INTERVIEW:Last week Sir David Attenborough, consummate broadcaster, communicator and natural historian, was in Dublin to receive an honorary degree from TCD. At 82, he is off to revisit the Antartic in the new year because of global warming. "It is the place where if something goes wrong, it goes very wrong," writes Eileen Battersby
HE HAS EXPLORED the planet; he has walked through tropical rainforests, peered through jungle grasses watching elephants at rest; engaged with mountain gorillas in Rwanda. He has tensed against the vicious winds of Antarctica, waded in mangrove swamps and investigated the mysterious depths of the ocean; acknowledged the immensity of the blue whale, traced the determined paths of insects and revealed the opportunistic tactics used by far from passive plants in recruiting birds and animals to despatch their seeds. He has witnessed the glories of the natural world, its tenacity and its cruelty. For anyone who has seen his superlative programmes, which are a form of high art, he is a magician possessed of all the answers and more importantly, an abiding sense of wonder. In our age of cynicism, he represents old-style decency teamed with modern technology and an irresistible subject.
Sir David Attenborough, the good-natured recipient of yet another honorary degree, this time from Trinity College Dublin, says he is a lucky man. "I'm been able to follow my passions and it's been described as a job." For the rest of us he is a hero. You could see it in the faces of the various individuals standing around a stairwell in Trinity as one photographer choreographed a group picture with men and women robed up in their gowns. The other graduates and doctoral recipients looked at Attenborough clutching his parchment as he joined in the communal smile for the camera.
College staff and parents looked on, nudges were exchanged. A woman's voice pleaded: "Give me something, I want his autograph. Have you a pen?" Few people inspire the level of goodwill that Attenborough evokes. He has brought us on amazing journeys, he has given us the natural world. He is a man who through his life's work has made an immense contribution to mankind.
As we are led into a comfortable sittingroom off the Dining Hall, The Irish Timesphotographer whispers: "I just want to tell how great he is, how do I photograph my hero?" What can you add to that? Except, perhaps as I whisper back, "how do I interview my hero?" without appearing as a gushing fan - which I am. Luckily Attenborough is accepting the offer of a glass of wine and doesn't seem to overhear our furtive exchange. He would laugh heartily at our hero worship. This blunt, good-natured, very English Englishman with the marvellously emphatic Brief Encounter voice, the most reassuring sound most of us will ever hear, is practical, direct, has a quick sense of humour, and is a very talented mimic with a range of comic facial expressions.
Like a fly wandering into a spider's web, I rather stupidly remark that he has seen all the wonders of the world, the sunsets in the desert . . . the . . . to which Attenborough immediately announces in a mock Cockney accent, "Have I seen sunsets!" but quickly follows this gag with a more neutral admission that diving off a coral reef is, indeed, unforgettable. Aware that the winter solstice is approaching, he says: "And I've never been to Newgrange. I want to see that." Asked to describe himself, he makes no claims to science. "I'm involved in the media, in information, just as you are. It's all down to the wonderful cameramen. We have people who can charm spiders; people who can make spiders go out on that web and catch the fly. We are fortunate, we live in a time when television is the most powerful medium we have and we use it. I just go out there and talk."
He does a great deal more than that. Attenborough, a widower and father of two, is an inspired and inspiring communicator and a gifted writer; he has opened our eyes, our minds. He doesn't see himself as an educator but points out "nothing is of any real use unless we learn something. Entertainment's all very well but it's better if we discover something from it. Dickens tells wonderful stories but there's a lot more to him than that; look at what he shows us about human nature. You can entertain and inform." As he sits on the sofa and pulls at his sock, conscious of the photographer but ready to take a question and tease it, unwrap it, push it several directions, those famous lines from Blake's Auguries of Innocence keep running through my mind: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour."
Attenborough's pleasure in his work is without guile. There is no ego, no self-importance. Throughout his extraordinary career, he has avoided polemic; he does not make campaigning programmes. "I think I tried to present the information in a 'well this is the way it is' sort of way. But no I'm not a natural optimist, I don't think I ever was, and who could be now? The planet is clearly in trouble. Over-population. There are too many of us and we all want our cars, our children, our houses, our heating. You know in the time I've been doing this - what, 50 years, 54 years, doesn't seem that long, seems like yesterday, or only the day before - there are three times as many of us on the planet." He gives his famous "well what do you make of that" look and allows the fact to sink in. Attenborough makes good use of pauses. "It's not possible; the planet cannot sustain it. We have to make decisions, and no one wants to take a smaller share." His practicality underlines everything he says. He has never sentimentalised the natural world. "I don't think you should. I suppose for so many people it has never been part of their lives. The world has changed. Now, more than 50 per cent of the world's population are urbanised. Many people have never seen animals. Animals are not part of their experience." Yet his programmes have brought the natural world into our living rooms.
