The World About Us - Season 2 / Year 1968

So near to civilisation and yet isolated for centuries, the Jivaro Indians still shrink human heads for vengeance in the rain forests of Ecuador.

America realised in time that her wild places were disappearing under the pressure of civilisation. Parks and wildlife sanctuaries were established ensuring that spectacles such as magnificent herds of buffalo, the rare, beautiful Pronghorn Antelopes, and the awe-inspiring Grand Canyon should remain for all to see.

The story of the Bindibu.

A Russian expedition travels to various islands in search of animals developed in isolation, such as the flightless birds of New Zealand and the marsupials of Australia. The expedition also finds other animals that have managed to survive the enveloping wave of civilisation: the Komodo Dragon and the prehistoric Tuatara.

The west to east crossing of the Sahara is not only unusual but dangerous. After Djanet, for a thousand miles you must trust to your own resources-until you reach the Soborom, a little-visited volcanic area in the Tibesti mountains.

The first successful American ascent of Everest took place in 1963. Ten years previously Everest had been conquered for the first time by the British Expedition led by Col. John Hunt. The Americans, however, achieved the distinction of being the first to film from the summit itself.

Norway has a small human population, living mainly along the coast, so the vast mountain plateaux and the dense forests of the interior are left to the wildlife: the reindeer, the beaver, the fox, and the beautiful snowy owl. After the darkness of winter, every moment of the summer light must be used by the animals to rear their young to a state of independence before the first snow falls and it is winter once again.

A fifty-foot ketch travels 2,000 miles across France, Germany, Holland, Denmark, and Belgium-a voyage made possible by the vast network of canals linking the great rivers of the Continent.

Heinz Sielmann is one of the world's leading wildlife film-makers. In the colourful Galapagos Islands he obtained outstanding material on the unique penguins, albatrosses, sea-lions, and giant tortoises. His expedition landed on 'an island of dragons' among thousands of marine iguanas and also managed to film the amazing behaviour of the wood-pecker finch, one of the few animals in the world to use a tool.

The Island of Das, somewhere in the Arabian Gulf, is the home for oil-rig men and a vast industry which is bringing wealth and the hope of modernity to Abu Dhabi. This is the story of two viewpoints - of the Europeans who work there temporarily, and of the local people for whom it is a new way of life.

The Hidden World of the insects is fascinating to explore - Praying mantis, goliath beetle, dragonfly, locust, ant, butterfly, honeybee - an amazing variety. Some species are helpful to man but others, in their millions, threaten his very existence.

"For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the golden road to Samarkand"
A film about a 10,000-mile journey through the Soviet Union beginning and ending in Moscow, and showing some of the remoter and more exotic republics of this great country which has just celebrated its jubilee.

The Grizzly Bear has roamed North America for a million years. The invention of the repeating rifle brought the feared and hated bear to the point of extinction, but today's inventions are to the Grizzly's advantage. Scientific devices are enabling John and Frank Craighead to discover the secrets of the great bear so that it may be preserved.

War is a ritual thread woven into the pattern of life of the mountain people, the Dani. Although few lives are lost, great displays of measured violence dominate their existence and shape a culture that in many ways resembles that of our own distant Stone Age ancestors.

There are few places, if anywhere. in the civilised world where life has changed less in the last millennium than Athos in northern Greece.
Since the middle of the tenth century Athos has been inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks. Women, children, and female animals are forbidden. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Athos has represented a unique survival from the great Empire of Byzantium. However, the monastic community is in danger of dying out. The reasons for this, and what would be lost if this were to happen, are the subject of tonight's film.

The incredible world of the famous French underwater explorer and inventor-55 fathoms beneath the Mediterranean.

The delights of Jamaica as a holiday playground are familiar enough, but what does the island offer to the naturalist? Last year a party of Oxford zoologists and film-makers spent a long vacation there, and the results can be seen today and next Sunday.

The leader of the expedition was Gerald Thompson, well known for his films of insect behaviour, and the programme will include outstanding film both by him and by Peter Parks, who, using a special photographic method, has produced some of the most remarkable close-ups of minute animal life yet seen on television.

