The World About Us - Episode Guide

Julian Pettifer reports on Antarctic exploration today. Fifty-six years after the discovery of the South Pole, the Antarctic is being opened up by a new kind of exploration, made possible by modern technology. By far the biggest and most expensive research programme is the Americans. They call it "Operation Deep Freeze".

The rainforests and the mangrove swamps of Trinidad are home to a great variety of wildlife from the giant anaconda to the charming tree porcupine. The island teems with exotically plumed birds and is one of the last refuges for the dazzling scarlet ibis.

This year marks the centenary of this 49th State of America which was bought for $7,200,000 from Russia in 1867: a land of contrasts, its capital warmed by Pacific currents and Inland temperatures plunging to 70* below zero.

So near to civilisation and yet isolated for centuries, the Jivaro Indians still shrink human heads for vengeance in the rain forests of Ecuador.

America realised in time that her wild places were disappearing under the pressure of civilisation. Parks and wildlife sanctuaries were established ensuring that spectacles such as magnificent herds of buffalo, the rare, beautiful Pronghorn Antelopes, and the awe-inspiring Grand Canyon should remain for all to see.

The story of the Bindibu.

A Russian expedition travels to various islands in search of animals developed in isolation, such as the flightless birds of New Zealand and the marsupials of Australia. The expedition also finds other animals that have managed to survive the enveloping wave of civilisation: the Komodo Dragon and the prehistoric Tuatara.

The west to east crossing of the Sahara is not only unusual but dangerous. After Djanet, for a thousand miles you must trust to your own resources-until you reach the Soborom, a little-visited volcanic area in the Tibesti mountains.

The first successful American ascent of Everest took place in 1963. Ten years previously Everest had been conquered for the first time by the British Expedition led by Col. John Hunt. The Americans, however, achieved the distinction of being the first to film from the summit itself.

Norway has a small human population, living mainly along the coast, so the vast mountain plateaux and the dense forests of the interior are left to the wildlife: the reindeer, the beaver, the fox, and the beautiful snowy owl. After the darkness of winter, every moment of the summer light must be used by the animals to rear their young to a state of independence before the first snow falls and it is winter once again.

A fifty-foot ketch travels 2,000 miles across France, Germany, Holland, Denmark, and Belgium-a voyage made possible by the vast network of canals linking the great rivers of the Continent.

Heinz Sielmann is one of the world's leading wildlife film-makers. In the colourful Galapagos Islands he obtained outstanding material on the unique penguins, albatrosses, sea-lions, and giant tortoises. His expedition landed on 'an island of dragons' among thousands of marine iguanas and also managed to film the amazing behaviour of the wood-pecker finch, one of the few animals in the world to use a tool.

The Island of Das, somewhere in the Arabian Gulf, is the home for oil-rig men and a vast industry which is bringing wealth and the hope of modernity to Abu Dhabi. This is the story of two viewpoints - of the Europeans who work there temporarily, and of the local people for whom it is a new way of life.

The Hidden World of the insects is fascinating to explore - Praying mantis, goliath beetle, dragonfly, locust, ant, butterfly, honeybee - an amazing variety. Some species are helpful to man but others, in their millions, threaten his very existence.

"For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the golden road to Samarkand"
A film about a 10,000-mile journey through the Soviet Union beginning and ending in Moscow, and showing some of the remoter and more exotic republics of this great country which has just celebrated its jubilee.

The Grizzly Bear has roamed North America for a million years. The invention of the repeating rifle brought the feared and hated bear to the point of extinction, but today's inventions are to the Grizzly's advantage. Scientific devices are enabling John and Frank Craighead to discover the secrets of the great bear so that it may be preserved.

War is a ritual thread woven into the pattern of life of the mountain people, the Dani. Although few lives are lost, great displays of measured violence dominate their existence and shape a culture that in many ways resembles that of our own distant Stone Age ancestors.

There are few places, if anywhere. in the civilised world where life has changed less in the last millennium than Athos in northern Greece.
Since the middle of the tenth century Athos has been inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks. Women, children, and female animals are forbidden. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Athos has represented a unique survival from the great Empire of Byzantium. However, the monastic community is in danger of dying out. The reasons for this, and what would be lost if this were to happen, are the subject of tonight's film.

The incredible world of the famous French underwater explorer and inventor-55 fathoms beneath the Mediterranean.

The delights of Jamaica as a holiday playground are familiar enough, but what does the island offer to the naturalist? Last year a party of Oxford zoologists and film-makers spent a long vacation there, and the results can be seen today and next Sunday.

The leader of the expedition was Gerald Thompson, well known for his films of insect behaviour, and the programme will include outstanding film both by him and by Peter Parks, who, using a special photographic method, has produced some of the most remarkable close-ups of minute animal life yet seen on television.

The story of a group of Oxford zoologists, led by Gerald Thompson, who recently spent a long working vacation filming the Caribbean wildlife which is so often overlooked by tourists.

Joseph Wood Krutch, author and naturalist, is narrator and guide on a visit to the unspoiled natural wonders of Mexico's Baja California region.

Gerald Durrell returns to the Greek island of Corfu, where he lived as a boy with his "family and other animals"; and where he first met his lifelong friend and mentor, Dr. Theodore Stephanides.

For four years an English girl, Jane Goodall, studied chimpanzees in the wild forests of tropical Africa. This remarkable film tells the story of her unique experiences with man's closest living relatives.

The first full documentary from Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom wedged in between Chinese Tibet and India. After centuries of isolation this autocratic Buddhist society is at last beginning to look beyond its frontiers. This is the story of Bhutan through the eyes of a young Bhutanese schoolboy, Tobgay.

A film about a year in the lives of Dido Bradford, Tom Stamp, and Dick Adams, whose work and leisure are so closely tied to the Devon estuary and its wildlife.

Apart from fish and whales, the oceans contain billions of drifting animals, some so small that they completely escaped attention until the nineteenth century. Using remarkable close-up photography, this film by Peter Parks looks at the tiny world of plankton and reveals its surprising complexity and its strange beauty.