It is easy to sense that Attenborough, at a lively 82, enjoys playing down his achievement probably because he knows exactly how monumental it is but he is not going to say that. He took a degree in natural science at Cambridge and has never lost touch with his subject; he reads the journals, has a good library and, true to that established English tradition of natural history collecting, owns a specimen collection that would cause most career scientists to expire with envy. Who else but David Attenborough could take a piece of Baltic amber that he had been given as a 12-year-old boy by a wartime refugee and trace its history through 40 million years, as he did in a fascinating programme The Amber Time Machine (2004),which explores the mysteries and answers contained in amber, pine resin, a beautiful "substance of wonder" capable of suspending insects in time.
Although part of the "end global warming" lobby, he is wary of making soundbite statements; it has never been his style. He is opinionated but not dogmatic. But he must have noticed the destruction, the changes. "Of course but when I go to film a part of the tropical rainforest, I'm not going to go to a bit that has already been destroyed." His remark reads sharper than it sounded but he was making the point that he doesn't make sensationalised disaster movies, although he has been criticised for at times showing the violence of the natural world. But then survival is often ugly.
And, as I remember from our previous interview almost 14 years ago in the Europa Hotel in Belfast, for the book of the series, The Private Life of Plants, he is not only not all that interested in talking about his life, he just doesn't. Asking him to speak about himself is like asking Roger Bannister to describe the first sub-four-minute mile. Just as Bannister remarked to me, "that race was a long time ago", Attenborough says, "What child is not interested in the natural world?" before conceding that many children nowadays are more drawn to PlayStations. He is the man who said to me of his elder sibling, Richard, "I have a brother an actor".
The young David Attenborough began collecting fossils when he was a schoolboy growing up around Leicester. He was born in 1926 and had a wartime childhood. Many of the family holidays were spent in Wales and the natural world preoccupied him. A book he read when he was nine left him with a boyhood ambition. At the time I first met him, he was about to fulfil it - he was preparing to travel to New Guinea to film the birds of paradise. I remind him. Attenborough smiles. Although he went on to make an incredible series, The Life of Birds, the film Attenborough in Paradise was special. He had read The Malay Archipelagoby Alfred Russel Wallace, a colleague of Darwin's. "I was nine, and he, Wallace, was only the second European to see a bird of paradise in the wild; a Frenchman, René Lesson had been there before him. But Wallace was the first to see the birds' display. There's a full page engraving in his book showing nine of these birds flaunting their plumes in the crown of a tree." The male birds engage in the most elaborate seduction routines which include displaying their beautiful plumage and even dancing in order to attract the females. The actual sex act is so quick you'd miss it if you blinked. "There are about 40 species; and most them live in New Guinea, it is a huge island, just south of the equator and more than a 1,000 miles long." Most of it is covered in dense rainforest and the absence of mammals makes it possible for some of the birds to display on the ground without fear of attack.
There are difficulties aside from the rain and the mosquitoes; most of the birds display only at dawn, which makes filming tricky. The 1995 trip was not his first attempt. He had gone there a couple of times in the 1950s and everything had gone wrong. It was also upsetting to see the plumes only as part of the ceremonial headdress of the natives - since the 16th century, millions of birds of paradise have been slaughtered for their magnificent plumage. Attenborough's joy at seeing the live birds was, he says, "such a thrill". His fascination with birds is evident throughout his work and although he says that the camera "isn't supposed to focus on the presenter's face", his crew had made effective use of his responses as well as his idiosyncratic angular gestures.
Still it is interesting that the man most immediately associated with wildlife and natural history documentaries is also acknowledged as a pioneer of colour television. Attenborough joined the fledgling BBC television service in 1952, aged 26, after serving with the Royal Navy as a navigational officer. He had also worked briefly in publishing. But the BBC, having originally turned down his application for a radio job, asked him whether he would consider television. He did, and was soon involved in live programmes, "in black and white". He was involved with Zoo Quest, a programme for which animals were brought into the studio by a zookeeper and discussed. One day the zoo man fell ill and Attenborough stood in. The show and Attenborough quickly acquired a following. Soon it outgrew the studio, and he went to Africa. All of this went well, so he suggested doing a series of programmes about England. But ironically, considering what was to follow, BBC Bristol had already decided it was going to do a series - and not with Attenborough. He was stuck with Africa.
Of the many strengths he brings to his programmes, for which he writes the scripts and later the books, is his multidisciplinary overview. He soon developed an anthropological approach which is particularly obvious in The First Eden(1987), his outstanding study of the Mediterranean. It was not by chance. In 1965, he offered his first resignation to the BBC and set off to the London School of Economics to pursue a post-graduate course in anthropology. But he was by then approaching 40 and aware of being much older than his fellow students. He returned to the BBC to head a revolution, the introduction of colour television to Britain, which was regarded with some apprehension as it had already proven unimpressive in the US. Attenborough was appointed head of BBC2, and well before he became the face of outstanding wildlife and natural history programmes, he was the man who decided snooker was made for colour television. It was he who masterminded Kenneth Clarke's art history series Civilisation and the Polish scientist Jacob Bronowski's seminal 13-part classic The Ascent of Man, which in itself drew on that distinctive overview approach.
