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West Australian
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Ocean with David Attenborough: Conservationist calls on countries to protect our waters to save our world
Sir David Attenborough turned 99 on Thursday, was feted by King Charles and presided over the London premiere of a stunning new movie that he hopes will force the United Nations to save Earth's oceans. Not a bad day for the world's most famous biologist. For someone who has spent his career describing the lifecycles of all creatures great and small, Attenborough is acutely aware of his own mortality. It's an immutable fact he leans into in his movie, Ocean with David Attenborough, to add even more weight to its urgent message. 'When I first saw the sea as a young boy, it was thought of as a vast wilderness to be tamed and mastered for the benefit of humanity,' he says in the film in that unmistakable voice. 'Now, as I approach the end of my life, we know the opposite is true. 'After living for nearly a hundred years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.' It's his sincere hope, and that of everyone attached to the film — produced with funding assistance from WA's Minderoo Pictures — that Ocean generates a veritable tsunami of support that flows into the United Nations Ocean Conference in June. It's there the nations of the world have what could be the last chance to vote on dramatic increases in marine conversation, before entire underwater ecosystems suffer catastrophic failure. 'This could be the moment of change,' Attenborough says in the film. 'Nearly every country on Earth has just agreed, on paper, to achieve this bare minimum and protect a third of the ocean. Together, we now face the challenge of making it happen.' Should it happen, it will further burnish the legacy of a man who has effectively become the human face of the natural world, tirelessly communicating wonders, fears and struggles on its behalf. And to think his first job application to the BBC in 1950, for a gig as a radio producer, was rejected. The consolation prize, however, was a job with the national broadcaster's nascent television department, where he found himself hosting the first series of Zoo Quest four years later. That show ran for a decade, and led to Attenborough's promotion into an administrative role at the BBC, where he spent a decade signing off on expenditure and commissioning shows by other people. He is erroneously credited with commissioning Monty Python's Flying Circus during that period – the honour goes to then-BBC1 controller Paul Fox – but Attenborough did greenlight Pot Black, a snooker show, when BBC2 transitioned to colour. But the inexorable pull of the natural world eventually convinced him to resign from his post, even as he was being touted as a future head of the BBC, and he eagerly dived back into wildlife filmmaking. And the planet is lucky he did. From the early 1970s to today, if it crawls, bites or flies, Attenborough has caught it on camera and beamed it into our loungerooms. It was the seminal 1979 series, Life on Earth, that really put him on the map. At the time, it was the most ambitious natural history series ever filmed, taking in more than 100 locations around the world and enlisting the expertise of 500 scientists over its three-year production. To this day, it remains one of the most influential works to documentarians and established a benchmark for all subsequent wildlife filmmaking. The boy who grew up collecting fossils and natural specimens was suddenly one of the BBC's most valuable international commodities. In the years that followed he gave us a seemingly endless array of flora and fauna. Blue Planet. Planet Earth. Frozen Planet. Life. Mega-budget shows that wowed adults and children alike with never-before-seen moments of magic. But what once seemed endless now has a very permanent end in sight, and Attenborough is determined to go out with a bang. Ocean was shot over two years and contains many firsts for wildlife filmmaking, including capturing the first vision of industrial bottom trawling, the biggest mass coral bleaching event and the largest school of yellowfin tuna ever caught on camera. Australian underwater cinematographer Tom Park contributed incredible footage of coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef and said the emotion of being part of Attenborough's final film was hard to put into words. 'He's been an icon of mine for as long as I can remember, I grew up watching his films, and he's really a figurehead of the natural world,' Park told The Sunday Times. 'He's inspired generations of wildlife filmmakers, so to actually be able to have filmed part of his new film is the privilege of my professional career.' Park's portion of the film chronicles the devastating impact of last year's mass coral bleaching event, which is becoming increasingly common as ocean temperatures rise. It's part of a larger section of the movie that focuses on humanity's destruction of the marine world and is considerably more grim than Attenborough's usual style. The vision of bottom trawling, a commercial fishing method that sees a weighted net destroy the seabed, is hard to watch, even for someone as experienced as Park. 'We've never seen anything like it on the big screen before,' the cinematographer admitted. 'Everyone knows bottom trawling is bad, we've seen the stats, but when you actually put vision to this idea of bottom trawling, and it's showcased how they do it in the film, it's remarkably shocking.' Of course, the point is to shock. To make the audience question why bulldozing the Amazon rainforest is an unthinkable horror, but doing the same to the ocean doesn't move the needle for most people. 'Unfortunately, the ocean is out of sight and out of mind for a lot of us,' Park said. 'For the everyday public, for the policymakers, the ocean is this hidden, underwater world. 'But if people understand, and they see the beauty and the fragility, hopefully this will create empathy, and that will lead to action.' That action better come fast, because a certain 99-year-old doesn't have time to wait. Ocean with David Attenborough is in cinemas now.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How David Attenborough changed sport forever
