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Here is the news from the Empire: Young Atten-borough (district commissioner
material here, surely) is sitting out on the verandah of a long house in
the Borneo jungle. He has spent a day with the orang-utan after a two-week
upriver slog with the porters . . . it is raining damnably . . . the river
slips darkly by.

‘Suddenly I saw a canoe going like the clappers. You could see the spurts
of water from its paddles, chap at the back. I thought ‘he’s in a hurry’.
I saw he had a kind of flag thing in the bows, a stick with a white triangle.
To my amazement he took this flag thing from the front – he was wearing
nothing but a loin cloth – and he came running up shouting ‘tuan, tuan’.
I suddenly realised he had a message, I thought it must be a death back
home at least. But it was a message from Mary Adams (a BBC chieftain) and
it said ‘latest tests have shown it is imperative you use reflectors with
Kodachrome 2. Contact Harrisson, Sarawak Museum immediately!”

Thus we glimpse the BBC at its apogee. The tenacity of its public service
principles, the Livingstone-like pursuit of the unknown, the determination
to get the film back to base, the search for technical excellence, the devotion
of the general staff at any cost. But since this is David Attenborough we
get the ethnographic note as well: ‘I realised that the thing at the front
was a cleft stick, the first I’d seen. Nobody thinks about what it looks
like but obviously the Empire builders didn’t like messages stuffed in somebody’s
loin cloth, so they came in the cleft stick.’

This is the nearest Attenborough felt he came to Livingstone. I had
asked him whether he had seen more of the planet than any man alive, but
he said the astronauts must claim that. But he also made clear his affinity
at that time with the Victorians: on a New Guinea trip they’d had to walk
from dawn until the heavens opened each day. In the old days you could be
out of touch for weeks on end. These days, with aeroplanes for hire to trek
around the world it has become rather more mundane and distinctly more comfortable.

Sir David Attenborough Kt MVO CBE FRS is such an affable, voluble chap
you wonder how he got all those gongs and remained so much a human being.
Services to the public via television, of course, but also (as no member
of the BBC in the 1960s will ever forget) he was controller of BBC₂
and ultimately director of programmes before chucking it up and heading
back for the jungle (or the ice fields). In all he spent eight years in
the BBC’s stratosphere (the 6th floor) as a manager and there performed
his most creative act – rescuing BBC₂ from the wreckage of its
opening and making it, for a time at any rate, the best TV channel in the
world. If there are to be medals, that surely deserved one. It is also true
that behind the famous charm lurks an immensely tough, determined character.
Anyone who ever tried to sell him an unsound idea will testify to that.

He does not think much of himself as a manager and denies much administrative
ability. When reinventing BBC₂ he simply had a concept which
excited people: ‘They were delighted to work the way I suggested so they
forgave me all the cock-ups I made.’ He gave early encouragement to the
struggling Horizon and tried to alternate it with a programme on the biological
sciences (Horizon was supposed to do the physical sciences) but ‘when we
started something with Desmond Morris called Life which was doing very well,
Desmond wrote The Naked Ape, made a million pounds and decided to go and
live in Malta. That was that.’ Attenborough does not add that he, too, has
become a very rich man, some say a millionaire, through books such as The
Living Planet, Life on Earth and Trials of Life: when asked about it he
talks only of the immense contribution he has made to the Inland Revenue
over the years – rich men usually do.

While I suppose David is more familiar, he has a brother, Richard also
a knight, who has ascended to the top of his own greasy pole as actor and
film director. What on earth genetic strain produced two men of such splendour?
Two teachers, says David, two very good teachers, especially his father,
who was principal of University College, Leicester, which ran external degrees
for the University of London. David went to a very formal grammar school,
Wyggeston, where he learnt a lot by rote, and he was very good at science.
His father would not let him go to Cambridge unless he won a scholarship,
so he won a scholarship and went to Clare College, where he read natural
sciences (including zoology and geology) and took a two year wartime degree
course. He did his national service in the navy, where he became a navigating
officer and instructor: he did not go to sea much but occasionally they
would take a destroyer into the North Sea and then find their way back home.

Attenborough’s first stab at a career was as an editorial assistant
to a science publisher. He answered an ad for BBC radio, but failed to get
in. Radio at that time was mainstream, television only an absurd and gawky
fledgling in north London at Alexandra Palace. Television was to offer him
a job three times before he gave in and accepted. Practically everything
being done was being done for the first time and live – there was no videotape
and little film. The staff regularly made idiots of themselves – but they
also edged forward the boundaries of television inch by inch on very little
money – radio still got most of the licence fee. Attenborough, urged to
do something with a short story about a fishmonger written by William Sansom,
which had been bought but not used, had it choreographed to the rhythm of
the words, and danced.