This is the story of a group of men who set off to walk 900 miles across the Tenere desert in the southern part of the Sahara. They are members of the nomadic Lazouane tribe called Tuaregs, and their haughty camels carry millet to barter for salt in the oasis of Bilma. The twentieth century has left these desert traders completely untouched. To us it is a remarkable journey, but for the Tuaregs part of their everyday life.

A film about the Spirit Land of the South Seas, New Guinea.
An island of dense tropical jungle which provides a home for exotic tropical flowers and the brilliantly coloured birds of paradise, the most beautiful birds in the world; and high up in the mountain regions, cut off from the rest of the world, live some of the most primitive tribes still in existence -Stone Age men in the twentieth century. Some are still cannibals; all of them are immersed in their strange customs and rituals - none more bizarre than their extraordinary death cult.

The Highlands of Scotland were once considered remote and inaccessible, so were left to the golden eagle and the wild cat. Now, as the wilderness shrinks, more and more tourists are flocking to enjoy the beauty of Strathspey. How is this human invasion affecting the area and its wide variety of unique wildlife?

A voyage with the vessel Star Kist on her expedition to Peru in search of the giant and valuable tuna fish.

This is a film about the work and research being carried out at the South Pole - the White Continent.

From its source 6,500 feet up in the mountains of Uganda to its mouth in the Mediterranean the waters of the Nile pass through the entire range of ancient and modern civilisation, bringing life to more than thirty million people.

Just off the Pembrokeshire coast lie two small islands-Skomer and Skokholm. The inhabitants number many thousands, of which a few are human. The rest include seals, the unique Skomer voles, and above all great colonies of seabirds like guillemots, kittiwakes, and comical-looking puffins. These bird cities are formed when the ocean wanderers of the winter fly in to become the cliff nesters of the summer.

Two years ago an American Commission was set up to report to President Johnson on the possibility of cutting a new Panama Canal by means of nuclear explosives. Five routes were considered: two in Panama, one each in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Colombia. The final decision will involve not just politics and economics but the social problems of the peoples who live in that area and have done for centuries.
The Golden Isthmus tells the story of 450 years of man's efforts to bridge the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in this narrow neck of land, and of the native peoples who have had to suffer them.

Tradition, courage, and determination take the fishermen of Portugal to Arctic seas for six months in every year. This is their story.

In 1835 a young divinity student called Charles Darwin voyaged round the world, calling at the remote and weirdly beautiful island archipelago of Galapagos. What he saw sparked off a theory of evolution through natural selection which was to shake the foundations of contemporary religion and natural science.

Spiders are not very popular, but their amazing courtship and feeding behaviour make fascinating viewing when filmed by those masters of macrophotography.

Tonight's award-winning World About Us film is a reconstruction of Thesiger's wanderings.

The film sets out to capture the spirit of the desert and its people. But many lovers of desolate places are saddened that the deserts of Arabia are changing fast. Today the silence of the sands is broken by the drilling rig, and the Bedu has lost his livelihood, for no one needs his camels.

Primitive medicine is the subject of tonight's film which comes from the rain forests of Malaya. Dr. Ivan Polunin, a lecturer in medicine at the University of Singapore, has for many years been studying this art as practised by aborigines in various parts of the world. Magic in the Hills is an account of his journey, to meet the Jah Hut people of Malaya, and to observe the fascinating ritual and practice of their applied medicine.

A flower unfurls, a beautiful butterfly emerges from a chrysalis, and the whiplash tongue of a chameleon is slowed down. By using stop and slow motion camera techniques, Italian film-maker Fernando Armati reveals many secrets of nature that would normally be invisible to the naked eye.

The Dadanawa Ranch in Guyana covers 3,000 square miles of wild, remote country. Across its savannahs roam 30,000 head of longhorn cattle, and in its swamps and forests live some of South America's most exciting animals-the giant armadillo, the jaguar, the harpy eagle, the jabiru stork, and the giant ant-bear.
Stanley Brock, the manager of Big D, is also a naturalist and animal collector and he gets to grips with all these giants, as well as the largest and most powerful snake in the world, the anaconda.

Stanley Brock, the manager of the Dadanawa Ranch in Guyana, is equally at home in the saddle of his horse or the cockpit of his light plane. In his leisure hours he sometimes flies to enjoy the spectacle of one of the world's greatest and most remote waterfalls, the Kaieteur Falls; but most of his spare time is spent in studying the wealth of wildlife in the forest, swamps, and savannahs.

A film of the 2,000-mile Geographical Magazine hovercraft journey through some of the remotest waterways of the Brazilian and Venezuelan rain forests, including the dangerous Maipures and Atures rapids.

The birds of Australasia include some whose plumage is among the most beautiful in the world, some with unique methods of incubation, and others whose ways of courtship are incredibly complex. The behaviour of a few even suggests that birds have an aesthetic sense.

The romantic story of two Brazilian cities. Manaus lies isolated in the middle of the Amazon rain forest; Brasilia rises from the desolate sertao - a new capital in the wilderness. Both cities grew as a result of men's dreams: one dream turned into a nightmare, the other appears to be coming true. Manaus is one of the most fascinating, most haunted places man has made for himself to live in; no road leads to this city-only one or two yellow tracks lead away from it and then peter out. Brasilia, in the space of three years, sprang up from an uninhabited desert to become a capital city-the 'city of the future'.

The Cultural Revolution and that little red book of thoughts are as near as most of us can get to China these days, for now more than ever it is a difficult country to visit. It took Rene Burri, who is Swiss, six years to get permission to film there. The result is a programme that allows us for the first time in many years to see the real face of a China that is in many ways surprisingly unchanged-and more real; to see the Chinese as people, as individual as any, and not just as a mass of yelling robots controlled by a master switch.

Behind the facade, behind the banners and political slogans of the Public Image, are the faces of 700 million people, the Chinese. In city and village, knee-deep in the paddy fields of the South, galloping at full tilt across the Mongolian Steppes, they continue in spite of the changes that have taken place to lead their own very personal lives, clinging with a stubborn tenacity to a code of private loyalties and traditions that have withstood 4,000 years of dynastic changes and upheaval.

