At the age of 82 Sir David Attenborough is still looking for adventure. So
later this year he will pack his thermals and head back to Antarctica to see
how places he has visited in the past have been affected by global warming.
He is not as mobile as he was but, as he points out: “I'm not walking there, I
tell you. In the polar regions it's a doddle if you've got all the gear. Got
all the gear, no problem.” Then, with the immaculate timing that he has
developed over decades of yarn-spinning, he adds: “Until something goes
wrong. If you are walking around on a glacier near the South Pole and you
lose a glove...” pause for effect... “you've probably lost your hand. It's a
serious business.” But just in case anyone should think that he is taking
his endeavours too seriously, he notes: “If you've got an aged presenter you
have a back-up of really tough, hairy-chested, string-vest men. If he drops
his glove they've got another one.”
Sir David continues to be the most popular, crowd-pleasing wildlife expert and
this year will be a good one for sightings. When he is not off filming in
Antarctica for a future project, he will be working on his script for an
autumn blockbuster series, Life. He has narrated next month's BBC One series
Nature's Great Events. And the highlight of the BBC's coverage of the 200th
anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of
publication of On the Origin of Species (broadcast next week) is an
Attenborough one-hour special, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life.
But if Sir David retains his position as the alpha male of natural history
documentary-making, he no longer laps the globe on long filming trips, for
one simple reason. “A big series is a three or four-year project,” he
explains cheerfully. “If you are a network controller - and I've been one -
and someone comes along and says ‘I have a terrific idea for a 13-part
series, it will cost you ten million quid and when I'm finished I'll be 86,'
what do you say?” So these days he travels less and does shorter programmes.
He has slowly mutated, too, into a more openly opinionated figure. He was once
renowned for his diplomacy, carefully sidestepping controversy. It took him
until recently to make his first programme about global warming, after
finally becoming convinced of mankind's role.
Today, however, sitting in the living room of his fine - but not grand - home
on Richmond Hill, southwest London, surrounded by tribal art and piles of
books, he is very happy to sound off. The subjects that chiefly exercise him
are the way we are treating a planet that he knows better than probably
anyone else who inhabits it, and what he sees as the “disgrace” of the rise
in belief in creationism.
The Tree of Life is one of Sir David's most personal programmes. It is the
“fabuloso” story of how Darwin changed “the way we see the world and our
place in it”. Sir David leads the viewer gently through Darwin's journey to
the Galápagos Islands and his observations in his garden at Down House in
Kent that formed his theory of natural selection; that all life forms
originated from a common simple beginning and evolved through mutations that
created new species and led to the extinction of others over hundreds of
millions of years.
We are taken on Sir David's own journey, too, as he returns to the rocks where
he hunted for fossils as a child in Leicestershire, and shows us his own
well-thumbed copy of Darwin's work, which he encountered for the first time
at 18. “I didn't read it cover to cover. I read chapters. But it is very
readable.” He starts quoting the exquisite conclusion to the book, which
describes “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds...”
The book didn't transform his life because he was already aware of evolution.
“I rather wish I'd been brought up a creationist who had a Damascene moment:
‘Yes! Now I see it.' But it always seemed clear that we were related to
monkeys.”
Darwin wasn't exactly his hero - “hero somehow implies somebody with a sword
having a battle” - but “he was the epitome of wisdom. You knew he had the
answer to most things.”
Darwin's theory shocked and appalled a Victorian world in which almost
everyone believed that God micro-managed the Universe, creating each
species. What thrills Attenborough is that Darwin's theory is being
bolstered by modern science of which Darwin had no inkling, such as
genetics. “DNA happened after I left university!” he exclaims. “I walked
past the lab daily but Crick and Watson hadn't done it then. The recent
proof of these things is so exciting.” He loves the fact that “there's an
awful lot about evolution that we don't understand” and that there are whole
university departments churning out new research.
He believes that Darwin changed the world in a way very few others have done.
“Copernicus, perhaps. The Sun becoming the centre of the solar system.
That's fairly life-changing.” I say that to the layman it is still quite
hard to get your head round evolution. “The theory that the first woman was
made out of the rib of Adam - now that is quite a difficult one to believe,”
he counters.
Of course, Darwin does not theorise on the creation of the Universe, and many
Christians have made their peace with him. “The Pope has. The Archbishop of
Canterbury has. They all say , ‘Yes, of course, the Book of Genesis is only
a myth, a creation myth. Come on, grow up'. That's what civilised religious
people say.”
His beef is with those who want to teach creationism or its offshoot
“intelligent design”. A recent survey found that a quarter of science
teachers in state schools believe that creationism should be taught
alongside evolution in science lessons. “That is terrible. That is really
terrible,” says Attenborough. Richard Dawkins has said that it is a national
disgrace. “I don't know about national; it's a human disgrace that you don't
recognise the difference between these things,” says Attenborough.
“People write to me that evolution is only a theory. Well, it is not a theory.
Evolution is as solid a historical fact as you could conceive. Evidence from
every quarter. What is a theory is whether natural selection is the
mechanism and the only mechanism. That is a theory. But the historical
reality that dinosaurs led to birds and mammals produced whales, that's not
theory.” He concludes this programme with the truth he takes from Darwin:
“We are not apart from the natural world, we do not have dominion over it.
We are subject to its laws and processes as are all other animals on earth -
to which, indeed, we are related.”
