The battle of the behemoths: David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman go head to head with their natural history epics – but who will win?

Attenborough’s BBC One series ‘Planet Earth III’ and Freeman’s Netflix show ‘Life on Our Planet’ are arriving within days of each other, writes Nick Hilton. Although these men are both masters in their field, and as long in the tooth as some of the creatures whose movements they narrate, Freeman can’t hope to replicate the magic of Attenborough and the BBC’s Natural History Unit

For decades now, the disembodied voices of these two men have dominated screens big and small (BBC, Getty)

David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman walk into a bar. Attenborough turns to Freeman with a quizzical look. “If I’m here,” he says to a baffled Freeman, “and you’re there...” Freeman gasps! “Then who the hell is narrating this joke?!”

For decades now, the disembodied voices of these two men have dominated screens big and small. Attenborough, who was born just a few weeks after Elizabeth II (they’re both Tauruses, of course) is now aged 97 and returns to BBC One this week with Planet Earth III. A world-renowned behemoth, straddling both science and entertainment, Attenborough has an ability to conjure drama with little more than a whisper. Mother Nature meets Father Time.

Just three days after Planet Earth III hits screens here in the UK, Netflix’s most ambitious project yet – Life on Our Planet – is released across the globe. With Attenborough confined to terrestrial duties, Netflix had to get creative with its voice casting for the story of life’s epic, 4-billion-year journey on Earth. If your biggest rival is an old man, his voice laden with textures of craggy weariness, how do you differentiate yourself? Well, Netflix’s answer is, of course, to hire 86-year-old Oscar winner Morgan Freeman, the definitive American narrator. Where Attenborough’s voice is puckish, Freeman’s is sonorous. Everything he says, however banal, feels laden with meaning. “This is the story of life,” Freeman purrs, while two Smilodon bare their teeth. The prehistoric Smilodon may have gone extinct 10,000 years ago (or, in other words, 103 Attenborough lifetimes ago) but somehow the vast reserves of natural history feel contemporaneous with these elderly voices. After all, both are long in the tooth.