the project

extraordinary rituals

BBC Two

From ancient ceremonies to extreme rites of passage, Extraordinary Rituals explores the rituals that shape human life and bring communities together.

Presented by Simon Reeve, the three-part series travels across the globe to examine ceremonies marking birth, coming of age, marriage and death, alongside rituals of community, belief and endurance. From Japan and Papua New Guinea to Senegal, Greenland, India and Australia, the films reveal the extraordinary ways different cultures respond to experiences that are universal to us all.

900,000

Average UK audience

4.7%

broadcast audience share

7.7/10

IMDb RATING

★★★★★

TV Times

“stunning film”

— The Guardian

Highlights

Extraordinary Rituals brought the BBC Studios Natural History Unit's observational storytelling to an unusual subject: the rituals, ceremonies and traditions through which people mark the defining moments of human life. Across three films, Simon Reeve travelled across five continents, encountering communities whose customs ranged from ancient religious ceremonies and extraordinary rites of passage to contemporary celebrations and extreme tests of endurance.

The series opened with rituals surrounding birth, adulthood and marriage, travelling from Japan and Papua New Guinea to Italy, India and the United States. The films explored practices that could be spectacular, intimate, joyful or physically demanding, while looking beyond their surface drama to understand why these rituals remain important to the people who take part in them.Among the most striking stories was the Naki Sumo competition in Japan, where young women compete in an unusual form of sumo wrestling, alongside the extraordinary scarification rituals of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. Elsewhere, the series followed the Jain tradition of renunciation in India, the elaborate preparations surrounding Senegalese wrestling and the intense physical training undertaken by Taiwanese military recruits.

The production also travelled to Burning Man in Nevada, where an enormous temporary community creates its own rituals and traditions in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, and to ceremonies in Greenland, Australia and Taiwan. The contrast between these cultures became one of the series' central strengths: while the rituals themselves could appear radically different, the underlying motivations — belonging, identity, transition, belief and community — were recognisable across cultures.

The series received strong contemporary critical attention. The Guardian described the opening film as a “stunning film”, while TV Times awarded the final episode five stars. The programme also attracted an average UK audience of approximately 896,000 viewers, with the final film reaching around 820,000 viewers on BBC Two.

For Anne Sommerfield, working as Edit Producer brought together the editorial demands of a complex international production with the challenge of shaping very different cultural stories into a coherent and accessible series. The result was a visually ambitious exploration of the rituals that distinguish human societies while connecting them through experiences shared across cultures.