We are flouting the evolutionary rules through our over-exploitation of land
and through the astonishing growth in population, which has trebled since he
started making programmes. His view of the future of the planet is fairly
bleak. “I am pessimistic. We are plainly being silly. The human race is
condemning, by its own behaviour, whole populations to famine. Global
warming is going to cause the same sort of thing.” He hasn't had to make
drastic changes to his personal life to help the fight against global
warming. He only ever flew on planes for work anyway. “I don't have two bars
on the fire. I have one,” he says, pointing at the little plug-in heater in
the room. He hopes to do his bit by keeping an increasingly urbanised world
“in touch with the realities of the natural world so they recognise that we
are part of it and involved with it. There are people who don't see a wild
thing unless it's a pigeon.”
Attenborough's great gifts are his ability to explain tricky stuff to science
dunderheads, like the one sitting across from him, and to communicate
boundless enthusiasm for his subject. One of the most extraordinary
statistics in his programme is that estimates of the numbers of varieties of
life range from six million to 100 million.
“Oh yes!” says Attenborough, delighted by the prospect of the unknown. “I can
find you a new species without any problem at all. Take you to the
rainforest and spend three or four days just scooping up insects.
“The difficulty is not finding the species, it's finding the one man who
specialises in thrips or whatever, who can tell you that it's a different
thing. Taxonomy is unfashionable.” Would a part of him have liked to be an
academic scientist? “I wouldn't have been good enough,” he says,
preposterously. He doesn't think he would have had the required dedication
and appetite for drudgery.
He always thought that he would be a scientist but took his degree in natural
science at Cambridge before national service. By the time he was finished in
the Navy he wanted to get married and didn't fancy living on a student grant
any longer. It seems like good thing thing for him, and certainly for us,
that he remained a generalist, seeking out all life on earth for the benefit
of armchair explorers.
When Michael Parkinson retired last year he called Attenborough “the greatest
broadcaster of all time”. Attenborough laughs. But it must be nice to hear
things like that, mustn't it? “Well, it would if I believed them.”
There is a lot of talk about who, of the BBC's other natural history
presenters, will be his successor as the dominant silverback. “Bags of
people could do it,” he insists, then adds that few people want to do
programmes like his because he doesn't do “personality shows”. I think he is
being a bit disingenuous here. While he does not allow himself to steal the
show from the animals, he is a legendary performer in front of the cameras,
whether being cuddled by mountain gorillas or spat at by a cobra. People
like to see him presenting. “Aw, not that much,” he grimaces.
He is much happier talking about those he works with at the Natural History
Unit, especially Justine Evans, the fearless camerawoman with whom I once
went on a shoot, whose tree-climbing skills Attenborough admires. “Isn't
Justine a winner?” he murmurs. “I adore Justine. Phew.”
The title of his Darwin programme came from the diagram that Darwin sketched,
resembling a family tree, representing the way in which species evolve and
die out over aeons. Of those branches that ended in dead ends, representing
extinction, what would he most like to have seen continue, so he could have
witnessed the species?
“It's obviously a cliché but it would have been so thrilling to have seen any
of the dinosaurs.” Of those species currently in existence that he hasn't
seen, the golden snub-nosed monkey from western China and the giant squid
are high on his wish-list. But the latter “is a deep-sea thing and my
chances of getting down there are nil”. If he had to save just one species
from reaching a dead end on Darwin's diagram, what would it be? Wrong
question. Trying to save a single animal “we now know is a very shallow
view”. You have to save environments - complex webs of plants, insects,
birds, mammals - “because you can argue that a mountain gorilla is not
really a mountain gorilla if you put it in a concrete pit.” He has come some
way from the start of his career, collecting animals for Zoo Quest.
He reaches behind the sofa, where a shelf holds lots of fossils, and
challenges me to identify a chunk of something. No idea. “Half the backbone
of a Pleiosaur.” He picks up another. “Ichthyosaur poo. Every good home
should have some. What do you do when the conversation flags?”
Attenborough lives alone since his wife, Jane, died in 1997. His daughter,
Susan, spends part of each week with him. His brother Dickie, or Lord
Attenborough, who lives near by in Richmond, is recovering in hospital after
a fall that left him in a coma for a while. “He's slowly improving. When
you're 85 that sort of injury takes a while.”
We return to cheerier subjects, such as Antarctica. He is very excited at the
prospect of seeing emperor penguins. So there are things out there that he
is still willing to risk losing a hand to see? “Not 'alf.”
Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, BBC One, 9pm, Sunday, February 1;
Nature's Great Events is due to be screened later in February.
Sir David Attenborough's CV
1926: Born in London, second of three sons (brothers are Richard and John)
1944: Graduates in Natural Science from Cambridge, and studies anthropology at
the London School of Economics
1947: Called up for National Service in the Royal Navy
1950: Marries Jane Oriel
1951: First child, Robert, is born, followed by a daughter, Susan, a year
later
1952: Joins the BBC as a producer and makes his first series, The Pattern of
Animals, featuring the naturalist Sir Julian Huxley
1961: A newly discovered species of mammal, thought to have existed around the
time of the dinosaurs, is named Attenborough's echidna
1965: Becomes controller of BBC2 and oversees the introduction of colour TV
1969: Made director of programmes for BBC1and BBC2
1973: Turns down job of BBC Director-General and returns to making programmes
1979: An estimated 500 million people tune in to the landmark series Life on
Earth, featuring the now famous footage of Attenborough sitting with
mountain gorillas in Rwanda. This is followed by The Living Planet in 1984
and The Trials of Life in 1990
1985: Knighted
1997: His wife dies of a brain haemorrhage while he is filming The Life of
Birds
2000 - 2006: Films such as State of the Planet, The Blue Planet and Planet
Earth look at the impact of humans on the environment
2008: Sir David announces that Life in Cold Blood, to be shown in 2008, will
be his last major television series
