Latest news with #NaturalHistoryUnit
BBC News
09-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Watch langurs' daring crossings over busy roadway
Dusky langurs in Malaysia face challenges as their forest habitat is fragmented by busy roads, forcing them to risk dangerous ground crossings or attempt precarious journeys across thin, exposed power cables. But a new project installed the first monkey bridge in Peninsula Malaysia, utilizing repurposed fire hoses to offer a safer, wider crossing option for the langurs and other wildlife. Produced by the BBC Natural History Unit.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
William praises Attenborough's dedication as he wishes him happy 99th birthday
The Prince of Wales has praised Sir David Attenborough's dedication to the planet in a personal tribute wishing him a happy 99th birthday. William met Sir David on Tuesday before attending a private screening of the broadcaster's new film, Ocean With David Attenborough, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The prince, in a message released on social media, wrote: 'As he turns 99 today, in his new film, Sir David has once again reminded us of the need to protect natural habitats – this time those beneath the ocean. 'He has dedicated his life to ensuring we understand the realities of what mankind is doing to the planet. As he turns 99 today, in his new film, Sir David has once again reminded us of the need to protect natural habitats – this time those beneath the ocean. He has dedicated his life to ensuring we understand the realities of what mankind is doing to the planet. However hard… — The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) May 8, 2025 'However hard-hitting his message is, Sir David always leaves us with a sense of hope and optimism that all is not lost and this film is no different. 'We must act together, with urgency, to restore our oceans. Happy Birthday, David. W' The naturalist has been on our TV screens for more than seven decades presenting programmes such as Planet Earth and The Blue Planet. Mike Gunton, creative director at BBC Studios Natural History Unit, told the PA news agency that Sir David must have 'one of the greatest legacies of any human being ever.' Mr Gunton, who has worked with Sir David on documentaries including Attenborough And The Giant Dinosaur and Bafta-winning Planet Earth II, said: 'Each generation has its own kind of personal legacy from him, and I think that's remarkable'. 'But also, there's a broader, I suppose, global legacy, which I think is that he has shown us wonders, he's helped us understand wonders, and he's encouraged us to protect these wonders. 'If you could do that in a lifetime, and speak to hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people and inspire them to do all that, that's got to be one of the greatest legacies of any human being ever. 'And I think he's aware of that, and the responsibility of that, and he often talks about the privilege of being able to do that, and it's a privilege for those of us who have worked with him to have.' Mr Gunton began working with the broadcaster aged 29 and said it has been 'a life-defining experience' for him. He told PA: 'Every programme I have made with him has been a remarkable experience which the audience have always found completely memorable and worthwhile and that's a joy for anybody, to make things that are remembered, you know, they're historic, they're part of human history.' Sir David was born David Frederick Attenborough on May 8 1926, in London, the son of an academic and principal of University College Leicester. Before joining the BBC in 1952, he studied geology at the University of Cambridge and served two years in the Royal Navy. He made his reputation with the ground-breaking Zoo Quest series, which he hosted for 10 years on the BBC. In 1965 he became controller of BBC2, overseeing the advent of colour TV, and he later became BBC director of programming. Ultimately, however, life as a broadcast executive did not appeal and he returned with relief to his early passions, programme-making and filming wildlife. His famous whispering voice captured the imaginations of the nation in 1979 when he was seen mingling and bonding with a family of gorillas in Life On Earth and its sequel, The Living Planet, in 1984. The following year, he was knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II before being awarded a Knight Grand Cross honour in 2022. The TV presenter has two children, Susan and Robert, with his late wife Jane, whom he married in 1950. In recent years, Sir David, who resides in Richmond, London, has presented shows including Dynasties, Prehistoric Planet and Planet Earth III. In celebration of his 99th birthday, his new documentary about the health of the ocean airs in cinemas from Thursday. Also to mark his birthday, John Murray Press is giving at least 1,000 copies of his new book, Ocean: Earth's Last Wilderness, to schools and libraries across the UK.
BBC News
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
BBC Studios and China's Orient International Holding Shanghai Foreign Trade sign co-production and co-distribution deal for 3D giant screen version of Asia
BBC Studios and China's Orient International Holding Shanghai Foreign Trade Co., Ltd have signed a co-production and co-distribution deal to create Asia: Wildlife at the Extremes (working title), a giant screen adaptation of the landmark BBC's Natural History series, Asia. The widely acclaimed Asia natural history series took audiences on a breathtaking journey across vast deserts, rich seas and soaring mountains, exploring many of the incredible animals that have adapted to survive in the continent's most extreme environments, where life is often pushed to the limit. Across the frigid peaks of the Himalayas, the turbulent waves of the Indian Ocean and arid deserts of Central Asia, the series revealed extraordinary footage of nature in the most challenging of environments. Filmmakers were able to capture breathtaking sights, including the adorable red pandas of the Himalayas, the deadly sea bunny of the Pacific Ocean and even a never-before-seen shark feeding frenzy, highlighting the unbelievable fight for survival that Asia's incredible animals face every day of their lives. Now adapted by the world-renowned wildlife storytellers of the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, Asia: Wildlife at the Extremes (working title), will soon launch as a thrilling 3D giant screen experience. Filmed using a variety of cutting-edge cameras, viewers will truly be able to immerse themselves in Asia's stunning wildlife and spectacular scenery, being able to choose from either the 40-minute giant screen, IMAX, CINITY option, or the 20-minute Dome version. BBC Studios and Orient International Holding Shanghai Foreign Trade Co., Ltd will co-distribute the film globally, with BBC Studios using SK Films to distribute on its behalf. Jonny Keeling, Head of Natural History Unit, BBC Studios said: 'We are really excited to now expand our decade-long partnership with Orient International for giant screen films