One of the highlights of this summer is promising to be Bang Goes The Theory, where our intrepid team will be pushing things until they explode and reveal their secrets.

Their lair is a converted former wind tunnel in Bedfordshire, and Open2 has been popping down from time to time to keep an eye on the process of turning a former RAF facility into the nation's biggest laboratory. We'll be sharing some photos of the process with you over the next week or so.

This, then, is the starting point – pretty much, as you'll see, how the plane-makers left the place.

An innocent-looking, disused facility...

But these people have plans for it...

Inside the abandoned RAF building.

The nerve centre of the operation. But what's in store?

Why not subscribe to our science, technology and nature RSS feed to be the first to find out when we share the next set of snaps?

Read more about Bang Goes The Theory on Platform, the OU student & alumni site.

This final instalment of my reports on the progress of Life comes from about as far from the office as it is possible to be. 8,000 miles from the South Pole sitting in a hut on the edge of the Ross Sea ice shelf.

There are seven of us here on the team. After arriving with 800kg of gear on a US Air Force C-17 transport plane, we spent the first week learning how to survive everything from a 60mph white-out to a helicopter crash landing; from falling through the ice to building an emergency camp from snow blocks. Now Neil Lucas is preparing all the elements of his unique underwater tracking timelapse gear, ready to take it 20 metres under the ice. There it will work away for six solid weeks filming the activities of the weird creatures that live in the eerie ice-blue world.

Meanwhile Doug Allan and his assistant are assembling their mobile diving hut, which will be dragged out onto the ice to provide them with shelter and access to their diving hole. This 2.5m-long tube is bored through the ice by a giant corkscrew and will give them access to film Weddell seals’ under-ice behaviour. I’ve seen the first images from the under-ice timelapses and they are extraordinary, with thousands of candyfloss-pink starfish marching across what looks like a vast steel-blue stage. The Weddell seals look equally stunning as they dance a ballet in a spotlit shaft of light breaking through the ice above.

This expedition to Antarctica is the culmination of two years’ planning and negotiation with America’s National Science Program to get permission to work at their amazing Antarctic base at McMurdo. We are the first NHU crew at the base for more than 20 years.

An equally tricky logistical expedition is underway in the rather warmer climes of the seas off Tonga; the courtship grounds of humpback whales. A humpback whale female choosing her mate is both extraordinarily spectacular and extraordinarily hard to film – we now know why it has not been done before! To get the full picture you need a camera on a fast boat beside the whales, a camera underwater in front of them and a camera in the air on a helicopter overhead, all operating in heavy seas in a very remote part of the Pacific. The female gathers dozens of males around her, and then sets them the challenge of chasing her while at the same time fighting with each other. The violence of their clashes challenges the perception of whales as gentle giants. But the problem for the crew was not so much the risk of being too close to the fighting as simply being able to keep up – you’ve never seen whales move so fast.

On the theme of amazing aquatic firsts, we are collaborating with a special scientific project in an attempt to film deeper into the ocean that has ever been done before, at almost 12km. The reports are of strange, almost translucent fish and giant shrimps like trilobites down there, but who knows what could turn up. Whatever it is will certainly be weird.

With very few sequences left to complete, this four-year project is coming to its final phase; the editing is beginning; and all the amazing stories and adventures are beginning to distil into what we hope will be a memorable series.

I mentioned last time that we had a prize for the most bizarre behaviour, and back then, the Hawaiian waterfall-climbing goby was the front-runner. Well it’s close, but I think it has just been beaten by the Vogel Kopf bowerbird.

One of the males we filmed decided to decorate his bower with, amongst other things, a precisely and artfully arranged pile of deer dung. As he waited for it to work its magic and attract him a mate, he was infuriated to discover that it had sprouted mushrooms. This not only affronted his creative sensibilities, but clearly put off the visiting female – who took one look at it and fled. Unfortunately for him she went straight to the bower of his rival, who had gone more mainstream, with pretty orange, pink and red flowers and berries.

The animals and plants we have filmed on Life have never ceased to amaze and surprise us with their beauty, heroism, determination, dexterity, athleticism, intelligence, tenderness, and occasionally violence. When we started I wrote that I thought this was going to be the most exciting series I have ever worked on. Now that we’re coming to the end, I know it is.

As we approach the end of our most intense period of filming, there is a bit of a competition going on in the Life team as to who has filmed the most bizarre story of the series.

Since the last report the claims have been coming thick and fast, but if pressed I would say the current leader is Adam Chapman and his Hawaiian waterfall-climbing fish! The star of this story is a colourful goby that spends the earliest part of its life in the shallow coastal waters off Hawaii, as any normal goby would. But then, when it is time to breed, it heads for fresh water – and this is where it gets bizarre, because the freshwater pools it needs are at the top of a waterfall over 20 metres high!

