How David Attenborough changed television by showing us the true face of nature

From the beginning of his life before the camera, Attenborough has demonstrated a striking, almost uncanny, talent for communicating the awe-inducing majesty of nature, along with its visceral lack of sentimentality, writes Ed Power

At age 92, Attenborough continues to push boundaries (BBC)

“National treasure” doesn’t even begin to do justice to David Attenborough. The natural history presenter is at once the country’s favourite beloved uncle, a lion of broadcasting and a voice in the wilderness warning that our addiction to plastics and other pollutants jeopardises the myriad of lifeforms with which we share the planet.

At age 92, Attenborough continues to push boundaries. He returns to the airwaves on Sunday with a landmark new BBC series, Dynasties. Echoing past triumphs beginning with Life on Earth (1979) and leading up to last year’s Blue Planet II, the show is being hailed as a leap forward in natural history television, combining state of the art filmmaking with life-and-death drama straight out of Shakespeare.

It undoubtedly promises to be a gripping watch. Having told the story of evolution and of nature’s ability to adapt to the most challenging environments, Attenborough now gives us a ground level view of life in the wild even as human population growth – and the attendant environmental destruction – hurtles towards a cataclysmic tipping point.

And that’s just the start. In 2019, he reunites with the creators of Planet Earth and Blue Planet for the Netflix eight-parter Our Planet – a collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund that will see Attenborough once more taking advantage of his unique profile to caution that humanity’s devastating impact is reaching a point of no return.

A young Attenborough in 1950s series ‘Zoo Quest’ (BBC)

But first there is the small matter of Dynasties, a globe-trotting project four years in the making. Each episode tracks the day-to-day experiences of a different animal – beginning with chimpanzees and taking in emperor penguins, hunting dogs, tigers and, fascinatingly, a female lion who must assume control of her pride when it is abandoned by its adult males

Dynasties is far from a one-person show (for Sunday’s first instalment, the camera crew trailed the chimp protagonist for up to 15 miles each day, often in 40 degree heat). Yet it simply wouldn’t work without Attenborough and his remarkable voiceovers – which convey the tooth-and-claw tumult of life in the wild, without anthropomorphising the animals or condescending to the viewer.

It is precisely this blend of drama and authority that has made Attenborough a singular presence in British broadcasting all the way back to the Fifties. From the beginning of his life before the camera, he has demonstrated a striking, almost uncanny, talent for communicating the awe-inducing majesty of nature, along with its visceral lack of sentimentality.

The real secret ingredient, however, was the humanity – with trace elements of bone-dry humour – he brought. This shines through the grainy black and white footage of Zoo Quest, one of the first shows he worked on after joining the BBC in 1952.

The powers that be hadn’t been particularly keen on Attenborough, who’d given up a steady job editing children’s textbooks to take a punt at broadcasting. One manager went so far as to note the young man’s “large teeth” made him ill-suited to a career on TV.

‘Planet Earth II’ was another hit for the beloved naturalist (BBC)

Indeed, the plan was for Attenborough to produce Zoo Quest with presenter duties carried out by London Zoo curator of reptiles, Jack Lester. It was only when Lester fell ill with malaria after the first episode that Attenborough was promoted – and only because part two had already been advertised in the Radio Times, meaning it was too late to bin the project.

Yet with Zoo Quest, which ran from 1954 to 1963, he showed he could both educate the public about nature and also convey what a jolly time he was having. The premise was simple: he would join keepers from the London Zoo as they travelled to exotic locations and captured animals for their collection (this was the era when animal rights was a contradiction in terms).

“Most zoos assumed that there was an unlimited supply of exhibits in the wild. No one seemed to suspect that a time might come when that supply might be in danger of exhaustion,” Attenborough wrote of Zoo Quest in his 2002 autobiography Life on Air. “So it was not uncommon for big zoos to send out expeditions to look for rare creatures that had seldom if ever been seen before in captivity.”

The BBC had been cautiously supportive rather than gung-ho, as was made clear when Attenborough was taken aside by the television unit’s head of departmental finances and told that, as a member of staff, he would receive no additional fee for stepping in as presenter. The first inkling Attenborough would have that the series was making waves came outside the corporation – when he was driving down Regent Street in London and a bus driver pulled alongside and loudly inquired as to what animals would feature the following week.

