What a view | Drones show China’s changing seasons in BBC Earth series to brilliant effect, as cameras follow rural dwellers in pursuits old and new
- Whatever did filmmakers do before drones? They are used to great effect to capture the shifting colours of a vast landscape in Through the Seasons: China
- Fans of Downton Abbey will find to plenty to like in its creator Julian Fellowes’ drama series The Gilded Age on HBO Go, set in 1880s New York
China began with a bang – and it’s still rattling. The bang in question was the slam dance of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, initiated 35 million years ago, to which the Himalayas and Qinghai-Tibet plateau owe their existence.
The latter has a recurring role in three-part travelogue Through the Seasons: China (BBC Earth), which turns extensive drone footage into visual gold by capturing the magnificence of an otherwise ungraspably vast landscape throughout a year of seasonally shifting colours and moods. Whatever did filmmakers do before drones?
Back on the ground (and, apart from a rapid visit to Macau, largely ignoring the rhythms of life in the country’s ever-expanding cities), it seems the Chinese calendar’s 24 solar terms – set down in the original farmers’ almanac – are indispensable out in those endless rural expanses still mercifully ignorant of cars, concrete and, at the time of filming, Covid-19. So the series presents as wide a variety as possible of happy natives prospering in their ancestrally inescapable callings.
Up in Gansu in northwest China, at the Shouhang Dunhuang solar power plant, company boss Huang Wenbo is busy bringing an essential form of energy to the country – aided by 12,500 monstrous mirrors. And in Sichuan, physicist Wang Tun dedicates his life to minimising earthquake casualties with his innovative early-warning system.