Pearl, 10.45pm
Walking With Dinosaurs, with just six half-hour episodes, has been brief by the usual standards of a BBC natural history series. Yet every minute on screen took 1,260 hours to produce.
Now that the series has come to a close and dinosaurs are once again extinct, we have the revelations of how this hugely successful 'product', as the BBC calls it in its new marketing speak, was made. Behind the images was a wealth of research: more than 100 palaeontologists were consulted. Dinosaur fossils showing skin texture, feathers or hairs provided blueprints for the life-size animatronic models built for the series.
It seems as if we have learned almost everything there is to know about these bizarre creatures. Diplodocus was, for instance, not an animal with a swan-like neck which fed on tree top foliage. It was, in contrast, more like a cow than a giraffe. We saw, for the first time, how an Ornithocheirus waddled awkwardly on the ground, yet glided so gracefully in the air.
Viewers have marvelled at the detail of the series. They will now be equally amazed as to how it was done. This could be a topic for the populist magazine show How'd They Do That?
How'd They Do That?