The closest most of us associate the name Sir David Attenborough with the history of sport on television is his memorable commentary during an episode of Planet Earth II, broadcast in 2016. That was his breathless voiceover of the annual contest between freshly hatched iguana babies and racer snakes on the Galapagos Islands, a face-off which held the nation transfixed when that extraordinary footage of a life-or-death dash for the shoreline was first aired. But, unlikely as it may seem, the fact is Attenborough is also responsible for some of the few moments of the BBC's once prodigious sporting output that remain standing. Because, in the days before he became renowned for bringing us ever closer to the drama of the natural world, Attenborough was a hugely influential television controller. A wonderful moment on Centre Court as the crowd rises for Sir David Attenborough 💚 #Wimbledon — Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) July 1, 2024 Never mind the landmark series he commissioned like Civilisation, Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Old Grey Whistle Test, he is also the man who kept Match of the Day on our screens. Plus, he was so persuasive in his role as a telly executive he even managed to get the notoriously conservative Wimbledon authorities to change the colour of the tournament balls to yellow (eventually). Not to forget that, when millions of us hunker down to watch the final moments of the World Snooker Championship this weekend, we have one person to thank for it being on the box: David Attenborough. Back in the 1960s, while still in his early thirties, Attenborough had tired of his early career as a television executive and was studying for a postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. But the BBC had long noted his innovative approach to programming and, with its new second television station struggling to make its presence known, persuaded him to become the second controller of BBC2, taking over in March 1965. His idea was to create a channel which, he once explained, 'catered to all levels of brow'. There was to be no traditional Reithian snobbery under his watch: all licence-fee payers would be invited to his channel. Not least fans of sport. On taking control, one of his first tasks was to rescue a programme commissioned by his predecessor Michael Peacock. Match of the Day had begun the previous August, its purpose to offer televised snippets of Saturday's football. And it had not gone down well in the corridors of the Football League. Those in charge of the game had always been wary of television, fearing that showing matches beyond the annual FA Cup final and the occasional England game would have a detrimental effect on live attendances. Thus it was decided among the game's hierarchy that the experimental first season of recorded highlights would be the last. But the new BBC2 boss was more than keen to keep the programme going. And in a meeting with the trepidatious blazers, Attenborough managed to assuage their doubts. He did it, he told a documentary to mark Match of the Day 's 50th anniversary, 'on the basis that nobody watched BBC2, which was more or less true. BBC2 was only visible in a small part of the country – London and Birmingham – and it had a tiny number of viewers'. 'Don't worry, no one's watching' is hardly the most compelling sell. But it worked. The Football League signed off on a new season-deal. Soon after which, thanks to Attenborough's shrewd negotiating skills, the show entered sporting folklore. Four years later, in 1969, Attenborough finally convinced the government to allow the BBC to introduce a new technology that had long since taken root in the USA and Japan: colour television. It required, however, expensive kit. And Attenborough needed something that would prove its vast superiority over bog-standard black and white to persuade viewers to fork out. So he called a meeting of senior producers, instructing all of them to come up with ideas. The best was a suggestion to embrace the game in which colour is absolutely central to its processes: snooker. Attenborough seized on the thought, sought the opinion of the established radio commentator Ted Lowe and immediately commissioned Lowe's idea for a show called Pot Black, a weekly competition involving eight players competing in one-frame challenges. Although available in colour for those who had new sets, for the rest of the nation it remained monochrome. Which explains Lowe's infamous attempt to clarify things in those early days: 'For those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.' It was Attenborough, moreover, who, in 1973, in his new capacity of director of programmes for the whole corporation, encouraged Grandstand to screen highlights of the semi-final and final of the World Snooker Championship. In 1978, after the tournament moved to the Crucible, daily coverage was introduced, an innovation that has remained in place ever since. Snooker was not the only sport he brought to the television audience in colour, either. He loved tennis, in particular Wimbledon. 'I mean, it is a wonderful plot: you've got drama, you've got everything,' he once told the Radio Times. 'And it's a national event, it's got everything going for it.' So his new colour BBC2, he decided, would feature not just recorded highlights in the evening as was traditional, but live matches during the day. Thus it was Attenborough who was responsible for half the British workforce feigning illness in order to spend the afternoon behind closed curtains watching the tennis. Even then, he was always seeking improvements. He noticed, while watching his station's output, that it was hard for the home audience to follow white balls moving across green turf. Why not introduce yellow coating for the balls? The International Tennis Federation did a bit of investigation and discovered Attenborough was right: it was not just the green of the All England Club lawns, yellow was a much more visible colour against all the surfaces on which the game was played. In 1972, it decreed yellow was the way forward. Though being Wimbledon, the annual fortnight did not adopt the Attenborough yellow until 1986. By which time the great man himself had long moved on into his career as a nature documentary maker. There can be no doubt he was rather good at that, too. But it is in sport we have a lot to be grateful to him for. Thanks to his hapless successors in charge of sport, the BBC has largely wilted in the face of rights challenges from more commercially muscular operations. The fact is, there is not much more remaining in the corporation's portfolio that does not have, some six decades on, a mark left on it by Attenborough. Even in sport, it seems, he is a national treasure.
Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Real meat again? Corned beef and Spam back in fashion for VE Day
It was praised by Margaret Thatcher as a 'wartime delicacy', while Monty Python's Flying Circus satirised Spam in a café sketch in which it was served with every dish on the menu. Britain's fondness for tinned meat appears to have made a resurgence before the 80th anniversary of VE Day next month. Waitrose has reported that a wave of nostalgia has already set in among its shoppers. Sales of corned beef and Spam surged last week by 64 per cent and 48 per cent respectively compared with the same period last year. On Waitrose's website, meanwhile, searches for bread and butter pudding, root vegetable casserole and carrot cake were up 733 per cent, 120 per cent and 402 per cent last week. • Corned