With extraordinary pluck, braving a deluge of water, the little fish clamps itself onto the vertical rock face (using its ventral fins that are modified into a sucker), and in what is the equivalent of you or me climbing the Empire State Building in a power shower, proceeds to loop its way up to the top. It’s two steps forward, one step back as he gets knocked back again and again by the massive force of water… when you see him finally make it you can’t help cheering!

As well as being great entertainment this story perfectly encapsulates the aims of Life: extreme behaviour revealing an almost unbelievable solution to some extraordinary challenge thrown at an animal by mother nature, and a beautiful example of ‘evolution in action’.

In our three-year quest for the best stories there have been many other contenders of course, as the Life team have been to the four corners of the planet and continued to push the use of revelatory filming technology; dung-collecting owls, cart-wheeling toads, flies growing their eyes on the end of giant stalks (which are the same length as their bodies) and hippos having their teeth cleaned by shoals of fish have amazed us back at base.

As well as the strange, we have also been on the trail of the spectacular and dramatic. We’ve been tracking with vast elephant herds, using our new ‘yogi-cam’ to rub shoulders with the matriarch as she leads them across the Amboseli plains. We’ve been joining enormous flocks of knot as they make their critical refuelling stop on their 1000-mile plus migration; watching the perilous fledging of baby snow geese as they leap from their clifftop nests into thin air (before they can fly); and spying beneath the waves on huge spider crabs as they come together in their thousands to moult.

Staying underwater we’ve been back to our very own shipwreck (which we sank at the beginning of shooting to show how a coral reef evolves). It’s progressing well. The corals are beginning to colonise the decking, an octopus has taken up residence in the funnel and the hull is coated with all sorts of marine creatures. There’s even a shark which likes to pay regular visits.

The series has tried not only to deliver beautiful, enthralling images but new scientific revelation, and one of the signatures of Life has been the use of ultra-high-speed cameras to show previously unseen action. In Belize, Madagascar, Peru and here in England images taken at up to 8000 frames a second have shown how a Jesus Christ lizard really runs on water; what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a chameleon’s tongue; the mating dance of the spatule tailed humming bird; and the way plants turn their seeds into ballistic missiles.

We still have many miles to go in the last few months of filming. In South America we’re looking forward to mass hunting by dolphins and the parental care of poison arrow frogs. In the Falklands we will be returning to film more of an amazing orca hunting behaviour. And, at last, I am going on location – heading to McMurdo base in Antarctica to film the strange creatures that live on the sea bed beneath the ice!

We are also off to West Papua to film two extraordinary birds, the Volgelkopf bowerbird and the king bird of paradise. This is an extremely tough assignment for cameraman Barrie Britton and director Stephen Lyle; it’s a very remote location and these amazing birds are very secretive. Their displays to attract a mate are almost beyond belief, including building a huge tent out of hundreds of orchid stems, each carefully collected from the surrounding forest, and, in the case of the king bird of paradise, doing a dance that resembles a scene from Monty Python’s ‘dead parrot’ sketch. Which I suppose neatly brings me back to the weird side of nature.

Maybe one of these birds will knock the waterfall fish off the top slot for the most bizarre story of Life!

Chadden Hunter, one of the Life team directors, is tough. He loves a real challenge in the field, but as he gingerly removed a burrowing, parasitic bott-fly maggot from beneath his skin for the twentieth time in a week, the patience and perseverance for which we NHU people pride ourselves was getting rather stretched – his only comfort was that at least it would be good stuff for the ‘Making-of’! But then we all knew getting the new stories we want for Life was never going to be easy.

Chadden and cameraman Richard Kirby were filming in the wildest, toughest part of the Brazilian rainforest. For three weeks they had been wading through waist deep mud, avoiding venomous snakes and spiders the size of dinner-plates, on the trail of a bizarre, elusive and crimson coloured monkey – the Wakari.

This strange primate spends most of its time hanging upside down from the tree tops and is notable for having both a bottom that looks like a monkey’s head and a bald head that looks like... well, a monkey’s bottom! (The theory is that if an eagle attacks a Wakari it would target its backside rather than its head.)

I’m pleased to say all the effort paid off and in the end these extraordinary primates were trusting enough to let the team get close enough for some fascinating images. All in a days work.

Meanwhile on the other side of South America, cameraman Gavin Thurston was, in truth, having it only a little easier filming another species of primate. The conditions were kinder but he was grappling with a different ‘beast’; the latest super-high speed camera (actually more like a mass of computer hardware with a lens stuck on the front, but capable of awesome frame rates for all that).

He was filming a troop of capuchin monkeys that, over generations, have learnt to use stone hammers to open otherwise impregnable palm nuts. It’s a tricky job – holding the nut between their feet and bringing down a huge stone, almost as heavy as themselves, with enough precision to smash the nut but not their toes! How exactly do they do it? The super-slow-mo imagery reveals their skills in a way that is both spellbinding and at times hilarious.

