I know of three people who know that Emmylou Harris is the greatest female singer since Ella Fitzgerald — me, a bloke in Wallington and, to my amazement, David Attenborough. “Yes, yes,” he says, in that breathy, gorilla-charming voice, “absolutely.” He even knows and loves her performance of Love Hurts with Gram Parsons. Attenborough is a national institution, of course, but cool also? Awestruck, I ask him a question I thought I’d never ask: “What’s on your iPod?”
“Every major classical work since Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 — it’s a 45-gig iPod — all Beethoven symphonies, all Mahler and, yes, yes, Emmylou Harris.”
Out in the field, as he so often is, he spends the nights in tents listening to music. Before iPods changed everything, he took CDs, always including some demanding music he had never heard — say, Janacek quartets. In the darkness, he would reach for a CD and put it on, not knowing what it was. If he couldn’t stand what he heard, he would grope for another. But he allowed himself to do this only twice. The rule was that he must listen to the third CD. “I had to sit through it, that had to be it. It was a little game.”
He’s coming up to his 80th birthday. UKTV is running a big Attenborough fest, a sort of greatest hits. His voice has just accompanied the staggering visuals on Planet Earth, and he is about to go back on the road filming a series on amphibians and reptiles called Life in Cold Blood. He’s rather ashamed that this involves a few days in Mallorca, but there is a toad there with “rather interesting breeding habits”, and he will be in the more zoologically respectable Galapagos for his birthday on May 8 — “I’m rather pleased about that.” Isn’t he, er, getting a little old for this?
“It is more difficult — I can’t climb trees. The machine is creaking. I think if I went to a producer with a big series that I’d finish when I was 86, he’d say it was a lovely idea but perhaps I could do some little 10-minute thing. But I am reasonably spry. My legs don’t work quite as well as they should. My daughter comes in, as she puts it rather bluntly, ‘to muck him out’.” His house is in a quiet, narrow street near Richmond Park. It’s immediately obvious which one it is because of a fine tree fern in the front garden. “I adore tree ferns, so beautiful — as a child I saw them as the epitome of the tropics. That’s Dicksonia, lives in Tasmania. It can take 10 degrees of frost.” He has lived in the house since the early 1950s. His wife, Jane, died in 1997, sadly while Attenborough was in the field, and his two children had long since moved out, but he’s never considered leaving the family home. “It’s not an extravagant house, I’m not living in Blenheim Palace. Where was I going to go? Also, I’ve got a lot of junk of one kind or another.”
The “junk” I can see consists of spectacularly fine, carefully arranged tribal artefacts. He collects them as systematically as he arranges his music. “You can’t buy them out there any more. Anything that looks halfway decent is either a fake or illegal, and there are only a couple of galleries in London. But you can buy them in Paris and Amsterdam.”
Organised, enthusiastic, engaged with the world: it’s what you’d expect, it’s what you hear in the voice. But, in him, it’s also old-fashioned, because he has none of that inane self-indulgence that makes almost all his television successors so irritating and unwatchable. His age, you see, is crucial. He was born in 1926 and his boyhood was passed in the 1930s, a simpler, freer time. “In those days, if you were 10 years old, you could get on a bicycle and cycle all over Leicestershire and Rutland and watch birds and dragonflies. Boys couldn’t do that now. You’re not allowed to collect birds’ eggs or pick flowers. I know all the reasons why that should be, and I don’t dispute them. But I did those things because they were what natural scientists had done for hundreds of years — for classification, working out relationships. I would hate to think I am being kind of sentimental, but, looking back, there was some kind of idyll. But I am well aware that the countryside changes. Of course, there were half the number of people on earth when I was born.”
Such childhoods are not crushed by distraction. They also engender a certain tough-mindedness. Attenborough may watch the natural world in wonder, but never with sentimentality. I bring up the subject of the recent film March of the Penguins. It was dreadful — the whole thing not as good as five minutes’ output of BBC Bristol’s natural-history unit on a bad day. Worst of all, it crudely anthropomorphised and sentimentalised the behaviour of the emperor penguin. “Sentimentalising is anathema, as far as I am concerned. It leads you into ethical problems about violence and killing and eating meat. The whole world becomes topsy-turvy if you impose moralities that were evolved within human society onto what a blowfly or a parasite does.”