into co-production. Asia was much-loved by viewers in the UK, performed very well for our partners in China, as well as across the globe. We believe that Asia: Wildlife at the Extremes, as the bespoke giant screen adaptation of our landmark natural history series, will delight even more audiences in China'. Mr. Wang Haitao, General Manager of Orient International Holding Shanghai Foreign Trade said: 'Together with BBC Studios, we've brought seven giant screen films to China's science museums, providing an immersive viewing experience to younger generations. We are pleased to partner with BBC Studios, who will bring their innovative production skills and compelling storytelling capabilities to natural history programming, and we can't wait to immerse ourselves in this incredible continent on giant screen'. About BBC Studios The main commercial arm of BBC Commercial Ltd, BBC Studios generated revenues in the last year of £1.8 billion and a third consecutive year of profits of over £200 million. Able to take an idea seamlessly from thought to screen and beyond, the business is built on two operating areas: the Content Studio, which produces, invests and distributes content globally and Media & Streaming, with BBC branded channels, services including and Britbox International and joint ventures in the UK and internationally. The business made more than 2,800 hours of award-winning British programmes last year for a wide selection of public service and commercial broadcasters and platforms, both in the UK and across the globe. Its content is internationally recognised across a broad range of genres and specialisms, and includes world-famous brands like Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars, the Planet series, Bluey and Doctor Who. BBC Studios | Website | Press Office | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram |
Telegraph
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
When Allison Pearson met David Attenborough in his natural habitat
This article is published as part of The Telegraph's Greatest Interviews series, which revisits the most significant, informative and entertaining conversations with notable figures over our 170 year history. The below interview is introduced by original interviewer Allison Pearson. It appears as it was originally published. They say you should never meet your heroes, but I made an exception for Sir David Attenborough. He was filming The Life of Birds and the BBC offered me an interview with him in a Florida hotel. I insisted that I needed to meet him in his natural habitat – which is the wild, of course. Those crazy, often dangerous days in the Venezuelan rainforest are still vivid more than a quarter of a century later. The heat was unbearable yet, again and again, Attenborough was hoisted in a bin above the canopy of the trees to deliver one of his legendary monologues. With the birds refusing to show up, most TV stars would have had a tantrum, but Attenborough is remarkably good-natured. It only occurred to me there, listening to that voice (such a mellifluous instrument) high above the jungle clearing, that he could have been one of our greatest actors. That theatrical talent, allied to the passion of a small boy who was mad about fossils, created a matchless and irreplaceable broadcaster. David Attenborough has never lost that capacity for wonder, and he awakens it in millions of us who too often forget that life is wonderful. It was the best assignment of my life, and when I look back on it I feel filled with gratitude. – Allison Pearson Would you describe yourself as an intrepid sort of person? Yes, I lied. Under the circumstances, lying was the only option. The BBC's Natural History Unit in Bristol had graciously, though with understandable reservations, agreed that I could accompany Sir David Attenborough on a trip to Venezuela where he would be filming a sequence for his forthcoming series, The Life of Birds. I would join Attenborough and the crew in Caracas and from there we would fly to the rainforest. By night, we would sleep on the floor of a hut, by day, we would take a boat up the Orinoco into the deepest interior, where scientists had erected a crane from which our intrepid presenter would dangle above the tree canopy. I could look forward to a temperature of 90˚F in the shade and a humidity level of 95 per cent – even when it wasn't raining, which it mostly would be, it would feel as if it were. The Unit sent me a fax with the word 'hazard' printed prominently in bold: beneath it was a list of things I might reasonably expect to bite me. Then there was the question of sanitary arrangements. I had always said that I would follow David Attenborough to the ends of the earth, but this was because I had always taken it for granted that the ends of the earth would have a working lavatory. And yet the very thought of being with Attenborough made me feel brave. This was so illogical, so painfully unscientific that I hesitated to mention it to anyone, but there it was: the eternal Boy Wonder, now an unbelievable 71, is one of those rare individuals who communicate a self-possession that is not just inspiring but consoling. I have watched Attenborough all my life: this makes me one of the millions of children who were educated by his curiosity as we grew up and had children of our own. It is part of the peculiar power of television that you can feel you know and trust someone you have never met – and by those lights, David Attenborough is the most trusted of all. Through the years he has been our guide to Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), The Trials of Life (1990), Life in the Freezer (1993), The Private Life of Plants (1995) and Attenborough in Paradise (1996). If you must go into the jungle, then what better companion than a man who once had his head fondled by a female gorilla, and who greeted a tribe of advancing cannibals with the words, 'Good morning'? Over the next fortnight, as I made my preparations for the rainforest, I discovered the full force of the Attenborough Effect. Viewing figures and book sales prove that the man has an enormous following (Life on Earth was watched by 500 million worldwide; proceeds from the book and subsequent series made the author a millionaire). Statistics alone, however, could not prepare you for the unanimous response to his name. At the British Airways clinic in Victoria, I told the nurse who was firing a quiverful of jabs into my arm that I was going to meet David Attenborough, and she let out a low moan of pleasure. Then it was on to a tropical outfitters in Covent Garden where I purchased a pair of anti-leech trousers with elasticated ankles – a style usually favoured by the incontinent. The only bright spot came when I mentioned the two magic words and the beefy silent types behind the counter went boneless with envy. And so it went on. A teenage beauty therapist, a middle-aged academic, my newsagent, a post-graduate biologist: the Attenborough Effect was immediate across the ages, the classes and the sexes. Even the hairdresser was agog: 'God, he's so great. Wouldn't you give anything to have lived his life, I know I would.' Down at the Natural History Unit when they talk about their location shoots, they always come back to one goal: 'getting the behaviour'. It is relatively easy to record a creature on camera; the real trick is to catch it doing what you know it is capable of, the thing that makes it extraordinary. A bird of paradise having a snooze is not much cop. A bird of paradise taking out its maracas and doing the samba is one of the wonders of the world. I knew I was going to observe a well-loved broadcaster in his natural habitat, but during the long flight to Venezuela I had plenty of time to worry whether the Attenborough I was about to meet would match up to the creature of legend. Would I get the behaviour? Day one Caracas is clammy and smells of old dog. Arriving at the hotel, I am weepy with fatigue. A tall, familiar figure in a pale blue shirt and khaki slacks bounds across the lobby beaming, his hand extended. Up close and observing my crumpled state, he changes his mind and splays into an awkward hug instead. 