TV review: Horizon: The Death of the Oceans? | Television & radio | The Guardian

TV review: Horizon: The Death of the Oceans? | Television & radio | The Guardian

One gets the feeling that the decision to frame the title Horizon: The Death of the Oceans? (BBC2) as a question may have been taken at the last minute in order to discourage immediate despair on the part of the viewer. If the programme itself communicated anything, however, it's that dead oceans are a much stronger possibility than that question mark implies.

The threat, in fact, appears to be immediate and all but irreversible. One scientist said: "We risk losing species before we've even been introduced to them." "The living ocean is very fragile," said another. "Don't for a minute believe that we can't screw it up much worse than it is today."

With the sound turned down, this looked like another lush and lavish documentary about sea creatures fronted by David Attenborough, complete with weird-looking squid and humpback whales glinting in the sun. But the soundtrack was, for the most part, a litany of stark warnings and dire statistics: our seas fished clean by 2050; all coral poised to die from ocean acidification unless the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is drastically reduced; all whale conversations eventually drowned out by our increasingly noisy shipping.