He points out that the sugary parable of love and loyalty in March of the Penguins was absurd because, once the male emperor gets rid of “that bloody egg” he’s been nurturing all winter, “he’s off and never sees the female again”. So what does he get when he watches such extraordinary dramas in the animal world? “A sense of wonder. I mean, internal sentiment is only one element of human life. There are lots of others, like agility, speed and looks. Also, the number of emotions it’s improper to moralise is not all that great. It’s not anthropomorphic to say that when an elephant has its ears out, lifts its trunk and trumpets, it’s angry. There are lots of emotions you can deduce from an animal’s behaviour that are correct. But when you start saying it’s feeling guilty or thinking of a loved one or mourning, you must be very careful of those feelings, that’s all.”
However, he does acknowledge that anthropomorphism is more justified among our closest relatives — notably gorillas, animals with which Attenborough will for ever be associated, thanks to that great scene where he cuddles up to a few in the jungle. “They look at us in the same sort of way we might be looking at them. I went back to my journal about that scene, and I remembered on that occasion that one of the females did put this huge finger in my mouth and looked at my teeth. Why, I have no idea. But it was amiable curiosity.”
The big hiatus in the career of Attenborough, our man in the wild, was, of course, the extraordinary period when he went into television management. In 1965, he became the first controller of BBC2. He had been thinking of going back to the LSE to study anthropology (his first degree had been natural history at Cambridge), but this opportunity was too good to miss. “If you’re a TV man, you’re not going to turn down an opportunity to spend £10m on a new network that nobody has yet decided what it is going to be used for.”
It was also a new network that few people could see, as it required a switchover from 405- to 625-line screens and was in colour. Like cycling through Rutland in a world of only three billion people, this freed Attenborough’s imagination. He commissioned Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. He also, amazingly, came close to commissioning Picasso to do the station logo and Stravinsky its musical sting. Picasso was on board, his fee being a colour TV, but, sadly, Stravinsky died. It couldn’t be done today: too elitist. He did four years at BBC2 and four years as director of programmes, then got back in the field, making series about animals, plants and wonder. “It was a thrill to be back, of course. Travelling around, having a great time, a band of brothers swanning around — like boy scouts, yes. But it’s also intellectually exciting, dealing with the problem of how you are going to handle this great pullulating mass out there and turn it into a story that people will want to know the end of.”
The shows he made were all masterpieces — Life on Earth, The Living Planet, The Trials of Life and many more. The British began to hear that voice, full of boyish passion, every time they looked at nature. It consoled and enthused. It came from a world devoid of contemporary cynicism and boredom. And yet, oddly, Attenborough came close to an appalling blunder that would have scarred his reputation for ever. He almost invented reality TV.
“About 10 years ago, I thought I really ought to do an anthropological series using exactly the same techniques for humans as I had on these other programmes. I started writing them up and, for example, there was one programme on territoriality. What I was going to do was take a really clapped-out car to Belgravia, somewhere where there are 18th-century houses right on the pavement, and quite legally park it opposite one — where I could hire a room in the house across. I was then going to film what the chap in this house would do. I reckon within a week he’d be slashing its tyres.” He eventually abandoned the plan on the grounds that it was “perfectly intolerable” not to tell people they were being filmed. Nothing now, of course, is “perfectly intolerable”: people queue up to be made to look idiots on TV. Happily, Attenborough had nothing to do with it.
He is, it hardly needs saying, a great man who holds a great belief — that the world is not ours to “plunder and exploit”. He believes in the absolute right of creatures to share this planet with us and in the high moral intuition that should spring from the wonder they inspire. Does he think his work has succeeded in disseminating that morality?
“Well, I suppose I wouldn’t express it like that. I think that television — not just me — has led people to realise the multiplicity, the beauty, the splendour of life. What does that mean? That means you have a respect for it and you care for it and give it some degree of importance, I think. If that amounts to saying it gives people the feeling that, morally, we ought to look after it, okay. But I haven’t preached morals.” The man is a wonder, a treasure. But, to be honest, he had me at Emmylou Harris.
A selection of Favourite Attenborough Moments is on UKTV Documentary at 5pm today. To vote for your own, go to www.uktvdocumentary.co.uk.
The result will be shown on May 7 at 7pm