'We thought you'd never make it.' Boy, am I glad to see David Attenborough. The whole crew is assembled, ready for the trip to La Esmeralda. There is sound recordist Trevor Gosling, a droll Devonian who is a veteran of Attenborough Expeditions; Justine Evans, the young camerawoman, is working for the first time with David (he is David to everyone); Anne Holmes is the PA in charge of food, transport and the elusive local 'fixers'; the producer on this film (one of five altogether) is Mike Salisbury – a smiley, compact man who cut his teeth 20 years ago on Life on Earth and is now in overall charge of The Life of Birds. Mike and Attenborough have just flown in from Texas where they were shooting at night in a cave. They had enough time to wash themselves, but their clothes – 'still covered in bat poo', according to Attenborough – are fermenting quietly in one of the suitcases. The airport, when we find it, doesn't look like any airport you have ever seen: it looks like Harold Steptoe's backyard. Our plane is parked in a shed which seems to double as hangar and henhouse; the aircraft is tiny, twin-engined and could easily be fired by elastic band. Anne sets us to loading the equipment and the crates of food – tinned beef, dirty oranges, beer. I had imagined that the BBC might stretch to a native bearer, but we are our own porters. Attenborough makes for the heaviest boxes and it is easy to forget that he is the oldest member of the group by a quarter of a century. William, the pilot, shows up an hour late. He is dressed in the kind of military uniform where the amount of gold braid is in inverse proportion to the confidence it inspires. According to William, we have 'beeg problem'. The big problem is down the end of the runway – a 4,500ft mountain, 'beeg heel, leetal plane,' William explains, gesturing glumly towards the horizon. Attenborough cocks his head in that unmistakable way of his and gives William his kindliest smile before turning to me and hissing, 'I always thought the National Westminster Bank offered very good career prospects, didn't you?' I ask the team whether they often have this kind of trouble. Anne admits that in South America things can get a bit sticky. Trevor and David recall that the last time they were in the Galapagos Islands the plane had to turn back three times and when it did finally get airborne it went down and down and down. 'Mmm, nearly died,' says David. 'Luckily,' adds Trevor, 'we hit another island so we landed on that.' It becomes clear that in order to take off, we will have to shed weight: the food will have to stay behind and wait for another plane. It may take three days to catch us up. As the others start unloading. Attenborough reassures me, 'Don't worry, Allison, we can forage in the forest – grubs, roots, beetles and so on. Highly nutritious, you know.' I try out my explorer's smile – stoic with a hint of selflessness – when I notice that everyone except me is laughing. This is the first round of a game that will prove hugely entertaining for the rest of the trip: winding up the gullible reporter. Once in flight, the plane behaves like a Sainsbury's trolley being pulled up an escalator. William's co-pilot, who must be at least 12, makes a great show of being able to read the map. I stop myself being sick by keeping three wine gums in my mouth and staring at Attenborough's immaculate loafers. 'Last time we were in Venezuela we were on a mountain top, it was raining, we were in a tent for two and there were five of us,' says Trevor. 'We had some chewing-gum and an orange between us,' recalls Attenborough. 'We were trying to keep the equipment dry as well.' 'Yes, so we were sleeping on top of one another.' The two men pause and then chorus together, 'Luxury!' This double-act – the Trev and Dave Show, as I came to think of it – will play throughout the trip, with special performances at times of danger or extreme discomfort. It is a kind of extended Monty Python sketch – 'Ee we 'ad it rough' – except that here the hardships are not exaggerated for comic effect, but belittled. I am surprised at how easily Attenborough slips into the fruity old trooper routine; shut your eyes and it could be his elder brother, Dickie. Just then, through the starboard windows, there rears up a monstrous plateau – 10,000 feet of rock that resembles nothing so much as Thunderbirds' Tracey Island. This is it! This is five-in-a-tent mountain! No one had ever been to the summit before, Attenborough explains, so the crew on The Private Life of Plants were winched down through thick cloud by helicopter. Once on top, the party found itself separated by a crevasse – one group got all the food, the other got the orange and the chewing-gum. 'Um, how did you know the helicopter would be able to find you again?' I ask. 'Ah, you've put your finger on it there,' Attenborough grins ruefully. 'Still, you have this huge plateau with just a little bush – truly the most extraordinary landscape, quite unreal – and water comes off it and makes the tallest waterfall in the world and the absolutely fascinating thing is…' He is off – launching gracefully into one of his improvised melodies of explanation. It confirms what you had always suspected: that he doesn't just spiel for the camera, he talks because he must. He is brimming with a thousand things to tell you about the world, and they fall from his lips as naturally as water from that plateau. As he talks, the sun burns off the cloud and I get a look at the landscape for the first time. From this high up, the rainforest looks incredibly benign – like the toy moss on a child's railway set. Blobs of green sponge inset with a strip of mirror for a river. Is that the Orinoco? 'No,' says Trevor, 'we must be lost.' The two-hour flight has now lasted well over three. 'David, do you want your malaria pill?' asks Mike, who mothers the presenter quite a bit on the quiet. I say that I still can't see any birds and Attenborough laughs. 