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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."
David Attenborough in his television series 'Life In Cold Blood'. Photograph: BBC/PA
 
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".
Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian
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