BBC Earth to Go HD

At last the stars have aligned for Sky’s BBC Earth to go HD: the channel will upgrade in time for next month’s belated premiere of The Planets.

The acclaimed Brian Cox series will screen 7.30 Sundays from December 8, four days after BBC Earth’s 1080i conversion.

For once, critics agreed with the producers’ claim that “this stunningly ambitious series brings to life the most memorable events in the history of the solar system, by using ground-breaking visual effects to tell the thrilling story of all eight planets”.

The Guardian raved the five-part series is “so staggering you go ‘whoa!’ every few seconds … The awesome vastness of time and space is laid out in its full, jawdropping incomprehensibility by Prof Brian Cox, the Attenborough of outer space.”

And the Independent argued it boasted “the kind of dramatic scenes you’d witness in a sci-fi movie” and dubbed the CGI “spectacular and entrancing“.

If you’re not a Sky subscriber, expect a Blu-ray release of The Planets early next year. Now that Universal Pictures NZ has taken over the distribution of BBC home entertainment content on disc, hopefully more BBC product will be showcased on Blu-ray.