The story of a group of Oxford zoologists, led by Gerald Thompson, who recently spent a long working vacation filming the Caribbean wildlife which is so often overlooked by tourists.

Joseph Wood Krutch, author and naturalist, is narrator and guide on a visit to the unspoiled natural wonders of Mexico's Baja California region.

Gerald Durrell returns to the Greek island of Corfu, where he lived as a boy with his "family and other animals"; and where he first met his lifelong friend and mentor, Dr. Theodore Stephanides.

For four years an English girl, Jane Goodall, studied chimpanzees in the wild forests of tropical Africa. This remarkable film tells the story of her unique experiences with man's closest living relatives.

The first full documentary from Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom wedged in between Chinese Tibet and India. After centuries of isolation this autocratic Buddhist society is at last beginning to look beyond its frontiers. This is the story of Bhutan through the eyes of a young Bhutanese schoolboy, Tobgay.

A film about a year in the lives of Dido Bradford, Tom Stamp, and Dick Adams, whose work and leisure are so closely tied to the Devon estuary and its wildlife.

Apart from fish and whales, the oceans contain billions of drifting animals, some so small that they completely escaped attention until the nineteenth century. Using remarkable close-up photography, this film by Peter Parks looks at the tiny world of plankton and reveals its surprising complexity and its strange beauty.

This is the story of a group of men who set off to walk 900 miles across the Tenere desert in the southern part of the Sahara. They are members of the nomadic Lazouane tribe called Tuaregs, and their haughty camels carry millet to barter for salt in the oasis of Bilma. The twentieth century has left these desert traders completely untouched. To us it is a remarkable journey, but for the Tuaregs part of their everyday life.

A film about the Spirit Land of the South Seas, New Guinea.
An island of dense tropical jungle which provides a home for exotic tropical flowers and the brilliantly coloured birds of paradise, the most beautiful birds in the world; and high up in the mountain regions, cut off from the rest of the world, live some of the most primitive tribes still in existence -Stone Age men in the twentieth century. Some are still cannibals; all of them are immersed in their strange customs and rituals - none more bizarre than their extraordinary death cult.

The Highlands of Scotland were once considered remote and inaccessible, so were left to the golden eagle and the wild cat. Now, as the wilderness shrinks, more and more tourists are flocking to enjoy the beauty of Strathspey. How is this human invasion affecting the area and its wide variety of unique wildlife?

A voyage with the vessel Star Kist on her expedition to Peru in search of the giant and valuable tuna fish.

This is a film about the work and research being carried out at the South Pole - the White Continent.

From its source 6,500 feet up in the mountains of Uganda to its mouth in the Mediterranean the waters of the Nile pass through the entire range of ancient and modern civilisation, bringing life to more than thirty million people.

Just off the Pembrokeshire coast lie two small islands-Skomer and Skokholm. The inhabitants number many thousands, of which a few are human. The rest include seals, the unique Skomer voles, and above all great colonies of seabirds like guillemots, kittiwakes, and comical-looking puffins. These bird cities are formed when the ocean wanderers of the winter fly in to become the cliff nesters of the summer.

Two years ago an American Commission was set up to report to President Johnson on the possibility of cutting a new Panama Canal by means of nuclear explosives. Five routes were considered: two in Panama, one each in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Colombia. The final decision will involve not just politics and economics but the social problems of the peoples who live in that area and have done for centuries.
The Golden Isthmus tells the story of 450 years of man's efforts to bridge the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in this narrow neck of land, and of the native peoples who have had to suffer them.

Tradition, courage, and determination take the fishermen of Portugal to Arctic seas for six months in every year. This is their story.

In 1835 a young divinity student called Charles Darwin voyaged round the world, calling at the remote and weirdly beautiful island archipelago of Galapagos. What he saw sparked off a theory of evolution through natural selection which was to shake the foundations of contemporary religion and natural science.

Spiders are not very popular, but their amazing courtship and feeding behaviour make fascinating viewing when filmed by those masters of macrophotography.

Tonight's award-winning World About Us film is a reconstruction of Thesiger's wanderings.

The film sets out to capture the spirit of the desert and its people. But many lovers of desolate places are saddened that the deserts of Arabia are changing fast. Today the silence of the sands is broken by the drilling rig, and the Bedu has lost his livelihood, for no one needs his camels.

