Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds, Tuesday 9pm, BBC One

Posted by Stewart Turner

Richard Hammond (c) BBC

Clearly desperate to put to good use all that cutting-edge equipment gathering dust since Sir David Attenborough’s Planet Earth came to an end, the BBC’s costly cameras were wheeled out to capture some of the planet’s most baffling phenomena in glorious detail last night. And no, I’m not talking about Richard Hammond’s increasingly-ludicrous mid-life-crisis haircut.

The premise of Invisible Worlds is that high-speed cameras can open the door to a flabbergasting hidden world which our low-tech peepers usually miss. The series opener was all about speed, and managed to take in enough big explosions to keep the Top Gear man on side – although there wasn’t a caravan or a cheap family car in sight.

Indeed, Hammond was most at home when detonating the explosives under 20,000 tons of rock to enable us to see the shockwaves causing the thing when the footage was slowed down. The resulting pictures were genuinely stunning, a little like a giant jellyfish jetting through the air and punching everything in its path aside.

When he wasn’t blowing things up, the Hamster was examining weird fungi on piles of horse manure – the fastest thing on the planet, apparently – hummingbird moths, bees and lightning. Pretty diverse stuff, then – and that was one area where the show fell slightly flat, with all sorts of subject matter shoved together simply because it involved speed, in a manner likely to induce some TV viewing whiplash.

Still, the footage was genuinely amazing stuff, and it seems a high-speed camera is capable of turning pretty much anything into a work of art, from droplets of milk bouncing off water like a ‘60s lava lamp to, you guessed it, a pile of steaming horse s***. For that reason alone, it’s worth tuning in to.

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