Four years in the making, Life will set a new benchmark in family entertainment and natural history epics. Life is the latest wildlife epic from the BBC’s award-winning Natural History Unit. It has the revelation, cinematic style, sense of place and emotionally involving individual sequences that that were the hallmark of The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, with all the scope, detail and content of an Attenborough epic, and the addition of close-up, intensely dramatic new behaviour – all captured by the world’s top wildlife photographers with the aid of the most cutting-edge and sophisticated filming techniques.

Mammals dominate the planet. They do it through having warm blood and by the care they lavish on their young. Weeks of filming in the bitter Antarctic winter reveal how a mother Weddell seal wears her teeth down keeping open a hole in the ice so she can catch fish for her pup.

A powered hot air balloon produces stunning images of millions of migrating bats as they converge on fruiting trees in Zambia, and slow-motion cameras reveal how a mother rufous sengi exhausts a chasing lizard. A gyroscopically stabilised camera moves alongside migrating caribou, and a diving team swim among the planet's biggest fight as male humpback whales battle for a female.