The familiar cries of the gulls along our coastline are only a small part of the language of these birds. During the breeding season especially, they use a number of other sounds as well as postures to communicate with each other. The meaning and use of all these are examined in this remarkable study of life in a colony of Lesser Black-backed Gulls.

In the depths of a Russian forest a Red Deer calf is born. Throughout the contrasting seasons of his first year he encounters all kinds of fellow creatures, including a bathing bear, beavers, a menacing lynx, and a pack of hungry wolves.

Since time immemorial man has gone down to the sea in ships and created a legend of daring and mystery. This is the saga of his adventure on ocean waters.

Half a million tons of snow travelling at up to 200 miles an hour... From the Andes to the Alps, ever since man made his home beneath the mountain, avalanches have preyed on him. But now the careless tourist is replacing the mountain dweller as the avalanche's main victim. This film looks at avalanches from their beautiful beginning in the snow crystal to their terrible effect on the dwellings of men, and on to perhaps their ultimate control by explosives and science.

Man has always been intrigued by storks, an extraordinary group of birds including the hammerhead, openbill, marabou, and the grotesque shoebill or whale-headed stork-. The most famous is the cherished white stork, the subject of many legends and fables. Heinz Sielmann's film shows 'A Summer with the Storks' in Germany before they migrate south to pass over Istanbul in one of the most spectacular sights of the bird world.

A hazardous dugout canoe journey through Venezuelan jungles towards the source of the Orinoco.
The Guaica Indians live short and violent lives wife-stealing and feuding. But for centuries they have at least been protected from 'civilisation' by the remoteness of their jungle home. Six members of the Hovercraft Expedition brave dangerous rapids to seek out the secrets of some of the most primitive people on earth.

Far out in the North Atlantic lives a community that is often isolated by dense fog or furious storms-the Faroe islanders. By fishing, catching seabirds, and climbing the huge sea cliffs in search of eggs, many islanders lead a way of life that has remained unchanged for centuries.

Orang-utans, Indian rhinos, Asiatic lions, Komodo dragons... These are just a few of the rare and extraordinary animals featured in this film. They were photographed by Eugen Schuhmacher during his seven-year odyssey through the world's last wildernesses in search of vanishing animals.

Oranges, sunshine, surfing, Hollywood-that's modern California. But it's also smog, garbage, overcrowded roads, and sprawling cities. A thousand people a day pour in to add to the twenty million already there. From the highest snowy mountains to the lowest hottest deserts man's impact has been felt... by sea elephants, snow geese, Californian condors, sea otters, and the grey whales that spend half their life on an amazing migration.

Two hundred miles south of Timbuctu lies a vast plateau of sandstone. After rising gently for 150 miles it suddenly drops sheer for over 900 feet, the result of a gigantic disturbance in the earth's crust. At the foot of this vast cliff live the Dogon - one of the most mysterious tribes in the continent of Africa.
One of the complex ideas which the Dogon hold on life is that each human being is mirrored by a twin in the animal kingdom. As a result, a man is forbidden to kill the animal with whom he shares a part of his soul, but if by accident or design he does so, then he kills part of himself.

This is the story of a 1,000-mile kayak voyage up the coast of Japan made by ten students: four British, six American. They experienced both the stifling calms of the Inland Sea and the storms of the Pacific, the frenzied excitement of the great Tinjin Festival, and the peace of tiny isolated islands whose inhabitants had never before seen a foreigner of any nationality. They visited the atomic dome at Hiroshima and watched the intense religious ritual of a modern Samurai swords-man. By the end they felt that, though their voyage had only been fleetingly written in the water, what they had learned would not be so soon forgotten.

The uproarious balloon race organised in 1965 by the BBC's Travel and Exploration Unit in which ten passenger-carrying balloons took to the air from a field near the Oxfordshire village of Stanton Harcourt and landed in various parts of the Cotswolds.

The sturdy individualism of Newfoundland's men of the sea takes them on a hazardous journey along the Labrador coast in search of the fish on which their livelihood depends.

Lemurs are animals unique to Madagascar. They have been isolated on this vast island off the south-east coast of Africa for twenty million years. Shy, gentle, and in some cases beautiful creatures, they have in time been hunted by the Malagasy people as food and feared as reincarnations of the dead. An Oxford University Expedition has completed a two-month field study and for the first time a great deal of lemur behaviour has been recorded on film.

The story of a family of Canadian Eskimos, the Annanacks. It traces their history from the great famine of nearly a century ago, when the family only survived by resorting to cannibalism, right up to their comparative prosperity today, leading one of the first Eskimo working co-operatives. As well as giving a picture of Eskimo life in Ungava Bay, it also looks at a modern city, Ottawa, through fresh eyes - the eyes of the Annanack family

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of this famous scientist and writer, best-known for his prodigious four-year journey across South America and for the Pacific current which bears his name. Foremost among the many Latin-American nations to celebrate this event will be Mexico, visited by Humboldt in 1803-4 and where he is revered as one of the founders of the country's independence from Spain.

In this birthday tribute Robert Cundy follows Humboldt's route across Mexico from ocean to ocean, Acapulco to Vera Cruz. He descends silver mines and climbs recently erupted volcanoes to present a portrait of a country whose diverse landscape and mysterious past presented an irresistible challenge to a scientist and humanist fascinated by everyone and everything.

"I am as free as nature first made man
'Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the Noble Savage ran"

Since the great European discoveries began 500 years ago, the Primitive peoples of the world have found themselves in collision with the white man. Tonight's documentary tells the romantic and then tragic tale of this collision in South America and Australia, with the camera penetrating deep into the jungles of the Amazon and Arnhemland.

When the British left India in 1947 it is said that they left behind them 'some of their customs, a little of their culture, and very occasionally a few of their kind.' Left-Over Raj is the story of a few of the kind who remained behind in the city of Calcutta - half a dozen individuals who chose to stay behind feeling that they could accept their new role in an independent India, and perhaps contribute something. They are people like Captain 'Dinkie' Fownes, a race-horse trainer; John Crossley, who makes tea-chests and distributes milk to 1,000 slum children every day. Tony Lucey runs his own little factory; Desmond Doig works for the Calcutta Statesman.