In fact, high speed filming has, by coincidence, been rather the theme of the last three months on location. This extraordinary camera, (and all its attendant cables, drives, computers and batteries) has travelled with Life from halfway round the world capturing unique images of bulldog bats pouncing on fish at 60 mph, frogs leaping from the water like great white sharks to catch dancing damsel flies and the unbelievable hunting behaviour of the star-nosed mole – each in astonishing detail at over 1000 frames per second.

Rather less frenetic but equally spectacular, the Life team have also been busy sinking a rusty hulk in the Bahamas (to create an artificial reef that we will see being colonised by corals in time lapse) and a few miles away filming from the air – using a heli-gimbel – dolphins hunting cooperatively as they ensnare their prey in a fishing-net of their own making.

Their extraordinary trick is to first isolate some luckless fish in very shallow water, then swim round them in a tight circle stirring up the sea bed, trapping them in an impenetrable, perfectly circular ring of mud – all beautifully revealed from the air. It’s a jaw-dropping demonstration of sophistication and strategy, although perhaps one you might be prepared to believe of such famously clever animals, but could you imagine similar cooperation in a creature like a squid?

Well it happens - and we’ve filmed it! Our underwater team have followed over 100 Humboldt squid hunting together as a pack, deliberately driving a shoal of fish against a reef before systematically annihilating them.

The sight of these six-foot-long giants co-ordinating each others movements by colour-flashing in the gloom is like a scene from Star Wars and frankly rather sinister (they do after all have a local reputation as man-killers!)

From elsewhere in the world we have epic spectacles ‘in the can’; we have flown with five million butterflies as they fill the air in the remote forested mountain peaks of Mexico. With cameras both in a heli-gimbel above the canopy and flying through the branches on cable dollies we can give a unique sense of being shoulder to shoulder with them as they gather in after a thousand mile migration.

And finally, we haven’t neglected the poignant stories, as in the south pacific seas we follow a pregnant sea snake on her dangerous journey through pounding surge and surf into a secret undersea cave – a sanctuary hidden from predators but critically also containing an air pocket essential to the survival of the eggs she needs to lay. We will be back later in the year to complete the story as the babies emerge from their eggs and take their first breath of air before plunging into a life aquatic.

We are nearly a third of the way through our filming and the pace is so intense that I am almost alone in the offices these days. The material coming back continues to amaze me with new stories and images of the extraordinary ways animals have evolved to survive. We’re so busy I may even get to go filming myself… although I think I’ll pick somewhere where you don’t get eaten alive by bott-flies.

The definitive exploration of the diversity of living things. Hmm. It’s hard to imagine a bigger subject to cover in a wildlife series than that – after all, there are something like one and half million known species on the planet. Doing them justice is going to be a tall order. For a start, how do you pick the best – the most spectacular behaviour, the most fascinating stories – the most surprising, most awe-inspiring images?

Well, that’s what the Life team has spent the last year grappling with; finding the top 150 behaviour stories of animals and plants battling to survive – and a star cast of great characters in the process.

It has been remarkable. Just when you think you know what animals do, you find them up to something utterly extraordinary: a pod of killer whales combining forces to roll a seal off a slab of floating ice into another’s jaws; new discoveries of ‘giant’ chimps that use tools in a completely novel way; ‘superbrat’ baby coatis that beat up their elders in a fight for food; a giant octopus mother that lays down its life for her brood of hundreds of perfectly formed babies; even a mountain plant with so many flowers (20,000 to be precise) that they form a spike which towers 30 feet high, and it only blooms once a century!

To make sense of all this wonder, Life needs to be big in scope. There are ten episodes, one dedicated to each of the major wildlife groups: mammals, primates, birds, insects and so on. Filmed on every continent and in every type of habitat across the world, the series will have epic style and breadth, making it definitive, and uniquely satisfying in a way that hasn’t been attempted since Life on Earth a generation ago. But Life is also about entertainment. Alongside the revelatory quality, sense of place and cinematic style inspired by Planet Earth and Galapagos, there will be new up-close, intensely dramatic behaviour that will captivate and emotionally involve the audience.

To achieve all this Life has a fantastically talented team of producers. Martha Holmes has unparalleled experience of the poles and the oceans gained from Life in the Freezer and Blue Planet. Adam Chapman knows as much about the African plains and its big cats as anyone in the Natural History Unit. Neil Lucas is the master of time-lapse photography, Patrick Morris is fresh from Galapagos, Rupert Barrington has a track record of delivering astonishing images of insect behaviour going back to Alien Empire and Ted Oakes was the creative brain behind the breakthrough series Amazon Abyss.

As the viewer witnesses animals doing everything they can to survive against the elements, predators and even their own kind, they take a roller coaster ride through a world of extreme animal behaviour. With the extraordinary intensity of experience that the best HD photography brings, I’m more excited than I’ve ever been about any series I’ve worked on. This is Life… as you’ve never seen it before.