The first commercial release of the avant-garde soundtrack to the 1979 David Attenborough nature blockbuster Life On Earth shows how pivotal it was to that programme's era-defining impact

British composer Edward Williams's orchestral piece The Sex Life of the Fern is perhaps not going to trouble this year's Christmas No1 spot. And other tunes on his new LP, such as Eusthenopteron and the Primeval Swamp, are even less likely to prove a hit.

But for 13 weeks in 1979, millions of television sets in Britain reverberated to these pioneering works, as they provided the musical backing for the BBC's landmark natural history ...

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