I’ve just found myself lying on the floor beside my telly. I’ve been out cold since I watched the brilliant Life in Cold Blood (BBC One, Monday, 9pm). David Attenborough‘s epic continues apace with shots that would make Scorsese green with envy and facts that defy belief. And it’s all about reptiles and all that? Well, sorta, but this is Attenborough… it was always going to be so much more than a nature documentary.

There’s something about the Attenborough team that makes their shows so incredible and special. Each member of the crew seems to own a bag of TV magic that they sprinkle on each glorious shot, edit and sound recorded. Even though the animals do the hard work, it’s the team that shows them off at their best. The end result is sensational.

In the main programme, we learn so much that it left me, throughout, shaking my head in disbelief. Worms that feed their own skin to their youth. Worms that yawn. Frogs that wave to each other. Toads that bury themselves in the ground. Living fossils. Fish with lungs that can breathe out of the water. Newts that dance. Cannibal lizardy things. Frogs that carry their young in a pouch on their hip. It’s staggering that they manage to get it all into one show.

However, as good as the main programme was, it’s the behind-the-scene show that left this writer reeling. I mentioned the waving frogs? Well, they were called Panamanian Golden Frogs. These frogs signaled to each other by a series of waves. Some to say “just passing”, others to say “you better go now buddy or we’re gonna have to fight”. Their brilliant and spectacular golden skin made them look like something made from marzipan. They can’t be real! They’re too pretty! Well, in the wild at least, they aren’t real. Thanks to a fungal disease, and man’s penchant for killing them to make lucky charms, has seen these frogs vanish from our Earth. Attenborough’s crew are the last to ever film them in their natural habitat. The only remaining ones are now in captivity. Incredibly sad.

For all the playfulness of the show, something which Attenborough clearly thrives on, and the sweet moment when Attenborough tried to whistle and hum at the same time (and failed miserably) to call some frogs, it’s still the underlying message that Attenborough and his crew are racing around the world to get one last snapshot of it before we make it implode. If Planet Earth was the last hurrah, then this is the comedown. We’re losing some of our most important creatures… and in the case of the Panamanian Golden Frog, we’re too late to do anything about it.