A tiny island in the sub-Antarctic is the home of the world's largest sea-birds - wandering albatrosses. They share Bird Island with vast numbers of fur, leopard, and elephant seals; with penguins and a wide variety of other birds.
For 18 months three scientists worked through storm, sunshine, and blizzard, studying the wandering albatrosses and filming this unique record of the wildlife of Bird Island.

Rain falling on the high, dry Chyulu Hills of Kenya filters through the lava soil until it emerges as cool, running springs at Mzima. Zebra and elephant visit the oasis to drink, but this unusual African portrait is more concerned with the animals that live at the springs.
It is a fascinating world in which frogs climb trees, birds swim, turtle and crocodile feed side by side, and the lumbering hippopotamus takes on a new grace in the unique underwater photography of Alan Root.

The most exciting river in the world: fierce Stone Age Indians, animals, and fish which came straight from a nightmare or a science fiction story, all figure in a film which traces the river Amazon from its source in the Andes to its many mouths spread over 200 miles of the Brazilian Atlantic coastline.

Each autumn millions of wild ducks, geese, and other birds migrate southwards through the United States to their winter quarters. This film follows them to the Mexico border and shows some of the work of the us Fish and Wildlife Service, which has to strike a fine balance between providing sport for the American hunters and ensuring the protection of rarer species. Among these is the entire world population of one of the rarest birds of all - the Whooping Crane.

The life history of a moth makes a fascinating story, and some of the larger and more brightly coloured ones have an additional attraction in that they produce silk for the cocoon in which they undergo their final metamorphosis.
One species in particular has been used by man for the production of silk, originally in the Far East and later in the West. The story of this sericulture is as intriguing as the natural history of the moths themselves.

Fenced in behind high mountains, largely bypassed by history, the hill tribes of the Philippines have had a unique opportunity to evolve at their own pace: thus they still pursue the blood-feuds of their head-hunting ancestors, but now also have an organised police force; still carry out pagan sacrifices, though many now regard themselves as Christians.
It was into this society that Professor Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf, anthropologist and explorer, took his cameras to record the beauty of their mountain rice fields and the savagery of their pagan buffalo sacrifices -sacrifices which some viewers may find almost too brutal but which are perfectly natural to the descendants of head-hunters.

David Cabot explores the country-side of Ireland and finds some unusual wildlife in a variety of places. Wagtails among Dublin's Christmas lights; wild geese on remote islands; choughs in ruined castles; rare plants and a peculiar slug in the Burren, the great limestone desert in the west.
He follows the coast from Achill Island where the huge basking sharks are caught to an island with the largest colony of roseate terns in Europe.

For centuries the wandering Lapps and their reindeer lived in a forgotten world of their own -the endless snows and frozen forests of Lappland. Then came the snow-scooter and the snow-tractor, and almost in a single generation the Lapps turned from nomads to settlement dwellers.
But one man determined that their old way of life should not be forgotten: his name, Per Host, explorer, photographer, honorary Lapp. For two years he lived with the last of the wandering Lapps. He filmed the bitter hardships of winter spent in tents far within the Arctic circle. He recorded the excitement of reindeer round-ups and battles. And with the Lapps he endured the long spring trek to the coast, ending in the spectacle of the whole reindeer herd, nearly 1,000 strong, swimming an arm of the sea.
At the end of his wanderings he returned with a faithful picture of a now-vanished pattern of existence - life of great harshness led amid surroundings of great beauty.

To Brazilians they're beija flores - flower kissers; to Cubans zumzum - their wings hum at 80 beats a second. They can fly backwards, must feed about every ten minutes, and have brilliant iridescent colours. No wonder they fascinate People: some enthusiasts even give them shower baths, cut their toe-nails, and analyse their amazing flight by filming in ultra-slow motion.

Bombay and Calcutta, two of India's most famous cities, are 1,000 miles apart. Viewers are invited to make a journey from one to the other by rail, stopping on the way to experience a Rajah's tiger hunt, Indian village life, the burning ghats of Benares, the erotic temple sculpture of Khajavao and the cut-off Anglo-Indian community of railway workers at Asansol, an important junction near Calcutta.

Vikings settled Iceland over 1,000 years ago. When they first landed they were still pagans and saw fire giants, frost giants, dragons, and gods in the spectacular natural features such as hot springs, geysers, volcanoes, lava deserts, glaciers, and tremendous waterfalls.
This colour film looks at the exciting landscape through the eyes of the Vikings - a landscape little changed to this day.

A resort for migrant humans - a staging post for migrating birds. The biggest of the Balearic Islands can attract two kinds of people: those who fly in for sun and fun, and others who look for the quiet life that is still the traditional Majorca - fruitful land in a southern sea.
Today there are falcons round the cliffs, vultures wheeling in the mountains, and ospreys fishing in the lakes. But with the rapid growth of urban development cramping Majorca's rich wildlife - what of tomorrow?

To sail in search of Paradise - the dream of many, the achievement of few. But recently a series of French expeditions set out, each heading for its particular idea of paradise on earth.
This film is a record of what they found at the end of their travels: for one, the ice-fringed Kerguelen Islands, lost in a freezing ocean, peopled by penguins; for another, a land of fire, the Tibesti in the Sahara where hot springs of mud boil; a third discovered a more serene paradise - a high plateau in the Northern Cameroons; a fourth went to the Mysore jungle of southern India in search of the elephant. Other expeditions saw the savagery of the Papuans and the flower-boats of Tahiti.

For centuries the legend of Ulysses' sojourn on the island of Gozo has remained vivid in the minds of the islanders. So, too, has that of St Paul , who preached to the islanders after his shipwreck in AD 60 and gave them the faith which, with their neighbour Malta, they defended so ardently during the Great Siege.
Today Gozo seems peaceful and undisturbed, and- it is difficult to imagine the upheavals of her past. And yet the present pattern of the islanders' life is very much a survival from that past. Their continual struggle against the elements to secure a livelihood, the warmth and loyalty of their family life, their intense piety, their pride and interdependence - all reflect beliefs and attitudes which elsewhere in Europe are disappearing.

