News/Media/Television
A natural phenomenon
Tonight, after 54 fabulous years of globetrotting for wildlife, David Attenborough bows out. What made him so great? And who can take his place?
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Stuart Jefferies
The Guardian
March 3, 2008
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David Attenborough in his television series 'Life In Cold Blood'.
Photograph: BBC/PA
When David Attenborough started out in TV 54 years ago, he came up with an idea for a series that today would get him thrown out of the BBC and lynched by animal activists. "We decided," he recalled recently, "we would go out into the wild to capture animals and bring them back to London Zoo."
Zoo Quest lasted from 1954 to 1964, a magical, if in hindsight indefensible, decade of programming. "We walked into valleys where no European had been before," Attenborough said. "It was an extraordinary time." Lemurs and birds of paradise had never been on TV, gorillas hadn't been filmed through the mist, controllers hadn't yet realised what meerkats could do for audience share. "It was a very different time," says Miles Barton, Attenborough's producer on several series, including his current one, Life in Cold Blood. "In the US, there had already been big game TV shows where hunters shot at animals - in a very literal sense. So Zoo Quest was not so very wild."
The world, and natural history programmes, have changed unimaginably since then - as has Attenborough's attitude towards the genre. Now he knows that responsible zoos breed their animals, aware of dwindling stocks in the wild. And if Zoo Quest had a successor today, it would be called Zoo Idol. Viewers would vote on which chipmunk to airlift to safety and which one to leave to the jungle's hungry rattlesnakes. Only the cutest would survive.
Tonight, 54 years of Attenborough globetrotting come to an end, with the final instalment of Life in Cold Blood. He will continue to make TV programmes (including a series about Darwin), but his days of going on location, of getting urinated on by birds, pooed on by bats or having a Mozambican cobra spit venom in his eye, are over. Attenborough will never whisper from the bushes again.
So what are we left with? Half a century of lovely memories, ones we can meander through on DVD or, shortly, download from online BBC archives. As Neil Nightingale, head of the BBC's Natural History Unit, says, Attenborough has given us an extraordinarily complete picture of the natural world. "He has done it all really," agrees Alistair Fothergill, the producer-director who worked with Attenborough on The Blue Planet. "He did evolution with Life on Earth [the 13-part 1979 series watched by 500 million people worldwide]. He did ecology five years later with The Living World. He did ethology with The Trials of Life in 1990. And after that, he did plants, birds, mammals, marine life, reptiles and amphibians. It's an amazing record of a disappearing world."
And what memories! In Patagonia during the filming of Life of Birds, Attenborough banged rocks on a tree deep in woodpecker territory. In a moment of pure magic, a huge Magellanic woodpecker flew in, convinced there was a rival bird on his turf, and did some loud pecking of his own. Attenborough hid (look it up on YouTube). Then there was the chimp hunt: chimpanzees hunting colobus monkeys through the Ivory Coast rainforest. Attenborough delivered a breathless commentary as he and crew, camera juddering, scampered behind. After the kill, the female chimps let out a chillingly exultant chorus of whoops and screams. Attenborough recalled those screams as "terrifying - just like the tricoteuses at the tumbrels. The whole scene is burnt into my mind." And into ours.
Miles Barton believes Attenborough's best moment came when he had to deliver a piece over the sound of screeching lorikeets: "I was there when he did it. He holds up this bowl of nectar, and they descend on him, looking like stripey ice lollies. There are hundreds of them, squawking and digging their sharp claws into him. The noise is deafening, but he carries on yelling the commentary like a trooper."
Attenborough has been amazingly lucky in the timing of his career. "In the whole of history, nobody has seen as much of the natural world," reckons Fothergill. "Nor perhaps will anybody again - because of the damage that has been done to it since the second world war. When he did Zoo Quest, he went to Komodo, and it involved a long boat trip. Now a flight lands there every few hours. Scheduled air travel made his career possible. Before, there was no way anyone could start a programme in Australia and end it in Canada, but he did. That's what made series like Life On Earth so groundbreaking."
Attenborough is aware of the paradox at the heart of his work's impact: "People know more about animals today than they ever have, even though they are less in touch with [the natural world] than they ever have been." In the course of his career, the planet's population has more than tripled: just over 2 billion in 1954 to more than 6.5 billion now. For Neil Nightingale, the rampant urbanisation of the world (more than half of us now live in cities) has made Attenborough's work even more crucial. "That role of keeping a connection with nature has fallen to David, principally. TV has been much more powerful than books or film in this. I don't think it's absurd to say that his work contributed to the rise of the environmental movement. He made us care about the natural world."
For Fothergill, Attenborough has been able to perform the tasks of educating, informing and entertaining in the Reithian way that the BBC set out to do. "If you got into a taxi the morning after The Trials of Life, you'd have the driver go, 'Cor blimey guv, did you see that killer whale pouncing on a colony of sea lions on a Patagonian beach on the telly last night?' And you'd also see applications to Southampton University marine biology department rise because of The Blue Planet. If you can do both those things, you have every reason to be proud. That's really public service broadcasting."
Many would argue that the Reithian ethos that underpinned Attenborough's series - as well as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man - is now dead. Barton disagrees: "Yes, there have been and will be bad natural history programmes, where presenters try to become the stars of the show by putting themselves in danger of shark attack or whatever, but the ethos David stands for is still there." He points to a new Natural History Unit series, Frozen Planet, and another called, boldly, Life. "Natural history programming has diversified. Who'd have thought Springwatch would become the second most viewed programme on BBC2 after Top Gear? It can't stay still if it's to survive."
The end of Attenborough's travels marks the end of an era in many ways - but the most important is perhaps this: who but Attenborough would have the clout to ensure that BBC1 devote an entire hour of its evening schedule not just to the furry cuties of the animal kingdom, nor to the narcissism of self-serving presenters, but to some ugly if diverting life forms? "One key thing he did was to create an audience for creepy-crawlies and scaly things, the less apparently charismatic animals," says Barton. "It's one of his most unlikely feats."
So who will fill Attenborough's safari jacket? "When I was made head of the Natural History Unit in 1992," says Fothergill, "one of the objectives John Birt set me was to find the new Attenborough. I said to David, 'I'm not even bothering to look.' He is irreplaceable".
· The last episode of Life in Cold Blood is on BBC1 tonight.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
