In the midst of a vast snowfield, the dark speck of a man, squat, fur-muffled, motionless. Lilliaxi, the Eskimo hunter, crouches beside a seal's breathing-hole. Around him lies an endless empty land, harsh but beautiful. This is the old picture of the Canadian North. But now ice-breaker and oil rig, prospector and aeroplane have shattered the old, cold dream, and igloos are things of the past.

Chimpanzees can appear quite human through their actions and expressions, which are often similar to ours. Why, then, have they not become even more human than they are?
In this fascinating film a team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam study the social structure of wild chimpanzees in Guinea and conduct some experiments with them. What, for example, will be the chimps' reaction to a stuffed leopard? The answer is provided in one of the most remarkable sequences ever shown in this series.

The shaggy musk ox recently came close to sharing the fate of its prehistoric contemporaries the sabre-toothed tiger and the mammoth. It had been hunted ruthlessly and with no thought for tomorrow by the Eskimo and others struggling to survive on the bleak and barren Arctic tundra.
Just in time, a spectacular operation using icebreakers and helicopters was mounted to catch some of the musk oxen and take them to a place of safety.

A denuded crab turned highway-man; an octopus coaxed into playing touch; jawfish which try to swallow each other whole; green turtles fighting a losing battle against the gourmet's love for turtle soup.

These are some of the sea citizens of the Bahaman reefs that a portrait photographer Harry Pederson films every holiday. For the last 20 years between water-skiing, swimming, sailing and enjoying the colourful day- and nightlife of these tropical islands Harry and his family have been exploring the underwater world of the coral reefs.

Siberia first became notorious as a place of exile; now the Russians have discovered there a wealth of oil, diamonds, gold and minerals. But all these treasures are largely inaccessible. Siberia is huge - it takes up nearly a tenth of all the land on earth -much of it in the 'permafrost' belt where the earth is always frozen solid down to hundreds of feet below the surface.

Douglas Botting is one of the few people to have seen Siberia from the far north - where the tribes-men herd their reindeer across a vast desert of snow - to the industries and research establishments further south. This is the new Siberia: the living's still hard but the wages are high and some people now go there willingly.

David Shepherd's life is a classic success story. Once rejected as a student without talent, he has since become one of England's most successful painters.
Widely travelled, his jet-age routine is dominated by his passion for giants - in particular elephants and steam locomotives. The international demand for his African wildlife paintings has enabled this tycoon of artists to donate thousands of pounds to wildlife conservation.

Could the Indian cultures of Mexico and Peru - with their pyramids, hieroglyphic writing, mummification and colossal stone statues - have received their inspiration from the similar cultures in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia? Having failed once in his attempt to prove that a papyrus boat built on the pattern of the Pharaohs could cross the Atlantic, Thor Heyerdahl set sail again a year later from the coast of Morocco.

Heyerdahl's second voyage in his new reed boat Ra II is a true adventure story as epic, significant and exciting as his celebrated Kon-Tiki expedition.

Thor Heyerdahl wanted to test his controversial theory that the Ancient Egyptians could have reached the Americas thousands of years before Columbus. He decided to build a boat from materials that would have been available to the Pharaohs. It was constructed of papyrus reeds and scientists were quick to tell him that it would become waterlogged and sink. It looked as though they might be right, for after sailing 2,700 miles Ra was battered by a storm and abandoned by its seven-man crew. But Heyerdahl was determined to try again.

This is the first film for ten years to be shot in Burma by a British cameraman. Specially made to coincide with the London visit of the Burmese National Dance Company, it shows many famous places in Burma from the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon to the floating islands of Lake Inle and the rebuilt walls of Mandalay.

Isolated in the heart of bustling Singapore four troupes of wild 'crab-eating' macaques share the freedom of the city's Botanic Gardens with hundreds of visitors. Monkeys and orchids side by side, and only the orchids are captive. Fed by passers-by, cursed by hard-worked gardeners, the animals provide, for the discerning eye, more than a glimpse of the monkey way of life.

If everyone in Britain went down to the sea at the same time, we would all have only three feet of coastline each. Operation Seashore is a light-hearted look at those few yards of ours.

Anthony Smith took a boat, a group of friends and six months off to quest for the odd, the diverting and the picturesque: a gannet colony here and stories of salvage there, of invasion and of cannibalism.

Scattered in a lost corner of the Indian Ocean, once the haunt of Pirates and their treasure ships, lie 93 islands, among them Aldabra the Amirantes and the Seychelles. Legend and superstition abound in this isolated and forgotten British outpost. It has even been suggested that the Garden of Eden was there.

Every living thing to be found in a stream, pond, marsh or bog is specially designed for its own way of life, which in turn plays its part in a complex food web. Close-up camera techniques reveal some of the secrets of freshwater life which the human eye cannot normally see.

Tierra del Fuego - Land of Fire - is the land hard by Cape Horn. For thousands of years no one wanted it but the Indians-until the 19th-century explorers came looking for untapped gold, and the missionaries for untouched souls.

Many kinds of men - Indians, explorers, sheep farmers, gold diggers, missionaries and oil men have struggled to wring a living out of the 'loneliest, most back-of-beyond spot in the world.' But men have clung on, anchored themselves against the wind and turned the barrenness into a home.

Rain falling on the high, dry Chyulu Hills of Kenya filters through the lava soil until it emerges as cool, running springs at Mzima. Zebra and elephant visit the oasis to drink, but this unusual African portrait is more concerned with the animals that live at the springs.
It is a strange world in which frogs climb trees, birds swim, turtle and crocodile feed side by side, and the lumbering hippopotamus takes on a new grace in the unique underwater photography of Alan Root.

This film from France, La Vie en Mourcment, might have been called 'the running, jumping, and anything-but-standing-still film.'
The animal world has an infinite variety of methods of locomotion, from the mysterious creeping of an amoeba to the graceful leap of an impala.

The happy story - almost a fairy story - of four children, two girls and two boys, of mixed English, Hindu, Pathan and Tibetan parentage, played out against the exotic backdrop of the snow-peaked Himalayas: children whose broken lives would never have been mended but for the loving kindness of one man, a Scotsman, Dr John Anderson Graham, who planted a seed which grew into a Lollipop Tree.

Heinz Sielmann, naturalist and film-maker, travels the world photographing animals. Over the years he has worked with many leading naturalists, all dedicated to the study and understanding of animal behaviour. His film of woodpeckers is regarded as a classic and earned him a world-wide reputation.

North of Australia, south of Japan, lies New Guinea. This huge island still hides pockets of unexplored territory. The people in these inaccessible parts appear to outsiders to have retained customs and beliefs of the Stone Age. A Japanese expedition find that tradition and innocence combine to produce a unique portrait of basic existence.