Television was acquiring a new respect. Meanwhile, Attenborough was running both channels and had become a major player, but he wasn't happy and longed to return to making wildlife programmes. By 1979 with the launch of Life on Earth, which he wrote and presented, he had begun what was to be a life's vocation. That first series was a comprehensive survey of the animal kingdom, a natural history. It could almost be described as conventional by Attenborough's subsequent standards. Yet Life on Earth, which began with Darwin, captured the imagination. I can remember watching with my best friend Sophie Kiang, who went on to become a scientist. We became obsessed with the natural world and still are. Attenborough's approach would evolve along with the ever-improving technology.
The Living Planet, a portrait of the earth, followed in 1984 and it explained the geology and evolution of the individual habitats. The books were also appearing. The world praises Attenborough the sympathetic presenter in the familiar blue shirts and khaki trousers, but it is equally important for Attenborough the writer to be applauded. His television scripts are precise and brilliantly pitched to the spoken word as well as moving images, while the accompanying books require a different style of writing and are even more impressive. He completed the trilogy in 1990 with The Trials of Life, the powerful, most dramatic element. Through this series, he explored the struggle for birth and for subsequent survival. It is often visually devastating, it neither sentimentalises nor idealises; its moments of brutality convey the harsh reality of what survival requires.
Yet before he completed the trilogy, he wrote The First Eden. It tends to be the book that many Attenborough fans don't have. Naturally, it was the one this fan brought to Trinity during this interview.. He seems pleased to see the book and holds the copy in his hands, describing it as a project. "I decided I needed some time away from jungles and as the Mediterranean is the oldest humanised landscape in the world and the one upon which man has left his greatest and most continuous impact on the environment, I set off to do it and really enjoyed the experience." It is a wonderful book, rich in history and showing a profound grasp of the competing civilisations such as the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks and the Arabs, who rose and fell throughout the territory which was changed more by man than by the [Mediterranean] Sea itself.
Interestingly, the text reveals the more cautionary side of Attenborough the reluctant campaigner. "In 1972, the ecological health of the Mediterranean basin seemed to have reached crisis point. The catches from fishing were shrinking. The beaches that brought such wealth from tourists were polluted with refuse and raw sewage. The lands were becoming more and more barren. It looked as though civilised man had, after a mere 3,000 years, finally fouled his own nest. Split by ancient religious and philosophical antipathies, divided by economic circumstances, with some of the richest countries facing on the opposite side of the [Mediterranean] Sea some of the poorest, it seemed that the chances of a united attitude and agreed policies were so slim as to be almost non-existent. But without such an agreement, the accelerating process of pollution and destruction would continue and all would be lost." He goes on to mention the efforts of the United Nations Environment Programme and concludes "a start has been made".
But that was 1987; further environmental damage has been done to the entire planet. Has he, through his travels, encountered any people or race who seem better, more aware of looking after their environment? "No you can't say that, yes these people here are very good . . . it doesn't work that way because if you take a primitive tribe out of their environment which seems to be doing all right and bring them here - they will want the same things that everyone here has; the car, the so on etc. I've been with South American Indians, I've hunted with them. If, when they are passing under a tree and they see a piece of fruit up high, and they want it, they cut the whole tree down . . . that's how man acts." He doesn't preach, but he is direct. He has seen the planet; he has watched the animal kingdom and man.
The Private Life of Plants, which screened in 1995 and masterminded the use of time-lapse photography, certainly changed the popular perception of flora. No longer passive, here were giant maws, often poisonous, capable of eating insects and deliberately affixing pollen and seeds to browsing insects and passing animals. "I was delighted to get a letter from a professor of botany who told me applications had gone up three fold as a result of the series."
The Life of Mammalswas a highlight of 2002 and by now Attenborough, having narrated Planet Earth (2006), has contributed an outstanding library - including documentaries on insects and reptiles - of the finest natural history programmes ever made, from the English meadow to the Serengeti. "It's the cameramen; a great cameraman captures the miracle."
Standing in the Europa Hotel all those years ago Attenborough, when asked to name the most menacing place he had ever been, replied the Antarctic. And it was not because of the vast emptiness. Does he still feel the same? "Oh yes, it is the place that if something goes wrong, it goes very wrong. You there in all that wonderful warm gear, hot as toast, and like I told you before, lose your glove and oops, your hand falls off. It's as tough as that. And I'm going back there, to South Georgia, early next year, because of global warming."