I am delighted to report that thanks to a kind colleague, I received a few days ago a copy of THE FORGOTTEN VOYAGE, the docudrama I really wanted to watch about Wallace's discovery of natural selection (see my post from the 21st August below). This 50 minute film was directed by Peter Crawford and broadcast by the BBC as part of its The World About Us series in 1983.
I thought that it would be rather dated and also probably horribly inaccurate, as most of these things are, but I was pleasantly surprised on both counts. It turned out to be very well written, researched and produced, and apart from the piercing and jangling music, I was very impressed! All of the main characters (Wallace, Charles Allen, Ali, Rajah Brooke, Darwin, Hooker and Lyell) were very much as I had imagined them to be, both in terms of appearance and character. It was all filmed on location in authentic looking places, and the research was so excellent that even the insect collecting equipment Wallace used was as it should have been in the mid-nineteenth century (a point which would be lost on most viewers I'm sure). There were, of course, some inaccuracies in the story (e.g. that Darwin and Wallace's contributions were read in alphabetical order to the Linnean Society on 1st July 1858 [they were actually read in order of the date they were written]) but overall the script was spot on. I would certainly highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in the history of the discovery of natural selection.
Interestingly, I noticed that the actor playing Darwin sat in the actual chair in Darwin's Study at Down House, in which Darwin sat and wrote On the Origin of Species. The actor also appeared to be using Darwin's walking stick whilst strolling through the garden of Down House! I can only assume that 26 years ago The Royal College of Surgeons, who then owned Down House, were not as careful with Darwin's artifacts as the current owners, English Heritage, are today. No wonder that Darwin's chair is now rather threadbare!
And before you ask me where you can get hold of a copy of this mini-masterpiece, the answer is that I don't know, but perhaps try the BBC.
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