"So what's the show about?"

"Earth. It's right there in the title."

"Yes, so it is."

Hosted by Chris Packham, this is effectively a biography of the Earth starting with this episode, where a massive volcanic eruption killed around 90 per cent of life - effectively wiping the slate clean.

What is appealing about this documentary series is that Packham doesn't feel the compulsion to talk all the way through.

He's happy to let the visuals - and some of them are pretty impressive - speak for themselves, rather than taking the usual nature documentary approach and telling us what we're looking at all the time.

It's a pleasant change, and makes you realise just how talky most documentaries have become.

For any movie, the most important thing is the story.

Sure, you can craft the story to be about something, especially if you want to say something about society.

But the story takes priority over the message; you don't go and shoehorn your ideas in there wherever they fit.

The Drover's Wife - built on a short story by Henry Lawson - really gets that wrong.

Here the message is often the most important thing; so important that the script beats the viewer over the head to make sure we hear it.

The film was written and directed by Leah Purcell, who also takes the lead role.

And she has an awful lot to say - the movie wants to talk about racism, the Stolen Generations, violence against women, rape, murder and more.

Really, it's way too much going on. And it's so often heavy-handed.

One character - Louisa Klintoff - seems to exist solely to spell out how terrible domestic violence is. Which she does in several speeches where she sounds like nobody would in the 1880s.

The odd thing is the film is littered with visual instances of men committing violence against women or treating them poorly.

So anyone watching the film already gets that message quite clearly.

Having a character explain it all just feels like it's the work of a writer who doesn't trust the story enough to get that message across.

Instead, they use a character to preach (supposedly to another character, but it's really directed at the audience), making the message more important than the story.

The Drover's Wife started out as a play written by Purcell and there are strong echoes of that in the movie version.

The script is very wordy. That can be an asset in a stage performance where the set can be limited and verbal descriptions of the surroundings are helpful. But in film, you can show the audience anything you want; there's no need to tell them everything.

Although I would have appreciated an explanation of the opening scene, where Purcell is out the front of her bush shack, sweeping the ground.

Why is she doing that? I have no idea - it's not like she has to keep the dirt clean.

And why do we hear the sound effects of sweeping when the broom is clearly not even touching the ground?