Last Chance to See

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 kakapo 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