A group of windswept islands in the South Atlantic, 400 miles from Cape Horn, the Falklands are one of the remotest of all British outposts. Stumbled across by early navigators, who were grateful for the shelter they provided, the islands are now the home of a few thousand determined people whose economy rests mainly on wool. Their sheep share the uninviting terrain with seals and many kinds of seabirds, including thousands of penguins.

Grand Canyon by Kayak and Raft 'We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown. We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth. What rocks beset the channel, what falls there are, we know not.' The words are those of John Wesley Powell who, in 1869, became the first man to navigate the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.

A hundred years later a dozen of the world's top canoeists, backed by three rescue rafts, retraced Powell's voyage into uncertainty. And though for them the dangers were no longer completely unknown, they were still real enough: 250 miles of river studded with over 200 rapids, some with great breaking waves up to 20 feet high, others with vast whirlpools that could suck down both man and kayak: this at the bottom of a canyon up to eight miles wide, over a mile deep - and from which escape was virtually impossible.
The film also tells something of the history of the canyon itself. But above all it is an action picture showing the excitement and danger of shooting one of the greatest rivers in the world.

The Panama Canal was opened in 1914-the first man-made link between the Atlantic and the Pacific. For more than 50 years it has handled the ever-increasing traffic of world shipping. Today it can no longer cope. The modern solution is to cut another canal with nuclear explosives.
Five nations are now involved in the search for a new route. Their final decision will involve not just politics and economics but the social problems of the peoples who live there.
The Golden Isthmus is the story of 450 years of man's efforts to bridge the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and of the native peoples who have had to suffer them.

A portrait of the Test by Ronald and Rosemary Eastman. 
Each year, from April to September, dry-fly fishermen practise their art of deceiving trout on this famous Hampshire chalk stream. The moods of the river and its wildlife throughout a year are also shown, even going underwater for some remarkable glimpses of the lives of the trout themselves.

Ten tons of hovercraft arrive in the West African republic of Senegal, and the first stage of the expedition, the journey from St Louis to Bamako, begins.
Africa, between the towns and villages, is like outer space... and we, in our heaving, hissing, belching machine, are like comic astronauts exploring the great void, unaware of the fact that no man has ever touched upon the land and water which we merrily detonate in dust and spray, as if our purpose is to wake up a sleeping age and then disappear.

The hovercraft expedition has so far travelled 800 miles from the west coast of Africa to Bamako, capital of Mali. Tonight's programme, the second of three covering the progress of the hovercraft, follows the course of the expedition along the immense reaches of the Niger -the great river that divides the southern-most fringe of the Sahara Desert from the dark jungles of Africa.

The Hovercraft arrives at Fort Lamy, capital of remote Tchad, to be met by the President. In the meantime a side expedition through the old African kingdom of Dahomey discovers a King and his female warriors - 'the Amazons of Abomey.'
From Fort Lamy the Hovercraft heads north along the Chari river to Lake Tchad, an inland sea as large as Wales and one of the least penetrated regions on earth.

Marcel Ichac's award-winning film about the conquest of Annapurna by a French team in 1950. At the time, Annapurna was the highest peak ever scaled.

The film is introduced by Captain Henry Day, one of the two army officers sponsored by the Army Mountaineering Association, who, 20 years later, took the same route and reached the summit on 20 May this year.
Captain Day is the first to acknowledge the debt mountaineers owe to the Frenchmen Maurice Herzog and the late Louis Lachenal who suffered such severe hardships in their battle with the world's tenth highest mountain.

Once a year in the highlands of New Guinea 20,000 warriors gather together in one place for the Sing-Sing, a huge government-organised display of tribal dancing, singing, and general high-jinks - kind of glorified agricultural show with natives in the ring instead of fat stock.
The warriors, probably the most primitive and certainly the most colourful on earth, spend two riotous days showing off their splendid feathers, wigs, and nose-bones to planeloads of tourists. The whole fantastic jamboree provides an instant microcosm of the colonial process - the breaking down of a traditional culture and the substitution of our own. It's at once riotously entertaining and sharply distressing.

Samoa, a tropical paradise in the South Pacific, is now faced with an agonising challenge.
The challenge is what some people call Progress, in this case American-style, complete with camera-toting tourists, educational television in every classroom, and an expanding economy that may be in conflict with Samoan traditional values.

Where jaguars roam, free from the threat of skin collectors, and Indians are protected from civilisation if not from their neighbouring head-hunters.
Faced with a massive population explosion, Peru has plans for development and colonisation that will alter the face of the country, but conservationists have persuaded the government to set aside at least one patch of the wilderness.

A re-enactment of the epic journey undertaken in 1804 by two men, Lewis and Clark, whose names were ever after to be bracketed together. Leading a 45-man expedition from St Louis, Missouri, they set out to explore and open up the North-West Territories of America - at that time the home of buffalo and Indians.
After a year and a half, 29 of the original team together with their Newfoundland dog reached the mouth of the Columbia River and the shores of the Pacific Ocean. It took them another year to get back to 'civilisation' - and the American North West was never the same again, for the long process of settlement was soon to begin.

High up in the Pennines of north-west Yorkshire a river leaps down a notable hole called Gaping Gill and disappears into the limestone hill. A couple of miles away at Ingleborough Cave a river appears out of the earth: today, it is known that these two rivers are one and the same.
For over a year, teams of fanatical potholers have attempted to make what is perhaps the last great geographical discovery in Britain: by what secret passages and chambers does the Fell Beck find its tortuous way from Gaping Gill to Ingleborough Cave? Perhaps even more extraordinary, an ex-BBC man Syd Perou, with a hand camera and a few lights packed in ammunition boxes, has for 15 months filmed the search in appalling conditions.
To have been a caver down some passages with only an inch of air space between water and rock is a considerable achievement. To have filmed it is an astonishing feat.

