‘We didn’t develop heads until we’d evolved an arse. I like that’: Chris Packham’s epic ode to evolution

His superpower has always been speaking his mind – and his majestic new BBC show aims to shatter our ideas about life itself. The presenter talks mass extinction, spiders who dream and why people get sick of him holding up rocks It’s impossible to meet Chris Packham without getting into a good mood. This is largely down to his contagious enthusiasm for the natural world, but on this occasion may also be his canary yellow polo shirt and stand-up-as-if-electrocuted hair. His new five-parter, Evolution, tells the story of the single cell that is all living things’ first common ancestor. Known as Luca, it is the indivisible connection between you and your cat, me and an elephant. (That’s an acronym, not poetry, by the way – Last Universal Common Ancestor, the single-celled organism from 4.2bn years ago that branched into everything that now lives.) “There is still a physical connection between me and you, and a cell that existed billions of years ago,” he says. “I find that absolutely brilliant.” The show seeks to shake up all our preconceptions: “We tend to stop at GCSE and are left with a legacy of thinking that evolution is laboriously slow, we are its be all and