'Don't worry, they'll show up: they all want to be on telly.' He explains that he doesn't really know anything about birds and hadn't wanted to do the series. This draws a merry guffaw from the producer and sound-recordist, who are by now well used to hearing Britain's most famous fount of knowledge explaining how little he knows. (Not that he is putting it on: hardwired into the Attenborough brain is a fuse that causes self-regard to cut out at the first surge of pride.) From the front of the plane comes Justine's voice, 'They're not quite sure if that was the runway, I think he's got the map upside down.' 'I said we were lost,' exclaims Trevor with satisfaction. 'Do you remember that time we got lost in the Seychelles?' 'Oh, yes,' says David enthusiastically, 'and with those snow geese up in the Arctic.' The recitation of disasters is interrupted by an announcement from William. Beeg problem. Wrong coordinates for La Esmeralda. Need more fuel. Land now. Okay? 'Ah,' says Attenborough, rocking with glee in his seat, 'I think it's going to be an adventure. It can be one of your stories, Trevor.' Running on empty, we come down on the border with Colombia. As the plane bounces towards the ground, we can see that the airfield is seething with soldiers and armoured vehicles. My mouth has furred up with fear, but I am determined to chime in with the prevailing nonchalance, 'Looks like a bit of a military coup, then?' 'Bloody hell,' says Trevor, 'I hope they let us use the toilet.' The door opens to reveal a band of teenagers toting machine-guns and Sony Walkmans. Mike springs smartly down the steps, 'Good afternoon, may I introduce Sir David Attenborough?' We hand over our passports, go inside the terminal and spend two Graham-Greeneish hours poised somewhere between boredom and all eternity. Surely there have been moments when Attenborough has been truly frightened? 'Yes, of course, but rarely with animals, only with man. I was down here once and we were arrested, I was outside in a compound and they kept pushing me into the sun at gunpoint. Wouldn't let me stand in the shade, and I thought for a while – well, it didn't look terribly good, frankly.' He shrugs. There are more lasting hardships, after all, like separation from your family. The Natural History Unit is a blackspot for marriages. When Attenborough started these trips back on Zoo Quest in 1954, he could be away from his family for four months at a stretch without any means of communication. 'One of the most heart-rending things was at the old London airport. I'd been away in Indonesia and in those days it was like the back-end of the moon. Jane and the two kids, Robert and Susan, were waiting there at the end of a long corridor and this little boy broke under the barrier and ran down the length of this corridor shouting Daddy! I hardly recognised him. The children changed so much in a short period of time.' A greater agony awaited him last year when he was in the south island of New Zealand. Mike Salisbury, who was then in Bristol, rang to say that Jane, David's wife of almost 50 years, was gravely ill in hospital after a brain haemorrhage. 'Trevor drove me through the night and into the dawn to the nearest airport and I got back just in time. Jane was semi-conscious but she registered my presence – she couldn't say anything but she grasped my hand.' She died the next day. 'On the surface he's recovered, but I don't think he ever really will,' says Alastair Fothergill, head of the Natural History Unit. 'I remember coming back from filming The Trials of Life and arriving at Heathrow. David was met by Jane and she gave him this kiss. Amazing – a 14-year-old-snogging-in-a-disco kiss. It was an extraordinary marriage.' Trevor agrees, 'Jane used to organise everything for him – foreign currency, pack clothes, meet him from the airport. Now, I think he's just trying to lose himself in his work.' We can be fairly certain that on screen no one will notice the change in David Attenborough. In person, you may detect a new heaviness in that preposterously youthful face – as if grief had finally done what age and gravity could not. But the ambassadorial bearing and the sweetness of his courtesy are wholly unimpaired. Later that afternoon, as we arrive at last at La Esmeralda, at the fag-end of a dire day. I witness the Attenborough Effect in full flow. On the verandah of a godforsaken bungalow, babyfaced police are playing dominoes. Drooping on the molten tarmac with our luggage, the six of us are greeted by a brace of snarling dogs. 'May I introduce Sir David Attenborough,' says Mike again, this time with slightly less conviction. It works. David straightens up, strides forward with hand outstretched and smile on full beam. The chief of police may never have tuned into Life on Earth but he knows Upright Man when he sees him. He ushers us into an office where a ceiling fan is stirring the soupy air. The blaring TV set is turned down and within minutes coffee is served in little porcelain cups that were last brought out for Sir Walter Raleigh's visit in 1595-96. The good news is that the food, unhindered by William's navigation skills, has just arrived on another plane. Almost simultaneously our hosts – bearded German research students – arrive to fetch us in a tractor. They take us along a cratered road to the base, a cluster of huts with straw roofs cropped in early-Beatles haircuts. Behind them, the sun falls like a stone. It is six o'clock. For supper that night, under the romantic light of a bulb marginally dimmer than a glow-worm, Mike rustles up omelette and tomato salad. I congratulate him on cooking in the dark. He grins: 'All part of survival in a multi-skilling BBC.' Seated around a long wooden table, the crew talk shop. Just the usual office stuff – near-drownings off Borneo, face-to-face encounters with polar bears. And birds. Birds in Bordeaux that got rained off; the capercaillie that chased Attenborough till he fell over, although he kept on addressing the camera from the ground (naturally); the snow geese who were trained up from goslings to fly behind a 2CV – because they think the first thing they see is their Mum. Mike and Justine spent days in New Zealand stalking the elusive kakapo – they talk about it with the enthusiasm of children recalling a birthday party. By the time The Life of Birds is broadcast this autumn in the form of ten 50-minute programmes, the Unit will have visited about 30 countries, deployed 42 cameramen and spent £7.5 million. It has two-and-a-half years to pull off this operation, which sounds like acres of time, but that only gives them two shots at each seasonal ritual: breeding, nesting, hip-hop. The human ritual of a jungle bedtime is equally strange. Brushing your teeth in the dark, slithering into the mosquito tent. I could sleep anywhere, but rather wish Attenborough hadn't mentioned the time when he woke to find rats climbing up his mosquito net: 'I switched on the torch and saw the pink pads under their paws.' And Sir David's own survival tip after 40 years in the tropics? Poplin jim-jams. 'They are the most comfortable by far.' You're going to wear pyjamas in this heat? 'Golly yes,' he smiles. 