Darwin’s voyage to the Southern Hemisphere in the 1830s changed him from a directionless rich kid bound for a career in the Church, into one of the most incendiary thinkers of our age. This five-year voyage stunned and stimulated the young Darwin; the biodiversity, the exoticism, even the brutality, of the Southern Hemisphere, was in staggering comparison to the England he had just left – and it laid the foundations of his very ‘dangerous idea’: evolution by means of natural selection. What emerges from this series is a portrait of Darwin as an ambitious and flawed man: one moment paranoid, bloody-minded and coolly manipulative; the next, courageous, compassionate and devoted. The drama features the people and the politics orbiting around Darwin as he moved cautiously towards publication of his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species.
