Rare glimpse of Africa

“You think you know this continent? Think again!” And there – as both promise and boast – are the opening words to this seven-part series on Africa, a co-production of Discovery and the BBC’s legendary natural history unit, filmed across 27 countries with a total of 21 different types of camera. Tuesday night’s hour opens in the Kalahari and the Namib – a world of sand stretching east from the Atlantic, and home to a vast assemblage of fauna, if not quite flora. In its bone-parched expanses live a type of spider that rolls down sand dunes, 3-inch-long crickets that eat bird hatchlings, and an underground lake of fossil water inhabited by blind catfish. Forest Whitaker (pictured above) narrates.From the folks who brought you 2009’s “Life” – another modest little subject – now comes “Africa,” about a continent not exactly begging for attention from nature documentary filmmakers the past half century or so. What more is there to see? Ah, the small-mindedness of that question: “Africa” convincingly, emphatically, establishes that you ain’t seen nothing yet. Based on the first hour (all that was sent out for review), this really does promise a magical mystery tour of a world we thought was familiar but instead is alien, mysterious and even numinous (watch a herd of black rhinos perform an elaborate mating ritual in starlight, and think otherwise). BBC

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Rare glimpse of Africa