'It's like having clean sheets wherever you go.' Day two At breakfast, one of the German scientists looks sceptical when we tell him we are here to film The Life of Birds for the BBC. 'Hmmm. I am here for 10 days already. Don't think I see bird.' We all nod, but no one is really paying attention. Anne and I are packing a lunch and securing the rest of the food against rats. Attenborough is bent over his small black Filofax – the bible of the series – mouthing the script for the day. As he murmurs, he clasps his fingers in a steeple like a bishop. We leave for the river by seven to get a headstart on the heat. Waiting for us are two bongo boats, native craft equipped with an outboard motor. The Orinoco is vast – maybe four times as wide as the Thames at Westminster – and the colour of milk chocolate. There is a small crisis when someone notices that David has got oily marks on his light khaki shirt. 'Oh no, the Presenter's shirt, that's all we need,' wails Attenborough, who breaks into mock-prima-donna at those moments when other TV personalities would be doing the real thing. There is a discussion as to whether we should walk the mile back to camp to collect a clean shirt, but Mike examines the smudge and declares it looks 'authentic'. Besides, in these conditions, they are used to making do: on an earlier assignment Attenborough's right eye closed up completely with insect bites and they got round it by filming him in profile. The 40-minute trip is astonishing. Expecting a journey into the heart of darkness, I am surprised to find myself feeling more like the Lady of Shalott, drifting down to the green mist of Camelot. On either side of the river lies forest as dense as myth. The butterflies shimmer like scraps of ballgown; David calls out their names, but I can't hear him over the whirr of water. For the first time, I get a glimpse of what it is that draws these lunatics from Bristol out here. Again, we see no birds, apart from a pair of kingfishers, who are startled to be greeted by an ironic cheer from the entire crew. We have come in search of a crane – not the flying variety, but the giant contraption erected by the Austrian Academy of Science to study the canopy of the rainforest. When we reach the site, there is thick mud underfoot and the ants are the size of slippers. 'Watch out for snakes, Allison,' says Attenborough, with the sly grin of Molesworth tormenting the French mistress. 'They look just like roots.' 'Or just like trees,' adds Trevor helpfully. The idea is that Attenborough will be filmed swinging out above the canopy, some 120ft in the air. The crane has two attachments that can carry passengers – the gondola, which is built like a cable-car, and the bucket, which is not much bigger than your average dustbin and looks like the kind of vehicle only the Clangers would take off in. Attenborough is to go up in the bucket. 'It will make for better pictures,' explains Mike. As an extra complication, Trevor and the microphone must travel in the bucket, too, and duck out of sight when Attenborough begins to speak. Meanwhile, Justine and Mike will ascend in the gondola with the camera and hop on to a platform at the top of a tree. The platform was put in place three months ago when Phil Hurrell, the Unit's legendary tree-climber, came out on a recce. Attenborough is fingering the cable that holds the bucket secure. 'It's all right,' he says, 'you hear a snapping noise before it breaks.' Anne has produced a clapperboard from her bag and begins to chalk on it: The Life of Birds: Forest Canopy Programme 3. David and Mike discuss how the scene will fit into the overall jigsaw of this episode. The original script, drafted more than two years ago, had Attenborough in Guatemala with an avocado nut. But conditions change all the time. Now Attenborough must improvise a link with a sequence about pollen, filmed six months earlier in Costa Rica. 'It needs to be a new paragraph,' he says. 'It needs to be something like, 'In the tropical rainforest seasons are all the same, so trees fruit all year and it's possible for birds to live here all year.'' It is nearly 10am by the time Mike and Justine go up in the crane. The heat, which began as a sheen on the skin, now clings to you like a wet dressing-gown. My special anti-leech trousers only add to the boil-in-the-bag effect. The resourceful Anne produces sticks of mosquito repellent and we all lather it on to our hands and faces. Does it work? 'Course it does,' says Attenborough, 'they can't get enough of the stuff.' Above our heads, Mike and Justine are now level with the platform, which looks no bigger than a teatray. The door of the gondola opens and Justine steps out confidently over the void. David whistles, 'Crikey. Pretty cool, Justine, isn't she?' Now it is his turn. Anne hands him some paper napkins to soak up the sweat from his face. 'What, no make-up lady? I've put in for one often enough.' This is a joke against himself; according to Alastair Fothergill, 'He has no vanity at all. The battle I had with David in Life in the Freezer was getting him to comb his hair. It's so windy down there he looked like Compo. 'I don't comb my hair,' he said, 'poofters comb their hair'. In the end we forced him to do it.' Clearly the lesson has paid off, because Attenborough meekly combs his hair into a prep-school parting before climbing into the bucket. Trevor squeezes in beside him and they are hoisted up and away into the green. With their heads sticking out, they look like the Flowerpot Men. 'Everyone ready?' hollers Mike. 'Stand by. Take one.' And now, from 120 feet above me, comes the voice. I have heard it so often before that the shock of hearing it live makes me want to laugh out loud with delight. 'Here in the tropical rainforest…' The voice is both urgent and soothing, crystal-clear without being cut-glass; so fresh and intent on its subject that it pays no attention to itself. Viewers are attuned to Attenborough's celebrated whisper but even when, as now, he rises to treetop declamation, it retains the intimacy of the bedside manner. 'Was that all right, Mike?' 'Yeah, sounded great. Quiet please! Take two!' 'After pollination come the seeds…' 'Not such a good one for me,' says Mike. Take three. Mike likes take three, but Attenborough isn't sure: 'Trevor didn't like that one so much. I'll do it again.' David fluffs the next one. 'Take five.' Time for some aerial choreography. 'OK, we'll lower David into the berries now.' 'That will scare off the flocks of birds,' protests Attenborough with a little light sarcasm. (There is still not a single bird to be seen.) Up pops Trevor beside him in the bucket: 'Don't worry, we can paint those in later.' For lunch back on earth, there is bread, apples and perspiring cheese. Squatting by the crane, David and Justine discuss how to attract an electric blue butterfly the size of my hand. 'Some banana?' suggests Justine. 'No,' says Attenborough, 'what you need is some nice salty urine.' When David has wandered away, I tell Justine how he marvelled at her cool on the platform. She is tomboyish and composed and doesn't give much away, but she is obviously chuffed. 