Wallace in Borneo

Comedian Bill Bailey heads to the jungles of Indonesia in the footsteps of his hero, Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, to understand how he came up with the theory of evolution independently of Darwin.

Wallace was a brilliantly eccentric British explorer and, unlike Darwin, he came from a humble background and had to pay his own way by collecting animals. He survived months living in the jungle, man-eating tigers and headhunting tribes to scoop Darwin to the theory of evolution.

Wallace changed the way we see life on earth but has since been written out of history. In the first of this two-part series, Bill retraces Wallace's explorations from the jungles of Borneo to the exotic islands of Indonesia, encountering orangutans, flying frogs and extraordinary bugs, on a mission to understand how Wallace came up with the theory of evolution and to win him the recognition he deserves.