In the remote highlands of Nepal live the Sherpas, famous for their work on mountaineering expeditions. Their homes are in tiny villages perched on the slopes of the world's highest mountains, and the Sherpa's life is hard, often short but rarely dull.
Tourists can now walk to the foot of Mount Everest, but few will see, as in this film, a Sherpa community working and celebrating, or be able to attend a great Buddhist festival which originated centuries ago in the monasteries of Tibet.

Turkey is a natural land bridge linking the East with the West.
Each year, across Western Turkey, come millions of birds on migration between Asia, Africa, and Europe. They cross high mountains and arid plains to reach Turkey's great lakes and reed-beds, vital to the migrants' survival.
Other animals have adopted man-made habitats, living amongst the crumbling palaces and temples of southern Turkey that stand as reminders of the great empires that once dominated this part of the world.

A film portrait of an African 'upside-down tree' and its wildlife.

The ancient baobab, growing in dry bush country, provides shade, food, and shelter for everything from elephants to bushbabies, honey-guides to fruit bats. It is the hornbills, however, that use the tree in the most remarkable way: the female cements herself inside the nest-hole to rear her young.

This unique film reveals some of the innermost secrets of one of the most fascinating life-cycles in the bird world.

As a creator of pearls and with the reputation of being an aphrodisiac, the oyster is no ordinary shellfish. It is not surprising that there are widespread and intensive efforts in many parts of the world to farm oysters on a large scale. Appropriately enough, this has been most successfully and picturesquely achieved in France, particularly in the Morbihan district of Brittany.

Bhutan is the world's last Shangri La, an Arcadian society squeezed in between Tibet and India. For centuries she has remained isolated, in a world of prayer-wheels and prayer-flags; mountains, valleys, and faith.
Today Bhutan is still a society as static and fantastic as 1,000 years ago; but the rumblings of the 20th century are now audible from beyond her Himalayan walls.

In the warm waters of the Coral Sea, a long and bitter battle is waged -the endless struggle for survival. Sometimes it's beautiful, like the shoals of silver pilchards: sometimes pathetic, like the defenceless baby turtles.
Into this pattern of inter-dependence has come man, equipped with aqua-lung and explosive harpoon, and an endless thirst for knowledge. So he snares the poisonous sea-snake to discover the secret of its venom: dynamites the shark that could kill him.

This film is the work of the outstanding Australian underwater photographer and director, Ben Cropp: it captures beauty in the frond of coral, action in the excitement of a shark hunt: and deals with a subject of ever-increasing importance - man's place in, and destruction of his environment.

A hazardous journey along the upper reaches of the Orinoco to one of the most inaccessible tribes on earth.
The Maquiritare are a people renowned throughout the jungle for their extraordinary skills, many of which, like the making of blow-pipes and poisoned arrows, are recorded in this film for the very first time.
It also tells of the delicately balanced relationship between these proud, reserved and suspicious people and Herman Schlenker who filmed this unique record of their lives. It shows too how dangerous it becomes when so precarious a relationship turns sour.

In the dragon-shaped group of islands which is Japan, it is said that one is never out-of-sight of a mountain. These are the Japanese Alps, which run down through the main island of Honshu like a backbone. In this volcanic landscape hot springs, bubbling and boiling mud, and roaring vent-holes are all part of a sinister seismography. Snow blankets the peaks in winter, but in spring all kinds of wildlife come out of hibernation or up from the lowlands as the snows melt: Asiatic black bears, foxes, hares, flying squirrels, and a variety of birds.

Constable landscapes and the Suffolk Punch - but there is more to Suffolk than that. Stretches of unspoilt coastline, fen, breck and pasture provide homes for rare wildlife. Groups of people are working to preserve these areas because they believe that such places, together with the old country crafts, make up the very essence of Suffolk.

When buffaloes fight it's the grass that suffers: a proverb from Laos where right-wing and Communist forces have been fighting on and off for nearly 20 years - a conflict as old as that in Vietnam. But a long-drawn-out civil war has not dampened the Lao spirit.

At the annual festivals, such as the great festival of fertility, the public mood is transformed into one of uninhibited delight and people surrender themselves to hours of carefree dance, cheeky playfulness, and slightly drunken tomfoolery. There are moments, too, of pure anarchy: where else would the British Ambassador be beset by a friendly mob intent on removing his shirt?

The climax in the fertility ceremonies is the firing of huge bamboo rockets from the bed of the Mekong river to ask the gods for a season of plenty, for rain and prosperity. Ironically, not far away, missiles of war are sowing death and destruction...

An ocean of sand 3,000 miles long and 1,000 miles wide where man and beast struggle to survive - that is Sahara.
Across this empty land the salt caravans of the Tuaregs follow their age-old routes. From the salt mines of Bilma to the markets of Agades, more than 300 camels pace out 500 unmarked miles and then return - an incredible journey without end.

Three intrepid aeronauts take off in a balloon from the grounds of Blenheim Palace. As they float over the English countryside in their antique craft they tell the dramatic, odd. and sometimes hilarious story of ballooning - and of the men who have drifted In these gay silken bubbles at the mercy of the winds in the magic of free flight.

The New Forest today stands at a crossroads. For 900 years it has remained relatively unspoilt, providing a refuge for shyer animals such as badgers, deer, and foxes. But the combined pressures of thousands of visitors keen to 'get back to nature' and the harvesting of the trees are threatening the Forest's very existence.

North of Australia, south of Japan, lies New Guinea. This huge island still hides pockets of unexplored territory. The people in these inaccessible parts appear to outsiders to have retained customs and beliefs of the Stone Age. A Japanese expedition find that tradition and innocence combine to produce a unique portrait of basic existence.

Heinz Sielmann, naturalist and film-maker, travels the world photographing animals. Over the years he has worked with many leading naturalists, all dedicated to the study and understanding of animal behaviour. His film of woodpeckers is regarded as a classic and earned him a world-wide reputation.

The happy story - almost a fairy story - of four children, two girls and two boys, of mixed English, Hindu, Pathan and Tibetan parentage, played out against the exotic backdrop of the snow-peaked Himalayas: children whose broken lives would never have been mended but for the loving kindness of one man, a Scotsman, Dr John Anderson Graham, who planted a seed which grew into a Lollipop Tree.