'When I was a little girl we lived across the park from him in Richmond and I used to walk in the park every day and plan what I would say to David Attenborough if I bumped into him.' So you're here because of him? She nods. 'We're all here because of him.' I find Attenborough pacing up and down a glum clearing. He is still refining the script, whittling away at awkward words until each sentence slides off the tongue: 'If the call was complex… The complexity of the call…' Everyone dwells on the visual feast of his programmes; less obvious, but no less crucial, is his mastery of language. Attenborough has a gift for the simple statement that brings clarity to Nature's most intricate games and structures. I point out a nest from which ants are pouring like treacle. 'Now, that's not a nest, it's a bivouac – a temporary camp. The workers all hold legs to form a sort of skin round it. They form compartments of living walls where the pupae and the queen live. Then, after four or five days, they move on. The workers are the equivalent of our blood corpuscles…' And all this straight off the cuff, just for me. That afternoon, Attenborough is back in the bucket for hour upon hour, suspended in the roasting sun as they try to perfect a difficult tracking shot. 'David,' confides Trevor, 'is not like other TV stars I've worked with. He's embarrassingly ready to carry the heaviest bag. I mean, the guy's 70. He has an amazing constitution. He's never ill. We all get colds and the squits but he just marches on. He can sleep anywhere and he isn't really bothered about food or drink. He has his music; last night he said he listened to Stanford.' When Attenborough finally comes down, midges have turned his forearms into a lunar landscape and his face is an angry red. He himself is not angry. He is singing 'Come into the Garden, Maud'. I suspect that he sings to himself to avoid shouting at others. Trevor has some good news for him. 'You know what's for dinner, don't you?' 'No.' 'Rat.' Everyone laughs. 'You think I'm joking, don't you,' says Trevor. On the bongo ride home, we revel in the cool spray coming off the river. There is a ludicrous Vivienne-Westwood sunset – all lilac tulle and knicker pink. 'I've seen a bird,' yells Anne. 'Liar,' yells everyone else. Attenborough raises one wry eyebrow at his executive producer and declares in ringing Received Pronunciation to the implacable rainforest, 'We searched and we waited to find a place 100 per cent free of birds and we're terribly pleased with it – it's almost entirely successful.' Back at base, Anne discovers a Christmas cake in the food crate and we sit outside in the dying light stuffing claggy warm lumps into our mouths. I ask Attenborough how all this began – at what age he first became interested in science. 'Knowing the names of fossils and plants and birds didn't strike me as being science. If you saw the piles of letters I get from kids – 'Why does a bee do that?' – you'd see that it's a very natural interest.' As a boy in Leicester, David would collect 'almost anything… I used to get on my bicycle and gather fossils by the ton. We had a great Humber car and when we went on our holidays to Wales I would have plotted the journey on the geological map. I would explain to my long-suffering parents that we should certainly stop as it was going to be very fossiliferous. I would come back with whacking great lumps of stuff which I'd put in the back of the car. On one occasion, as I was loading rocks through one door, I saw my mother chucking them out the other. 'You don't want that one, do you dear?' I was appalled.' Even now, after 60 years in long trousers, he retains the air of that determined little boy in shorts. Looking back at their childhood, Richard Attenborough recalls that his younger brother was 'always grubby and kept worms in father's empty tobacco tins'. At the ages of eight and nine the boys appeared in a school sketch, Lidies Wot Come To Oblige, and it was David who got the rave reviews. 'Between you and me he has considerable histrionic ability,' says Dickie, and there are BBC producers who maintain that David is the better actor of the two. 'You never get the same take twice,' says one Bristol colleague admiringly. 'You get a different word here or a pause there – and he does that deliberately to give it a feeling of spontaneity. He's a very good performer and that's one reason why he remains unknowable. It just so happens that the real Attenborough and the performing Attenborough are both very nice men, and there are times when, to be honest, you can't tell them apart. Actually, I don't think he can himself.' The Attenborough parents were scholars, socialists and fervent humanitarians. Father pulled himself up from a Midlands corner shop to become a professor of Anglo-Saxon and a founder of Leicester University; mother was a linguist, a JP and a marriage-guidance counsellor. In 1936, she organised relief for Basque children, looking after 150 of them in a hired village hall. I suggest to David that they sound rather a formidable pair. 'Yes, but I don't object to that. I think being formidable's quite a good quality, don't you? I was always sure of their affection.' During the war, the family took in Jewish academics and children. Two girls – Irene and Helga – ended up staying for five years. 'It was very hard,' says Attenborough, 'because their mother and father went to Buchenwald and, having lost their parents, they desperately wanted mine. You're very jealous of the affection of your parents – all the time you think, 'Hang on, what about me?' But, of course, you can't say anything because what had happened to them was so much worse.' And so self-effacement was grafted on to his nature and flourished there. Sitting in the Venezuelan gloaming, Attenborough shakes his head when I ask if his parents were particularly ambitious for their three sons (John, the youngest, studied at Cambridge like David and became wealthy in the car business). Still, there is no doubt that they drummed into their boys – two of whom were destined for knighthoods – a profound sense of service to others and a reverence for learning. 'I remember, I suppose it was '45 and we had an allotment – Brussels sprouts, etc – and I can see my father now running down the hill towards the allotment shouting, 'You've got it, you've got it!' I'd got the scholarship to Clare. I couldn't have given him a better present. Mind you, he'd said if you don't get the scholarship you can't go. Said you don't deserve it. He thought that a son of his ought to bloody well have some degree of nous.' David is extremely protective of his older brother. According to one producer, 'when people try to rib David about the luvvie side of Dickie, the shutters always come down'. It is said, for example, that he was not amused in 1993 when Richard got his peerage and someone joked that they had got the wrong Attenborough. 'School was not Dick's thing, you see. Dick fixated on acting.' He insists that he himself 'couldn't act for nuts and wanted no part of Dick's celebrity'. But I wonder. For someone so talented, Attenborough is strangely spooked by competition. 