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In a four-part series, Melvin Bragg follows in Darwin's footsteps through the locations of his life trying to uncover the man behind the myth and get to grips with what his great and controversial idea really meant.

In program one, called on the origin of Charles Darwin,

Melvin examines Darwin's early years,

his unhappy childhood, his wayward time at Cambridge University and his attempts to become a

priest to see if they contain the seeds of the man who would become the genius of evolution.

It's been called a most important idea in human history. Charles Darwin's argument

that human life, indeed all life, can be explained as the result of evolution

by means of natural selection. Darwin suggested that the greater

ray and complexity of life on earth was not created by God fully formed, but evolved incrementally at the hands of unremitting, often violent and wasteful yet relentless, meticulous forces.

It's an idea that has radically changed our understanding of ourselves that created the signs of biology

and that more than anything else provided evidence for a case against God.

Darwin's been fated as an intellectual revolutionary, an iconic last of the highest order.

But when you look at the story of Charles Darwin and how he came to this profound insight,

you find a story that's subtler, more complex and more

conflicted than that, which is why I'm standing here in the pulpit of great

St Mary's in Cambridge, the University where in 1828 Darwin came to train to become a priest, but he left

Cambridge a naturalist is one of the great turning points in the intellectual history of this

...