Primitive medicine is the subject of tonight's film which comes from the rain forests of Malaya. Dr. Ivan Polunin, a lecturer in medicine at the University of Singapore, has for many years been studying this art as practised by aborigines in various parts of the world. Magic in the Hills is an account of his journey, to meet the Jah Hut people of Malaya, and to observe the fascinating ritual and practice of their applied medicine.

A flower unfurls, a beautiful butterfly emerges from a chrysalis, and the whiplash tongue of a chameleon is slowed down. By using stop and slow motion camera techniques, Italian film-maker Fernando Armati reveals many secrets of nature that would normally be invisible to the naked eye.

The Dadanawa Ranch in Guyana covers 3,000 square miles of wild, remote country. Across its savannahs roam 30,000 head of longhorn cattle, and in its swamps and forests live some of South America's most exciting animals-the giant armadillo, the jaguar, the harpy eagle, the jabiru stork, and the giant ant-bear.
Stanley Brock, the manager of Big D, is also a naturalist and animal collector and he gets to grips with all these giants, as well as the largest and most powerful snake in the world, the anaconda.

Stanley Brock, the manager of the Dadanawa Ranch in Guyana, is equally at home in the saddle of his horse or the cockpit of his light plane. In his leisure hours he sometimes flies to enjoy the spectacle of one of the world's greatest and most remote waterfalls, the Kaieteur Falls; but most of his spare time is spent in studying the wealth of wildlife in the forest, swamps, and savannahs.

A film of the 2,000-mile Geographical Magazine hovercraft journey through some of the remotest waterways of the Brazilian and Venezuelan rain forests, including the dangerous Maipures and Atures rapids.

The birds of Australasia include some whose plumage is among the most beautiful in the world, some with unique methods of incubation, and others whose ways of courtship are incredibly complex. The behaviour of a few even suggests that birds have an aesthetic sense.

The romantic story of two Brazilian cities. Manaus lies isolated in the middle of the Amazon rain forest; Brasilia rises from the desolate sertao - a new capital in the wilderness. Both cities grew as a result of men's dreams: one dream turned into a nightmare, the other appears to be coming true. Manaus is one of the most fascinating, most haunted places man has made for himself to live in; no road leads to this city-only one or two yellow tracks lead away from it and then peter out. Brasilia, in the space of three years, sprang up from an uninhabited desert to become a capital city-the 'city of the future'.

The Cultural Revolution and that little red book of thoughts are as near as most of us can get to China these days, for now more than ever it is a difficult country to visit. It took Rene Burri, who is Swiss, six years to get permission to film there. The result is a programme that allows us for the first time in many years to see the real face of a China that is in many ways surprisingly unchanged-and more real; to see the Chinese as people, as individual as any, and not just as a mass of yelling robots controlled by a master switch.

Behind the facade, behind the banners and political slogans of the Public Image, are the faces of 700 million people, the Chinese. In city and village, knee-deep in the paddy fields of the South, galloping at full tilt across the Mongolian Steppes, they continue in spite of the changes that have taken place to lead their own very personal lives, clinging with a stubborn tenacity to a code of private loyalties and traditions that have withstood 4,000 years of dynastic changes and upheaval.

The familiar cries of the gulls along our coastline are only a small part of the language of these birds. During the breeding season especially, they use a number of other sounds as well as postures to communicate with each other. The meaning and use of all these are examined in this remarkable study of life in a colony of Lesser Black-backed Gulls.

In the depths of a Russian forest a Red Deer calf is born. Throughout the contrasting seasons of his first year he encounters all kinds of fellow creatures, including a bathing bear, beavers, a menacing lynx, and a pack of hungry wolves.

Since time immemorial man has gone down to the sea in ships and created a legend of daring and mystery. This is the saga of his adventure on ocean waters.

Jacques Cousteau's research vessel Calypso has reached the Maldive Islands off the southern tip of India. Divers descend to depths of 300 feet to trace the history of the brilliantly coloured coral reefs. Their explorations reveal a wealth of weird and wonderful marine life, each species having its own ways of surviving in this... Coral Jungle.