'Fear of losing, perhaps. I just dislike myself when I find myself getting competitive. I find it a very unpleasant feeling. If someone over there wants to do the same thing as I want to do and only one of us can do it, I'd rather walk away.' What about the survival of the fittest stuff he keeps telling us about? He chuckles. 'Ah, well it's called adaptive radiation – what animals do if they have too much competition. They will tend to do something else and so develop into a different kind. Say you have an ancestral finch and one of them starts to eat cherries and grows a beak in order to crack cherry stones and turns into a bullfinch. And another says, 'I can't quite manage this' so he goes to peck on seeds and he becomes a goldfinch.' And say you had one brother who was very good at acting and another who was also good at acting but had a gift for studying finches. Perhaps the second might say, 'I can't quite manage this acting lark', so he goes off to become another kind of performer. But that is speculation, not science, and besides, supper is ready. In a dark hut, we all tuck into a dark casserole in the dark. It is delicious, if full of small bones. It is rat. Day three You even dream differently here. Fevered, tentacular dreams that pull you back to things you'd rather forget. This morning, Attenborough says he dreamt that he had a row with Paul Fox, a colleague at Alexandra Palace in the early days of television who has now retired. Hey, I thought you never argued with anyone? 'Only in my dreams.' Over breakfast, the presenter is practising his script once again, this time with some additions for my benefit. 'In the tropical canopy above the rainforest lives the bell bird – the bell bird lives in the high canopy – unfortunately, there are no birds here today, but if there were they'd be making a short, sharp call like this.' Mike catches me taking notes and says sternly, 'I suppose you're going to go back and write, 'No Birds in BBC Life of Birds Shock' are you?' I admit that, as I am a reporter, this may indeed be my sad duty. In fact, they have got footage of the bell bird. The BBC Natural History Unit has not become the best in the world without being able to work round flighty stars. Much of the in-depth behavioural photography for the series is already in the can, guided by Attenborough's original draft of the script. Down the Amazon, in similar terrain, cameraman Nick Gordon has been perched in a tree for months filming the very birds we might have expected to find in Venezuela. Attenborough, Mike explains, is brought in for the big explanatory set-pieces and the crucial links. Each programme costs about £750,000 - ''peanuts compared to drama', and up to 60 per cent of the budget comes from foreign partners. That investment will be returned many times over after worldwide sales. 'It's what people pay their licence fee for,' says Alastair Fothergill. 'We're the Pride and Prejudice of wildlife.' When Sir Walter Raleigh navigated the Orinoco, he wrote, 'Every day almost melted with heat and suddenly wet again with great showers.' Four hundred years later the region is still big on showers. By the time we reach the crane site, the bottom of the bongo has turned into a small lake. There is a good deal of hanging about, waiting for the sun to break through. It could be a drag, but Attenborough doesn't understand boredom. Between takes he is never idle, preferring to read a book or go for a walk; the self-improvement continues even at night, when he slots random discs into his CD player in the dark, unable to tell which composer will come up. (He buys music he doesn't know and forces himself to listen.) He is always turning over a new leaf, sometimes literally. When I express my exasperation with the rainforest – pea green, dappled green, mouldy yellow green, olive green, horrid horrid bathroom-suite green – he gently takes me to task. 'But Allison, look at this.' Kneeling by the path, he picks a plant with a lovely sage leaf and a pearly coronet of buds. 'This is selaginella, a survivor of the Jurassic era. Just think, this was eaten by dinosaurs.' So here it is, the secret of his eternal youth – the chronic inability to be jaded. If you believe in what Louis MacNeice called 'the drunkenness of things being various', then Attenborough has never had a sober day in his life. 'I always feel the same age as the team,' he says. 'It never occurs to me to think they're younger.' What of the recent research which showed he has inspired a generation of botanists, biologists and film-makers – people like Justine. 'Well, it's not me personally. That's television. I'm just the face that people associate with the whole subject. There's been a huge boom in it since the Fifties. But I get all the credit. And you've seen' – he gestures towards the rest of the crew – 'how unfair that is.' Unfair, but unavoidable. Whatever Attenborough says, it is him. When Alastair Fothergill became head of the Unit, the first objective set by John Birt was to 'Find the New Attenborough'. It has proved a fruitless search. 'The trouble is,' says Fothergill, 'that he's such a mighty oak tree that underneath his shadow it's very difficult for seedlings to grow.' There are plenty of qualified scientists, but that is barely the half of it. How do you advertise for a perfectly mannered polymath who looks great in a wet suit? The last day Sitting on the verandah of La Esmeralda police station, we suck Polos and wait for the plane to pick us up. The rain is sluicing down. 'Imagine if today had been one of the filming days – disaster.' Attenborough winces behind his spectacles. For a moment, I catch him looking old and I go weak at the thought that some day there will be no more of this particular life on Earth. As we packed up at the base, Mike told me that all the work of the past few days – the bongos, the bucket, the bites – would amount to no more than two minutes of screen time. Some people might call that ridiculous: to me it looked like dedication, and it confirmed my suspicion that here were the true heirs of the great Victorian explorers. I saw Attenborough inscribe a copy of The Trials of Life for one of our hosts. He left it on the table and I sneaked a look at the dedication: 'To Jens, With the Gratitude of an Amateur Biologist to a Professional One. David Attenborough.' He really believes it, I think, and if by amateur we mean one who loves his subject then it is quite true. But Attenborough wants more: he wants to pass the love on. Partly this is a legacy of his generation, the first and last which believed that 'television had a mission in society – that it had a cementing function that would enable the nation to talk to itself in a way that nothing else did'. The only time he comes close to losing his temper is when I mention the current tendency to sneer at projects such as Civilisation, which Attenborough commissioned when he was head of BBC2. 