Last Chance to See
BBC radio documentary series
Last Chance to See is a 1989 BBC radio documentary series and its accompanying book, written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. In the series, Adams and Carwardine travel to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction. The book was published in 1990.
In 2009, the BBC broadcast a television follow-up series of the same name, with Stephen Fry replacing the late Adams.
In 1985, Douglas Adams went to Madagascar in search of the (possibly extinct) lemur the aye-aye. The trip was part of a project by the World Wide Fund for Nature and British Sunday newspaper The Observer, sending well-known authors to remote places to seek endangered species and write articles for The Observer Magazine, to help raise awareness of ecological issues. Adams was met in Madagascar by zoologist Mark Carwardine (who was working for the WWF at the time). The Observer project was successful, and Adams and Carwardine developed a radio series around the same concept for BBC Radio 4. Carwardine later said:
"We put a big map of the world on a wall, Douglas stuck a pin in everywhere he fancied going, I stuck a pin in where all the endangered animals were, and we made a journey out of every place that had two pins."
The journeys undertaken were to see:
The aye-aye in Madagascar
The Komodo dragon on the island of Komodo in Indonesia
The kākāpō in New Zealand
The mountain gorilla in Zaire
The northern white rhinoceros in Zaire
The Yangtze river dolphin in China
The Rodrigues fruit bat on the island of Rodrigues, Mauritius
The Amazonian manatee in Brazil
The Juan Fernández fur seal on the Juan Fernández Islands, Chile
Radio
The aye-aye programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 1 November 1985 as a pilot; six further episodes were then broadcast in 1989:
The kākāpō - 4 October
The Yangtze river dolphin - 11 October
The Amazonian manatee - 18 October
The Rodrigues fruit bat - 25 October
The Komodo dragon - 1 November
The Juan Fernández fur seal - 8 November
The mountain gorilla and northern white rhino, although the subject of chapters in the book, did not appear in the radio series.
The series also features short descriptive pieces narrated by Peter Jones, written and performed in the same style as Jones's role as The Book in the radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
“Last Chance to See” enters the record as bBC radio documentary series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Last, Chance and radio can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1068999. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1990, 2009 and 1985.
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