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Airdate: Voyage to the Planets

With this doco you could be forgiven for thinking the Richard Roxburgh and the ABC had gone and done a Vince Colosimo or Grant Denyer.

Watching this documentary on space exploration, you could be forgiven for thinking the Richard Roxburgh and the ABC had gone and done a Vince Colosimo or Grant Denyer -gone and revoiced an overseas documentary.

The subjects in this 6-part series are verrrrry American in their interviews. When Roxburgh’s voice cuts in with his Australian narration, it’s all a bit distracting.

But Voyage to the Planets is actually an Aussie-made series, produced by Essential Media for the ABC and National Geographic US.

I guess it will have a different narrator in the US…

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to leave Earth?

To gaze back at the receding blue gem that is our home planet and go where no human has gone before? What strange sights await you? What dangers must you avoid? With five decades of space exploration behind us, we can now begin to answer these questions.

Blast-off with Voyage To The Planets: an Australian made documentary series exploring the pleasures and pitfalls of travel to the very alien planets of our own solar system.

Narrated by Richard Roxburgh, this series visits the planets from a very personal perspective: that of the people who have sent probes hurtling to strange worlds, and also from the viewpoint of any one of us who might dream of making a trip ourselves.

The series is styled in the guise of a visual guidebook, tapping into the mystery and intrigue of space exploration while providing the sort of practical information required by anyone who might like to imagine actually going there. Think of it as a kind of handbook for our cosmic neighbourhood. Voyage To The Planets recaptures the sense of wonder and romance that was so palpable during the early years of the exploration of the Moon and the planets beyond.

With a renewed push to propel humans into the heavens and the last three decades of unmanned interplanetary missions behind us, we now have the legitimacy to look deeply into the solar system to explore what our planetary neighbours offer in terms of destinations for human exploration and discovery. As dawn breaks on a new age of manned space flight, Voyage To The Planets offers a ringside seat to the splendours of the solar system: an astronaut’s guide to whole new worlds of possibility.

It airs 8:30pm Thursday on ABC1.

6 Responses

  1. Really looking forward to this show. DVR programmed and ready.

    I agree the American version will probably have a different narrator, can’t see the Yanks putting up with a foreign language narration and subtitles…

  2. Looks good, I like this type of show. But I hate when they add a local voice over guy, why? If it for local content or don’t they thing we will understand the US or UK people used? The worst offector IMO was when Seven butchered the ‘Life After People’ special (which is now had 2 series, when is Seven planning to air them, or couldn’t they get the local guy to re-voice them?) The special was originally 2 hours, or 90 minutes without ads. Seven cut it down to just 65 min without the ads.

    I know ABC will not do that, I’d rather watch this than Sea Patrol on Nine, we might actually learn something!

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