'Nobody is allowed to know anything these days, or to accept that someone else may know more about something than you do. It is such cheap arrogance. And how can you market research what the audience wants? Barmy! It smacks of not caring, of having no red blood in your veins!' On the walk to the airstrip, Attenborough can be seen stooping repeatedly to pick something up from the ground. He holds out his palm in triumph and shows me a handful of purple quartz, which he then stuffs in his pocket, like toffees to keep for later. Through the rain-storm, we can hear the plane coming in to land. Attenborough suddenly stops and points. Hovering only a foot away is a dragonfly so evanescent it seems to be woven from spittle, 'Now, the extraordinary thing about that is how it mates. The male has a spiral penis covered in bristles, which he uses to scour out anything that's been there before.' He smiles dreamily. 'Makes us temperate males feel quite inadequate. And while we are on the subject, how about dogs? Do you know about the coital lock?' Actually, Sir David, there are some things I really don't want to know about. 'But you must listen, it's absolutely fascinating.' And I did. And it was. 'Wildlife on One' begins on BBC1 at 8pm on February 25 and 'The Life of Birds' is due to be screened in the autumn
The Independent
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Tom Hanks is the face of a new BBC nature series. Here's what you need to know
Sir David Attenborough is Britain's undisputed nature show king. However, across the Atlantic another charismatic, captivating figure is emerging as the voice of natural history - none other than Tom Hanks. He is the face of a new blockbuster nature show showcasing the beauty of the wild Americas. TV producer Mike Gunton has now recalled how he thought Hanks would be a top nature talent. Sat in an office pitching to Hollywood execs, he said his name popped into his head one day. 'I'd just finished working on a project with David Attenborough, and I was thinking, 'Who's the equivalent? Who does everybody want to be with? Who does everybody trust? Who does everybody want to hear?' It's got to be Tom Hanks.' Several years later, the multi award-winning actor can be heard narrating a new 10-part natural world series sweeping the enormous breadth of the Americas. Covering two continents and spanning multiple ecosystems, the ambitious show was filmed over the course of five years and 180 expeditions. 'As far as nature is concerned, this is one super landmass,' says Gunton, creative director of Factual and the Natural History Unit for BBC Studios, whose past accolades include Planet Earth II and Dynasties. 'It's the only place that reaches right up into the Arctic and right down into the Antarctic. It splits oceans and has the Tropics of Cancer, the Tropic of Capricorn, the Equator and every type of habitat.' Commissioned for an initial US release, the blockbuster series intentionally aims to instil a sense of national pride in the destinations featured. Entertaining whilst being educational, it's a visual safari and Tom Hanks is very much along for the ride. 'It feels like Tom is sitting here with his arm around you, saying, 'I've just seen this most incredible thing' – rather than a voice of God saying this happens here and this happens there,' adds Gunton. From bison on the Great Plains to polar bears in Hudson Bay, countless bucket-list wildlife experiences feature along with behaviours captured for the first time – including several male blue whales racing along the coast of California, a sequence which Gunton highlights as one of his favourites. 'This is an animal that is the size of a jumbo jet, almost going at 30 miles an hour and then leaping out of the water. That's a lot of energy. We don't really know why they were doing it, but it's incredible. One of the most impressive animals of all time doing something that is some of the most impressive things I've ever seen.' But it's not just the animals that shine. 'You don't just go to the giant redwood forest to see the giant redwoods,' Gunton points out. 'You go there to experience the whole environment. We work very hard to invoke the character of individual places. These aren't just locations.' In every episode, efforts are made to make the wild world feel relatable. At a time when political upheavals in the USA threaten to unravel years of environmental protection efforts, connecting with audiences is more important than ever before. 'It's a good time to remind people that this is special,' admits Gunton diplomatically. 'You've got something incredible here, it should be treasured. But it's vulnerable. It's like that Joni Mitchell song. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. 'Tom feels that very strongly as well. He was keen to make sure that we reminded the audience that these wonders are on their doorstep, but they're fragile, they're precious, we have to treasure them.' Mike Gunton shares several standout sequences from the series… 'It's hard to find real wilderness, but this is definitely real wilderness. There's been a lot of protection of pumas and numbers are increasing but the reason why it's hard to find them is because they're brilliant at camouflage. 'If you'd asked me, I'd say filming pumas was one of the hardest shoots, just because physically it's so demanding. As a filmmaker, it's tough because you can't go in vehicles. You have to do it pretty much all on foot. Now, if you ask Tom Hanks [about the toughest shoot], he'd say, filming army ants in the Amazon, because they want to bite you.' Blue whales in California, USA 'Blue whales are notoriously difficult to film – this is the biggest animal that's ever lived. They're mysterious. We know very little about them. 'We found this one camera operator who had incredible access to a secret location, and he managed to film not just one, not just two or three, but four blue whales.' Burrowing owls, Florida, USA 'The natural habitat of these tiny owls is close-cropped prairies, where they can see over the grass for predators. But they've moved into human habitats where people beautifully mow their lawns. 'Males build these burrows and do a bobbing dance to attract a mate. Our story is that we join this community of owls, all of whom are paired off. There's one guy who was too late to the party, and he mournfully does this little dance. We do a kind of Sleepless in Seattle montage where the days go by, the sun sets, the sun rises. 'He does one last dance and he hears a female. She's also late to the party, and he goes into a hyperdrive. It's hilarious. There's this lovely moment where they meet, and she turns and does this big wink at him.' 'The story here is one of infidelity. To attract a mate, males do a dance and show off their blue feet. We filmed a courting pair, but when the male goes off to find food, the female's head is turned by another male who has even bluer feet, and she starts to sort of flirt with him. 'The other male then comes back, and they have a bit of a barney. We gave Tom a script but encouraged him to extemporize. He does it perfectly exclaiming, 'He's not gonna put up with that'. 'It's so unlike a narrator. That's what is unique about this project. There are these moments where, as an audience, you're brought into the shows through Tom almost the breaking the fourth wall.'