This film from France, La Vie en Mourcment, might have been called 'the running, jumping, and anything-but-standing-still film.'
The animal world has an infinite variety of methods of locomotion, from the mysterious creeping of an amoeba to the graceful leap of an impala.

Rain falling on the high, dry Chyulu Hills of Kenya filters through the lava soil until it emerges as cool, running springs at Mzima. Zebra and elephant visit the oasis to drink, but this unusual African portrait is more concerned with the animals that live at the springs.
It is a strange world in which frogs climb trees, birds swim, turtle and crocodile feed side by side, and the lumbering hippopotamus takes on a new grace in the unique underwater photography of Alan Root.

Tierra del Fuego - Land of Fire - is the land hard by Cape Horn. For thousands of years no one wanted it but the Indians-until the 19th-century explorers came looking for untapped gold, and the missionaries for untouched souls.

Many kinds of men - Indians, explorers, sheep farmers, gold diggers, missionaries and oil men have struggled to wring a living out of the 'loneliest, most back-of-beyond spot in the world.' But men have clung on, anchored themselves against the wind and turned the barrenness into a home.

Every living thing to be found in a stream, pond, marsh or bog is specially designed for its own way of life, which in turn plays its part in a complex food web. Close-up camera techniques reveal some of the secrets of freshwater life which the human eye cannot normally see.

Scattered in a lost corner of the Indian Ocean, once the haunt of Pirates and their treasure ships, lie 93 islands, among them Aldabra the Amirantes and the Seychelles. Legend and superstition abound in this isolated and forgotten British outpost. It has even been suggested that the Garden of Eden was there.

If everyone in Britain went down to the sea at the same time, we would all have only three feet of coastline each. Operation Seashore is a light-hearted look at those few yards of ours.

Anthony Smith took a boat, a group of friends and six months off to quest for the odd, the diverting and the picturesque: a gannet colony here and stories of salvage there, of invasion and of cannibalism.

Isolated in the heart of bustling Singapore four troupes of wild 'crab-eating' macaques share the freedom of the city's Botanic Gardens with hundreds of visitors. Monkeys and orchids side by side, and only the orchids are captive. Fed by passers-by, cursed by hard-worked gardeners, the animals provide, for the discerning eye, more than a glimpse of the monkey way of life.

This is the first film for ten years to be shot in Burma by a British cameraman. Specially made to coincide with the London visit of the Burmese National Dance Company, it shows many famous places in Burma from the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon to the floating islands of Lake Inle and the rebuilt walls of Mandalay.

Thor Heyerdahl wanted to test his controversial theory that the Ancient Egyptians could have reached the Americas thousands of years before Columbus. He decided to build a boat from materials that would have been available to the Pharaohs. It was constructed of papyrus reeds and scientists were quick to tell him that it would become waterlogged and sink. It looked as though they might be right, for after sailing 2,700 miles Ra was battered by a storm and abandoned by its seven-man crew. But Heyerdahl was determined to try again.

Could the Indian cultures of Mexico and Peru - with their pyramids, hieroglyphic writing, mummification and colossal stone statues - have received their inspiration from the similar cultures in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia? Having failed once in his attempt to prove that a papyrus boat built on the pattern of the Pharaohs could cross the Atlantic, Thor Heyerdahl set sail again a year later from the coast of Morocco.

Heyerdahl's second voyage in his new reed boat Ra II is a true adventure story as epic, significant and exciting as his celebrated Kon-Tiki expedition.

David Shepherd's life is a classic success story. Once rejected as a student without talent, he has since become one of England's most successful painters.
Widely travelled, his jet-age routine is dominated by his passion for giants - in particular elephants and steam locomotives. The international demand for his African wildlife paintings has enabled this tycoon of artists to donate thousands of pounds to wildlife conservation.

Siberia first became notorious as a place of exile; now the Russians have discovered there a wealth of oil, diamonds, gold and minerals. But all these treasures are largely inaccessible. Siberia is huge - it takes up nearly a tenth of all the land on earth -much of it in the 'permafrost' belt where the earth is always frozen solid down to hundreds of feet below the surface.

Douglas Botting is one of the few people to have seen Siberia from the far north - where the tribes-men herd their reindeer across a vast desert of snow - to the industries and research establishments further south. This is the new Siberia: the living's still hard but the wages are high and some people now go there willingly.

A denuded crab turned highway-man; an octopus coaxed into playing touch; jawfish which try to swallow each other whole; green turtles fighting a losing battle against the gourmet's love for turtle soup.

These are some of the sea citizens of the Bahaman reefs that a portrait photographer Harry Pederson films every holiday. For the last 20 years between water-skiing, swimming, sailing and enjoying the colourful day- and nightlife of these tropical islands Harry and his family have been exploring the underwater world of the coral reefs.

The shaggy musk ox recently came close to sharing the fate of its prehistoric contemporaries the sabre-toothed tiger and the mammoth. It had been hunted ruthlessly and with no thought for tomorrow by the Eskimo and others struggling to survive on the bleak and barren Arctic tundra.
Just in time, a spectacular operation using icebreakers and helicopters was mounted to catch some of the musk oxen and take them to a place of safety.

Chimpanzees can appear quite human through their actions and expressions, which are often similar to ours. Why, then, have they not become even more human than they are?
In this fascinating film a team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam study the social structure of wild chimpanzees in Guinea and conduct some experiments with them. What, for example, will be the chimps' reaction to a stuffed leopard? The answer is provided in one of the most remarkable sequences ever shown in this series.

In the midst of a vast snowfield, the dark speck of a man, squat, fur-muffled, motionless. Lilliaxi, the Eskimo hunter, crouches beside a seal's breathing-hole. Around him lies an endless empty land, harsh but beautiful. This is the old picture of the Canadian North. But now ice-breaker and oil rig, prospector and aeroplane have shattered the old, cold dream, and igloos are things of the past.

A re-enactment of the epic journey undertaken in 1804 by two men, Lewis and Clark, whose names were ever after to be bracketed together. Leading a 45-man expedition from St Louis, Missouri, they set out to explore and open up the North-West Territories of America.