A man from London Zoo, George Cansdale, brought animals up to the studio
and they were televised, hopefully before defecating on the floor. The enormous
popularity of animals did not escape Attenborough’s attention; a bizarre
couple called Armand and Michaela Dennis kept sending films from Africa
of paralysing formality about their adventures. But Philip Dorte, head of
television, had proclaimed that as long as he was around 16mm film would
never be used by the BBC. This blocked a lot of promising avenues because
you certainly couldn’t go into the jungle with equipment the size of 35mm
cameras. But Dorte went, and in came Charles Lagus, a cameraman of genius,
just back from Everest (Attenborough was just trying to get there) with
16mm equipment. Both men were consumed by the idea of filming animals in
the wild, a completely new type of television which Attenborough took very
seriously indeed, calling them in his Who’s Who entry zoological and ethnographic
filming expeditions: viewers knew them as Zoo Quest and watched, enchanted.
Lagus’s camera was superb for its day; it was clockwork driven and the film
came in 100-foot rolls.

Attenborough wrote vividly of his first trip: ‘I still recall, with
great clarity the shock of stepping out of the plane and into the muggy,
perfumed air of West Africa. It was like walking into a steam laundry. Moisture
hung in the atmosphere so heavily that my skin and shirt were soaked within
minutes. A hedge of hibiscus bordered the airport buildings. Sunbirds, glittering
with green and blue iridescence, played around it, darting from one scarlet
blossom to another, hanging on beating wings as they probed for the nectar
. . . Beside the hedge I trod on what appeared to be grass. To my astonishment,
the leaflets immediately folded themselves flat against the stem, transforming
green fronds into apparently bare twigs. It was sensitive mimosa . . . I
have had the luck to journey for months with the sole object of finding
and filming a rare creature that few people have seen in the wild, and to
gaze on the most marvellous spectacles that the wild places of the world
have to offer . . . ‘

From this alliance of hand, brain and eye, and sinewy physical toughness,
came superb images burning on the screen with all the larger-than-life dimensions
of the tropics: along with the almost naive sense of wonder borne on a nurturing
voice which took millions into worlds they could never tread themselves.

Attenborough points out that the BBC was taking no great risks with
the expeditions: they were costing little more than £1000 a throw:
beyond civilisation there are no greedy taxis or hungry hotels to gobble
up the BBC’s meagre travel allowances. Sierra Leone, New Guinea, Indonesia,
Paraguay, Madagascar, Borneo all received, year by year, the Attenborough
accolade. But what exactly constituted the treatment he devised? Freshness
and enthusiasm everybody knows: but there are quite a few fresh and enthusiastic
fools around television; these characteristics guarantee nothing by themselves.
What else? Erudition, without parading it; a love of facts in themselves,
of information and imparting it fresh and fast, and a love of all the manifestations
of life on Earth; a rehearsed spontaneity – the factual content has to be
well rehearsed however spontaneous it may appear on the screen. There is
also an actor’s guile and often an actor’s gesture in there as well. A gift
for handling the unexpected – you can’t rehearse animals and you have to
be prepared to follow where they may take you. There is no shame in acknowledging
all this; Attenborough is a fusion of all these things, who lives and breathes
as one of the most important and gifted science popularisers of the day.
He works with a firm hand and eye on the script: in the beginning is the
word, albeit with some description of the pictures which should turn up
in the sequence, and constant readiness to respond to the eccentricities
of animal behaviour. He denies there is much personal risk in the job –
you take steps to avoid those, even when consorting with gorillas. At the
end of the day there are ‘facts, which have an excitement, a beauty and
a thrill all their own’.

It was Huw Wheldon, then controller of programmes, who saw in Atten-borough
the man to save BBC₂ after its disastrous launch. He made Atten-borough
controller of BBC₂ with a brief to bring it to life. At the time
the channel was caught in a viscious circle: few of the most experienced
producers were willing to work for the channel because the audience size
was so poor; audiences were poor because there were no well-produced and
interesting programmes. So Wheldon set the BBC’s naturalist to capture an
audience. Things worked in Attenborough’s favour, he was popular personally,
colour was coming to BBC₂ and a lot more sets capable of receiving
the channel would be sold on that account. He asked the staff for programme
ideas especially in areas that were not already being covered. They responded
and the audience responded, agonisingly slowly at first, but respond they
did.

Out of this came a series which is arguably one of the greatest statements
of scientific humanism this century: The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski,
a 13-part series in colour. Attenborough takes little direct credit for
it. The government of the day, after shillyshallying, ordered that colour
TV should be shown on BBC₂ some time like a week next Thursday.
‘I sold it to journalists by saying that when you see colour it’s like the
difference between an old 78 and a modern LP record. But we badly needed
a showcase on film. I thought ‘why don’t we get all the most beautiful things
that human beings have ever created in Europe over the past 1000 years and
simply show them, which is a fairly simple-minded idea. We thought we’d
get the best guy, Kenneth Clark. Everybody said it would be a disaster –
‘who wants to see a few bloody pictures? Thirteen programmes, you must be
mad’.’ Out of the strife emerged the distinguished and very successful
series Civilisation, with Kenneth Clark as civiliser. All this was received
with much indignation in the science department. Its modish pessimism and
its refusal to include science as part of Civilisation seemed wilful and
arrogant. ‘Science came beating on the door and they produced the Bronowski
series, but it was the success of Civilisation which had opened up the way.’

