what does leave it is an enormous "flying river" of water – one much bigger than the Amazon River – created by plant transpiration. That water falls on the Andes, washing mountain sediment all the way back out to the ocean, where it nourishes trillions of microscopic photosynthetic diatoms – and it's from those diatoms that we actually get our oxygen. Mind blown, right? Oh, and the African dust that started it all? That is itself the remains of trillions upon trillions of prehistoric diatoms. Rarely has television explained such a complicated natural system so simply and comprehensively, and with such stunning photography (this episode even incorporates a side trip to the Arctic to see how sediments that glaciers push into the ocean also cause diatom blooms). The unique perspective of the astronauts and their space photography underlines the isolation and vulnerability of our planet in poignant fashion. Magnificent.