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One of the big things to have come out of David Attenborough’s 100th birthday celebrations this year was the scale of ambition he had during his tenure behind camera. It was Attenborough who commissioned Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, two vast documentary series that became defining texts on the history of art and science.
The consensus seemed to be that this sort of thing – huge, cerebral, expensive – would simply not get made today, unless it was dumbed down and cut-price and rebranded as Amanda Holden’s Top 10 Renaissance Willies. So it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the Cosmic Shambles Network’s new documentary series, For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, takes its title as seriously as it does.
At nine episodes, with a total duration of more than 10 hours, For the Record is a wildly ambitious project. Only the first episode was supplied for review, but that was enough to give a sense of its scale.
I assumed, naively, that the series would largely be about the sort of music that was popularised in the 20th century, with a nod to classical along the way. Nope. The first 15 minutes are spent discussing the soundwaves produced by the Big Bang, explained via interviews with astrophysicists and theoretical cosmologists. We learn how it is that sound cannot move through space, and how science can measure the growth of galaxies by their unique acoustic oscillations.
Then we learn what sound actually is, with digressions about how the size, shape and texture of a room can affect acoustics. An academic gets out a glockenspiel to explain how sounds are caused by vibrating objects attempting to recover their shape after an impact. There’s a tangent about viscosity, and the best material through which to hear sounds.
It is dense, unapologetically brainy stuff, and it’s enough to make you remember that this is the sort of show the BBC used to be famous for. Even Life on Earth, Attenborough’s landmark natural history series, wasn’t afraid to be cerebral; though it is best known for the clip of Attenborough being groomed by gorillas, it is important to remember that he only went to mingle with them to illustrate the evolutionary benefit of the opposable thumb. Even a decade ago, something like For the Record would have found a very comfortable home on BBC Four, and yet it is telling that it has ended up on YouTube, where it is likely to find its largest audience.
Still, this isn’t an alienatingly brainy series. Its trump card is its host, Charlotte Ritchie. While she might not have Bronowski-level credentials – she justifies her role early on by simply stating “I love music” – she is nevertheless a charming, humanising force, able to ground the high-frequency science with a self-deprecating joke, or a pun so bad that even she looks disappointed in herself.
She is a vital presence, because the show has a lot of very big ideas that it needs to link together. It recruits the science writer Philip Ball to try to articulate the exact point where a sound becomes music – no spoilers, but he argues that it’s when the sound becomes deliberate and organised – before disappearing down another rabbit hole about whether animals can be considered musical. There’s a long bit about the different frequencies emitted by various whales and dolphins, then a discussion about whether dogs are musical, and before you know it we’re off talking to a couple of Inuit throat singers.
It’s a giddy ride, and one that doesn’t always follow a logical pattern. But it’s nothing short of amazing that something like this exists in 2026. However, YouTube can be a place where fanatics chase down subjects in obsessive detail, so perhaps it makes sense that this is where For the Record has wound up. Maybe we’ve reached a point where shows simply don’t need television any more.
Nevertheless, to reiterate the scale of the endeavour, by the end of the first episode we are still only at about 800BC. That leaves close to three millennia (the ones containing all the music that any of us will be familiar with) to get through in just eight episodes. Apparently No 2 will largely revolve around the ancient Mesopotamian use of Pythagorean tuning. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