Attenborough was installed as controller of BBC₂ just as
he had decided to resign to read a postgraduate degree, in anthropology
at the London School of Economics. ‘I had taken steps to avoid going into
administration and I wanted to learn anthropology.’ It was an excellent
deal for the BBC, but Attenborough had taken the precaution of writing into
his contract the option of making one film expedition every 18 months. ‘It
was perfectly obvious that if I was going to abandon what I was doing I
wanted to keep in touch with programme making. Technologically things were
changing every six months and I wanted to keep up with the latest innovations.

‘It paid off well in a very curious way. I had been doing my nut about
BBC costs, something we’ve always been very sensitive about, because the
shooting ratios (ratio of 16mm film exposed to the number of feet actually
used in the finished film) had shot up from 12:1 or 14:1 to over 30:1. I
didn’t understand it until I went out with a unit. New lenses put a premium
on the cameraman running his camera for far too long in-between takes, so
we were getting huge overshoots. It wasn’t the film used that mattered all
that much – the costs of every aspect of editing the extra material went
up through the roof. I simply said I would not tolerate ratios greater that
15:1.’

Whether or not he was impressed with this administrative stroke, Charles
Hill, the chairman of the BBC, next instructed Attenborough to be the director
of programmes – the overlord of BBC₁ and 2. He disliked this
job because it took him away from programme making (in much the way that
scientists move further and further from doing science the higher they climb
up departmental ladders) and into areas where he was dealing with management
methods, computerising the BBC and sacking people, which he hated. After
three years he resigned again to return to his travelling life. In doing
this he passed up the job of director general of the BBC. ‘I certainly did
not want to be, and it wasn’t a reason to stay.’

Set free, Attenborough returned to his first love, but it was now the
era of the big series on television and he cast his ideas in that expensive
and somewhat uncertain mould. Each series of 12 or 13 programmes (the most
convenient package for foreign sales) takes about three years to complete
– a big sacrifice if it turns out to be less than popular. Attenborough’s
have been extremely successful international productions. Life on Earth,
The Living Planet, The First Eden, Trials of Life embraced the big themes
of life and its nature on this planet. They have proved unique. Production
teams, researchers, camera operators and film editors have sacrificed no
small part of their working lives to series which have become a lexicon
of the earth and a great deal of what lives upon it. The programmes caught
the new wave of concern about what we are doing to the planet; environmental
issues are now one of Attenborough’s main concerns. The BBC Natural History
Unit in Bristol has been able to meet his specifications with its own unique
standards of professionalism. The result has been some of the finest work
done in this field.

The mechanisms for making each series begins with Attenborough alone
writing his scripts. ‘They are written by me on the basic proposition that
in any one programme the highest intellectual level will be about the first
term of the first year at university: fairly simple stuff. You decide in
a journalistic way to do a programme about birds, say, what is it about
them that makes them birds? You decide it is the feather. Once you get hold
of that rather simple idea you write a skeleton. What you do then is show
it to a bloody good ornithologist – I don’t mean birdwatcher – and you say
‘how about that?’ and he says, ‘Well; it’s OK but that stuff you’ve got
there for display – everybody knows that, but I know a chap who’s working
on so and so – they’ve never been filmed before and they’re much more exciting,
why don’t you film that – he’s still out there!’ so away you go!

‘If you are trying to construct an argument you have to write it out
and I write 30 to 40 pages of script, even to the extent of saying you want
an animal moving left to right across the screen. It doesn’t mean you’re
actually going to stick to that, but at least you’ve got something which
worked on paper and if you’re going to depart from it you know the extent
to which you’ve moved away from the argument and when and where you’re going
to come back to it. So you have a structure to work to. There is a decent
size team on this, not just ‘genius’ Attenborough. There are researchers
– very good researchers.

‘Such is the process of biological science by and large there’s a hell
of a lot of people out there watching troupes of macaque monkeys – or whatever
– and if you get in touch with them and say ‘Look what I want is an alpha
male doing his aggressive display’ and he says ‘Well, May, June, July, that’s
the time to do it. Group three have got a young aggressive male right in
its prime. Do you want the light behind you? I should come the second week
in June.’ You turn up and he’s there. It’s a tribute to the Natural History
Unit. You might think that someone who had spent 10 years sitting in appalling
conditions in the middle of the Sahara of some frightful jungle drenched
with rain and eaten by bugs, at the end of this appalling labour he’s discovered
just one thing, if someone turns up from the telly and says ‘would you mind
taking us to film’ he might say ‘push off, you come here . . . why should
I do that?’

