Mt Attenborough
Wasn’t David Attenborough supposed to be slowing down after the completion last year of Life In Cold Blood? Didn’t I hear the dreaded R-word briefly mentioned? Evidently not. The day before we met, he and Prince William had opened the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum; a few days earlier he had been performing at the Last Night of the Proms. A boyish 83, Attenborough seems as busy as ever.
“I’m going to the Rocky Mountains and Newfoundland in two weeks’ time,” Attenborough tells me, “then to Morocco and Spain, then somewhere I can’t remember, and then to the Antarctic.” He is making programmes about pre-Cambrian fossils, overpopulation and the frozen planet. “Does work drive you, keep you going?” I ask. “It isn’t a question of driving,” he says, “I’m having fun.”
The next project to hit the screen is not, strictly speaking, his own. Life, a monumental 10-part series which has been four years in the making, was not authored by him. But he was asked to narrate it and act as a sort of midwife, seeing it safely into the world, as if his identification with such epic film-making is now so great that the public will accept no substitute.
Attenborough recoils at that and took some persuading to do this interview. “I don’t wish to suggest that I should take credit for it, and there’s a hell of a lot of credit going,” he says. “It belongs primarily with the cameramen and secondly with the directors, and lastly, and a very long way behind, with the narrator.” His contribution, he says, is narration and a bit of fiddling with the script to make it as precise as possible. He explains the secret of good narration? “Don’t use similes as you do if you’re writing. Words shouldn’t be there if they’re telling you what you can see. They should only be there to put across those details which are not visible to the viewer and which are essential to understand what’s going on.”
He sees this series as the successor to his own Life on Earth, made 30 years ago: perhaps less detailed as a scientific document, but an enormous leap forward in terms of the quality of the images. “The development of natural history filming over the past 30 years has been huge,” he says. “There are sequences in the deep sea that blew my mind, and animals I didn’t know existed 30 years ago, let alone filmed.”
Does it really still excite him after more than half a century of capturing life, the whole of life, on camera? Silly question. “A lot of this stuff is so spectacular and beautiful. People think I’ve filmed it, and I have to keep telling them I didn’t. There are some marvellous sequences, things which I wish I’d seen. The weedy sea dragon, for example, one of the most beautiful and astonishing, fantastic and amazing creatures in the world, and they’ve got a sequence of its courtship and a sequence of its breeding.”
There is a lot of blood and gore in Life: the film-makers show the centrality of killing in the great struggle to survive, indeed underscore it with a Hollywood-style soundtrack. Do we really need to see a penguin chick being flayed by a leopard seal, or a buffalo dying a long and painful death after being bitten and tracked by venomous Komodo dragons? Is this not animal porn?
“What you’ve just described is what goes on in the natural world,” says Attenborough when I suggest that the series has an unhealthy preoccupation with sex and death. “You are born, you get food, you mate, and you die. Do you say, ‘OK, we’ll pretend that the wildebeest, when it’s hunted by a lion, is not actually in pain; it’s just going to sleep and the lion’s just eating it. Anybody who watches a lion catch wildebeest knows that the poor wildebeest is being eaten alive, and if you hear its piteous cries they can keep you awake at night. That’s the nature of the world, so what are you going to do? Tell fairy stories? A woman once wrote to me, and said, ‘These natural history films cost a lot of money and you’d be much better off if that money was spent teaching lions to eat grass.’ ”
Won’t children watching be upset? That poor, brave little penguin chick out on its first swim. “Children are much less sensitive than you think they are. You ask children if they have a question, and they say, ‘Yeah, if it was a lion fighting a tiger, which would win? Children are quite tough.”
He rejects out of hand my suggestion that, with natural history film-making in recession, producers have to adopt a blood-and-gore mentality to get commissioned. “It isn’t true, it’s really not true,” he says, his voice lowering to that famous hush to suggest I have made an outlandish charge. “Fortunately, the BBC doesn’t think natural history programmes must necessarily compete with Strictly Come Dancing in terms of audience. The BBC says, ‘Make proper, responsible natural history programmes.’ ” Every other broadcaster in the world, he says, has closed its natural history unit. The BBC’s Bristol-based unit, despite some cutbacks, retains its breadth and confidence.
He even has some relatively kind words for Wildest Dreams, the reality-show-meets-natural-history-programme hybrid presented by Nick Knowles and spawned on BBC1 in the summer. “I didn’t watch it much, I have to say and it wasn’t a hell of a lot about natural history. But I would have thought, as an ex-network controller, that’s a perfectly valid line of scheduling. I think the BBC has a responsibility to explore all kinds of programme genres.”
We are talking at Attenborough’s largish house in Richmond, south-west London, where he has lived alone since the death of his wife Jane in 1997. He sprawls across an armchair, giving succinct answers, never ducking a question or even pausing much. You sense the formidable intellect which has underpinned his dual career: as a major player in the pioneering days of television – he was controller of BBC2 from 1965-69, then the BBC’s director of programmes; and as a maker and presenter of natural history films over more than half a century.
He would probably have gone on to be director-general of the BBC had he not, in 1972, opted to return to programme-making. Why did he forgo that gilded post? “I was not having as good a time as I used to have. I had a great time on BBC2, and enjoyed it hugely. I had a lot of interesting things to do, and when I became director of programmes I was in theory responsible for both networks. But that meant I was responsible for finance, engineering, firing people, [dealing with] politicians, and I was not having fun. The most fun I get is making programmes, so after four years of that I thought, ‘I’ve paid for the piano, the kids are educated, why don’t I have more fun?’ ” His idea of fun was to spend then next 30 years making landmark natural history series.
Despite his admiration for the natural history unit and his belief that, in this area at least, the BBC is not dumbing down, Attenborough worries about the state of television. “I think it’s in great trouble,” he says. Budgets and staff are being cut at commercial stations, and inevitably that is having a knock-on effect on the BBC, which is under pressure to “top slice” its income to subsidise public service broadcasting by its commercial rivals. Last year he made a speech attacking top slicing, and criticising the BBC for showing too many lifestyle shows. He rejects what he calls the “false antithesis” of education v entertainment, and says the best programmes do both. Porridge is his prime exhibit. “It entertained and educated, gave you insight into psychology and current affairs, and was the greatest programme we’ve ever seen.”
He doubts whether he would go into television if he were now setting out on his career. “I’d be looking into this question, which I simply don’t understand, of the refinements of blogging and twittering, and thinking about how one might do interesting things with it, because that’s where the growth and innovation is.”
Attenborough says that, at 83 and with the funerals of so many friends to attend, he inevitably considers his own mortality. I ask him whether he thinks he will be remembered. “It is of no consequence whether I’m remembered or not, except by my family I hope. But the programmes will live on.” In any case, this line of questioning quickly runs into the sand because in front of me is this gangling mass of irrepressible energy about to surge off to Newfoundland or some other other unlikely location. In an email to a colleague, I accidentally call him Mt Attenborough, rather than Mr Attenborough, and then realise how appropriate that is. It’s simply impossible to imagine the landscape without him.
← Authenticity in sport
The jockey's life →