After a year and a half, 29 of the original team together with their Newfoundland dog reached the mouth of the Columbia River and the shores of the Pacific Ocean. It took them another year to get back and the American North West was never the same again, for soon the settlement began.

Cowboys and Indians, gold-miners and pioneers, skyscraper cities and ghost towns, snow-capped mountains and rich valleys: this is 'the last frontier.' In May the Royal Family joined British Columbia's celebrations commemorating the country's first hundred years as the sixth province of Canada.

But despite progress and modern cities, today much of the country is still as the pioneers found it. One can fly from Vancouver's whirling social life and join a packhorse trip through the mountains and valleys where wild life still roams free and where each season brings a new blaze of colour.

The Everglades in Florida is the haunt of the alligator and a wealth of water birds, fish, snakes, deer and other creatures who all depend on water. People want to live here too. Now this unique river is running dry and Tony Soper travelled 2,000 miles in Southern Florida to find out why.

The Ganges is the river of India. It rises in an ice cave in the Himalayas, held sacred by the Hindus. It is like being born in a monastery. It dies in the Indian Ocean, after a journey of 1,540 miles. Over the years it has become not only a river but a way of life.'
Film-maker Yavar Abbas returns after years in the West to the country of his birth, and follows the Ganges from its source to the sea.

Iceland as the Vikings 'saw' it
Vikings settled in Iceland over 1,000 years ago. When they first landed they were still pagans and saw fire giants, frost giants, dragons and gods in the spectacular natural features such as hot springs, geysers, volcanoes, lava deserts, glaciers and waterfalls.

In the warm waters of the Coral Sea a long and bitter battle is waged - the endless struggle for survival.
A new arrival, Man, has recently appeared to affect the age-old balance of Nature. Equipped with aqua-lung and explosive harpoon, and an endless thirst for knowledge, he snares the poisonous sea-snake to discover the secret of its venom; he dynamites the shark that could kill him.
Ben Cropp, the outstanding Australian underwater photographer and director, captures beauty in the frond of coral, action in the excitement of a shark hunt: and he deals with a subject of ever-increasing importance - Man's place in, and destruction of, his environment.

When George Borrow lived with the Gypsies over 100 years ago, Petulengro told him: "Life is very sweet brother; who would wish to die?"
To find out if life was still sweet among English Gypsies, a group of young men whose connections allowed them to penetrate Gypsy family life in a way never before achieved, lived with and filmed two Gypsy families over a period of months in Kent and Essex during 1970 and 1971. The enquirers found a striking similarity between the present condition of Gypsies and that of nomadic peoples all over the world who have come into direct collision with modern societies. Are the only two solutions integration or destruction?

In the Antarctic spring 30,000 Adelie penguins return to Cape Crozier for the breeding season.
This is the dramatic story of these birds and the hazards that they face from storms, blizzards, skuas, predatory leopard seals, and even hooligan penguins.

The Middle Kingdom has passed away. It was the name used by the Chinese Emperors to describe their ancient land, a country situated between Heaven and Earth. Just as the Middle Kingdom is no more, so in mainland China the exotic customs, rites and age-old pageantry have gone. They still live, however, in the group of islands we know as Hong Kong.

"I continue non-stop because I am happy at sea and perhaps because I want to save my soul".
This cryptic explanation left many questions unanswered when ace French sailor Bernard Moitessier dropped out of the first round-the-world, non-stop yacht race in 1969. Having already circumnavigated the globe, Moitessier felt compelled to ignore £5,000 prize-money and sail towards a destination which was, to say the least - uncertain.
The reasons behind his strange 'compulsion' (echoed also, perhaps, in the mysterious disappearance of Donald Crowhurst during the same race) can easily be interpreted as 'sea-fever.' But this account of Moitessier's voyage - filmed by the mariner himself - reveals that there is much more to the psychology of long-distance sailing than we might at first imagine.

A hundred sea miles north of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific Ocean there are two idyllic atolls called Nuguria.
Hermann Schlenker, a German explorer and film maker, spent a summer with the islanders. His film shows these gentle, primitive people in their last year before they learn to read and discover the world beyond their islands.

Kifaru is the Swahili name for the Black Rhinoceros which is reputed to be one of Africa's most dangerous animals. For six years Canadian biologist John Goddard studied wild rhinos at close quarters, camping with his wife and two small daughters.
This film is an account of Goddard's work as well as a record of a most unusual family routine.

Who would expect to find deep beneath their feet an ice-making machine, a telephone exchange, a waterfall, two frozen turbots, and a Prime Minister's bedroom?
This is the dark nether-world in which the Under London Expedition takes a light-hearted look at the strange, complex labyrinth of tunnels and sewers, railways and shelters, vaults, crypts and caves, which are as remote to the world above as the farthest reaches of Patagonia - and as full of surprises.

Apart from fish and swimming mammals, the oceans contain billions of drifting animals, some so small that they escaped attention until the 19th century.
Using remarkable close-up photography, this film by Peter Parks looks at the tiny world of plankton and reveals its surprising complexity and its strange beauty.

Last year Brazil's dreamers and builders launched a four-year programme to conquer the vast mysterious Amazon basin. Mechanised armies of bulldozers are slashing red-earth tracks through virgin rain-forest in an attempt to occupy the hinterland, but deep in the forest the Indians are fighting back with bows and arrows.
Construction of Brazil's Great North Road, from Manaos to Georgetown, has been brought to a standstill by one of the most hostile tribes ever encountered.
A BBC expedition by mini-hover-craft traces the route of the proposed jungle highway, from the Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean, and uncovers the strange story of a massacre in the forest.

With places called Death Valley, Arsenic Spring and Coffin Canyon, it's surprising that men and animals survive there. But there are Basque shepherds, mustangers, prospectors, and even a ballet school. And some who are there just for its solitude and beauty.

The first film ever to have been made in a Harem.
Harem means sanctuary, protection. It means a sacred place... a forbidden place. It grew out of the desert tribal raids and to stop women being stolen.
"In them maidens best and fairest
Then which of your Lord's bounties will ye twain deny?
Whom no man nor djinn has deflowered before them."