‘To their eternal credit never once has anyone said that. They’ve always
said ‘delighted’. It might have something to do with the overall reputation
of the BBC. Of course you don’t ask bloody silly questions and you’ve read
all the papers beforehand. But it starts with me writing 13 scripts and
delivering them once a fortnight for the team to start work on them. That’s
six months work, and of course you may have to raise the finance and you
may need to co-produce with an overseas network.’

Is the day of the big series over, crucified by enormous costs? ‘I don’t
see why. They make money in terms of round the world viewing and in terms
of cassettes and they are shown three or four times here.’

I asked him what was his most memorable sequence – consorting with the
gorillas in the African jungle? ‘We did that for a purpose, to show how
important the opposition of thumb and forefinger is to us. Being allowed
to sit with them is a moving experience – in many ways they are like us,
they live in family groups like us and they live about as long as we do.’
He was particularly anxious to pay tribute to Dian Fossey who had habituated
them to humans and so allowed Attenborough to go in close. ‘We wouldn’t
have got within a hundred miles of them if she hadn’t been there for 10
years and come very close to them physically.’

Naturally Attenborough’s view of the world rates the human species as
its more destructive inhabitant. ‘We are part of a continuum but it is perfectly
clear that we are different philosophically and in terms of the responsibility
we have for this planet.’

I suggested that environmentalism had been guilty of overkill – the
Club of Rome was discredited because of its faulty calculations. ‘I don’t
think that’s at all true. There may have been excesses but they certainly
put the environmental cause on the map. Thirty years ago if we went into
Trafalgar Square and said ‘Stop killing whales because they are sensitive
creatures and have every right to live and there’s nothing we got from them
that we can’t get another way and they are a valuable part of the ecosystem’
people would have said of you – he’s one of them! But they don’t think that
way now.’

That day a Daily Telegraph headline had said: ‘Green issues get fifteen
minutes’ (at the G7 meeting). Wasn’t this a poor return for all the crusading?
‘Green issues would not have been within a thousand miles of G7 had it not
been for the Club of Rome and all kinds of others. Where I do agree with
you is that it would be a very great shame if every TV programme on natural
history always took the ecological line and always ended up saying ‘this
is wonderful but human beings are screwing it up’. That would be terrible.
I eschew that sort of thing because I believe it comes through in-between
the lines. There is a great place for drum bangers but if everything about
natural history was drum banging on that particular line it would be a disaster.’

I said I’d worked for four years with a large number of engineers and
scientists who said people like him were a break on progress and if you
would get out of the way the problems of the planet would be solved: ‘What
I’ve got to say to them is you’ve lost! But at the same time conservationists
haven’t got to be so silly as to see as bogeys everyone who is responsible
for our gross national product.’

Attenborough belongs to influential conservation bodies worldwide. But
he also regrets that children can’t collect from the countryside any more.
‘Legally if you pick up a jay’s feather you are breaking the law. I’m extremely
sad that we cannot allow people to collect birds’ eggs and butterflies,
but the law has found it so difficult to frame that people find it hard
even to collect fossils. I did a lot of it as a child – the urge to collect
is the mainstream which has driven a lot of naturalists.’

‘Concepts such as Gaia don’t impress me. Perhaps I should be more profound.
I just enjoy watching birds of paradise and chimps have a particular fascination
because of their nearness to us.’

Was he concerned about the future of the BBC in a more free-for-all
broadcasting climate after working for it, or with it, for 40 years? ‘I
don’t know why it is so different now. I suppose because the BBC was much
more of a citadel or battleship then, a large entity and you don’t feel
it’s a large entity now. At that time the BBC stood shoulder to shoulder
and represented a lot of people, interests and standards. And you were being
hit over the head by the government of the day and by the press and you
stood by and repelled boarders in the way that you don’t do now. In that
time you were on the bridge and it was not the moment when you said ‘I’m
going to get a little dinghy and row to the shore’.’

Lastly I asked, did it ever occur to him that for the past 30 or 40
years we had been wasting our time – pleasantly enough, perhaps – but were
all the programmes done in aid of science and technology by our generation
changing anything?. ‘I think the fact that kids are playing with computers
and are very good at it, I think the way the school curriculum has changed,
I think that scientific literacy has increased very substantially – not
anywhere near enough, but you are surprised sometimes: I got into a taxi
the other day and the driver said ‘Now about this selfish gene stuff . .
. ‘ I don’t think it’s true to say you’re wasting your time. But even if
you thought that, you would have no alternative but to go on doing it.’

Glyn Jones is a writer and broadcaster specialising in science and technology.