Wonderful Life with Stephen Fry

Join Stephen Fry for the greatest story of all: the story of life itself.

Wonderful Life is a twelve-part exploration of the incredible diversity of living things on our planet from microbes, invertebrates and plants to birds, mammals and us.

Prepare to hear incredible stories: bacteria that make decisions; plants that count; insects that farm; fungi that eat nuclear waste; fish that live for 400 years; salamanders that re-grow their brains; birds that plan for the future and great apes that talk and write.

Drawing on the latest scientific research and illustrated with original music and rich sonic effects, this is an adventure in sound that will change the way you think your place in the universe forever.

Episode 1: The Bird and the Mountain

We open with the story of how our planet transformed itself from a burning hellscape into the only place in the Universe where we know life exists and we discover the astonishing fact that all living things share a single common ancestor born of rock, water and luck.

Episode 2: The Invisible World

Plunge into the realm of microbes: the oldest and most successful life forms on the planet. It was bacteria that first mastered photosynthesis, from that revolution to the trillion microbes living in your own body right now, this episode reveals why awe and wonder, not bleach and contempt, is the proper response to our microbial cousins.

Episode 3: The Green Planet

From the first green smear floating in an ancient ocean to the Global Seed Vault buried deep in the Arctic permafrost, this is the story of how plants made life possible. Turning sunlight into food, rock into soil and thin air into oxygen, plants have quietly powered most ecosystems on Earth for three and a half billion years.

Episode 4: Alien Nations

From Darwin’s earthworms transforming the soil beneath his Kent garden to the breath-taking biodiversity of coral reefs, we explore the strange and marvellous universe of animals without backbones. With multiple hearts, blue blood, compound eyes and body plans straight out of science fiction, invertebrates challenge every assumption we have about life.

Episode 5: Notes from the Underground

Fungi are neither plant nor animal — and yet without them, neither could survive. Might fungi’s ability to transform death, decay and chaos into life, order and balance, have profound lessons to teach us?

Episode 6: Creepy Crawlies

Enter the parallel universe of arthropods: the beetles, ants, bees and spiders that outnumber us a billion to one. Insects are not just survivors; they are farmers, engineers and pollinators without whom our food systems would collapse.

Episode 7: Scaling the Depths

From salmon navigating thousands of miles by magnetic fields and memory, to the European eel whose reproduction remains one of nature's great unsolved mysteries, fish turn out to be much more remarkable than the primitive cold-blooded creatures driven purely by instinct we once assumed they were.

Episode 8: Inbetweeners

Explore the double life of amphibians: the animals that made the first great leap from water to land. From giant salamanders to the impossibly tiny Brazilian flea toad, this episode reveals creatures of remarkable resilience and an existential fragility that makes them the most urgent living barometer of our planet's health.

Episode 9: In Cold Blood

The dinosaurs may have gone, but lizards, crocodiles, turtles and snakes have found ways of adapting and thriving that are more than a match for their giant cousins. Reptiles survived four of the five mass extinctions that have dramatically re-set life on the planet, dominating land, sea and air in a way no animals have until modern humans.

Episode 10: Kingdom of Song

Not all the dinosaurs perished – one branch survived to become birds. Dive in to the mystery of birdsong and the growing evidence of bird intelligence: tool use, problem-solving and in some species, a capacity for play and planning that challenges everything we thought we knew about animal cognition.

Episode 11: Family Business

Six remarkable mammal guides lead this episode: platypus, bat, wolf, elephant, whale and chimpanzee. All capable of things we cannot do; all displaying intelligence and behaviours we recognise and understand. Welcome to the story of our own family.

Episode 12: Homo Musica

Sixty-five thousand years ago, a small group of humans crossed open ocean to reach Australia: the furthest point yet from our ancestral home in Africa, and perhaps the first true voyage into the unknown. ‘Homo Musica’ asks what makes us special as animals — and finds some humbling answers.