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‘Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure’ delivers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into the making of the groundbreaking series

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“Life On Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure” airs at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 6, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. It will also be available to stream on the PBS app after the broadcast.

It’s been 50 years since Sir David Attenborough trekked across the globe for three years to film the “Life on Earth” documentary.

Attenborough and his team traveled to 40 countries to document over 600 species — sometimes facing challenges including a coup in the Comoros, gunshots in Rwanda and threats from Saddam Hussein’s family.

Fifty years after production began, and in celebration of Attenborough’s 100th birthday, “Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure” delivers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into the making of the groundbreaking series. It will air at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 6, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. It will also be available to stream on the PBS app after the broadcast.

Mike Davis served as executive producer of the documentary and worked on the series for nearly 15 years.

Davis says he was about 5 when “Life on Earth” hit screens in the ϼ Kingdom on BBC. He says the series was important to his generation, which meant that he had to do his research prior to creating the documentary.

“I had to go back and rewatch all 13 hours, which takes you from very early life all the way through to humans and everything in between,” Davis says. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with David a number of times. I made a series with him on the Great Barrier Reef, made a film called ‘Natural History Museum Alive.’ I was the producer of the show where he met President (Barack) Obama. I have worked with him quite a lot over the last 15 years, but ‘Life on Earth’ has always been an important series.”

Davis is also proud that as he was working with Attenborough, it always felt like they were creating something entertaining for audiences.

He says many series today have pulled from the DNA of “Life on Earth.”

“When you go back and look at ‘Life on Earth,’ you can see the fingerprints of ‘Life on Earth’ in series like ‘Planet Earth 3’ and ‘Frozen Planet 2.’ It set a new bar in terms of David the presenter and storyteller, camera technology, showing parts of the animal kingdom that we hadn’t seen before. It’s very evident that that journey started 50 years ago and has continued to, as one of the contributors says, ride a wave ever since. But when you go back and look at ‘Life on Earth’ and properly watch 13 hours, it’s pretty bold and ambitious.”

For this project, Davis got to revisit 50 years’ worth of footage and says he wanted to make it more than a retrospective documentary.

“I think what just makes it so emotional is being able to hear it from the people that were there (making the originals). David is one of them and he’s an important one of them. He was the producer and presenter and conceived of this idea, but obviously worked as a team and was very respectful of the whole team. And so I think hearing from the production assistants who organized everything to the camera operators that were there in the field, I’m just really proud that we managed to get their account of this,” Davis says.

“The documentary allowed the former crew to conjure memories and it transported them back in time,” Davis says, adding that many of them are in their 70s and 80s now.

“I really wanted to try and get to the source so that we felt like it was an authentic, immersive experience rather than just a backwards looking arts documentary.”