However, it was a charming encounter with an orangutang named Charlie which confirmed his natural affinity with all creatures furry and adorable. Having been rudely plucked from its home in the Borneo jungle and thrown in the cage, Charlie found a friend in Attenborough, whom he befriended to the point of allowing the eager young presenter to apply ointment to a minor injury .

A glorious future would await both. Charlie would become the father of the first Orangutang born in London Zoo, while Attenborough was to utterly transform natural history programming.

It was with 1979’s Life on Earth that he first demonstrated his ability to weave stunning footage and a deep knowledge of wildlife into a compelling overall narrative. The 20-plus year gap between Zoo Quest and Life on Earth is explained in part by an ongoing suspicion among senior figures at the BBC that nature was not a suitable subject for “serious” television, but even more so by a detour into management, which saw Attenborough become the first controller of BBC2.

In this capacity, Attenborough was, in 1969, instrumental in bringing to the screen one of the BBC’s most important ever documentaries, Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation.

“One of the things we developed was to take a really important subject and give it proper treatment,” he would recall. “It would be 13 parts because that was a quarter of the year. People were a bit suspicious about it. To everyone’s surprise….[the public] was delighted to make an appointment for 13 weeks.”

Encouraged by its success, he went on to commission Alistair Cook’s America: A Personal History of the United States (1972), and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973). The show he really dreamed of bringing to the screen, however, was a chronicling of the evolution of life on the planet, from single-cell organisms to human beings.

‘Dynasties’ is Attenborough’s new landmark BBC series (BBC)

The problem was that, if such a series was to be made, he couldn’t reasonably commission it – and then expect to be the presenter too. So he took the dramatic step of stepping down from BBC2 so that he could do Life On Earth before anyone else had the notion. Natural history programming – and British broadcasting more broadly – would be very different had he stayed.

“My worry was someone else would do it,” he recalled. “They would bring this idea to me what about telling the story of life on Earth in 13 parts. I managed to resign in order to do that series.”

Life on Earth was history-making in its scope and ambition – and brimming with moments that lingered with the viewer, especially if the viewer had been allowed stay up past bedtime on a Sunday to watch this show thrillingly swarming with bugs, lizards and African hunting dogs. There was that shot of Attenborough between the jaws of a huge extinct shark; those still gobsmacking images of frogs and flying squirrels soaring in achingly beautiful slow motion.

But most enduring of all was the visit Attenborough paid to a family of silverback gorillas in Rwanda. “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know,” he said, as he snuggled between two huge apes who appeared quietly thrilled to be appearing in a BBC documentary. “We’re so similar. Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell is so similar to ours. We see the world the same way as they do.”

Attenborough’s gorillas in his midst moment was to become one of the iconic images in British broadcasting – up there with Del Boy looking shifty behind a stall and Gazza bursting into tears.

Life on Earth would take three years and two round the world trips to complete. It was an enormous hit and a showcase on the world stage for both the BBC’s fledgling Natural History Unit in Bristol and Attenborough personally. Still, there were hiccups. When the series was sold to PBS in America, it was suggested that Attenborough’s voiceover be removed, for fear he would not be comprehensible to Middle Americans, and that Robert Redford narrate instead.

But PBS ultimately backed down and, both home and abroad, Life on Earth was soon on its way to blockbuster status. “Life on Earth was gratifyingly well received,” Attenborough would write. “Its ability to take the viewer in a fraction of a second from one continent to another, the systemic way and serious way in which we had surveyed the natural world, not taking short cuts and featuring groups of animals that that had been largely neglected – sea slugs, legless amphibians, naked mole rats and other creatures – made a great impression.”

Last year, Attenborough collaborated with the Queen on an ITV documentary

Anyone else might have looked on such an achievement as their legacy. Attenborough, however, was merely getting started. He followed with the 1984 sequel, The Living Planet, which examined a different environment every week. This culminated in the nightmare-fuelling episode in which Attenborough scrutinised creatures that had adapted to living amongst humanity, and which presented a shiver-inducing tableaux of bed bugs, creepy crawlies in the carpets, spiders in bedroom corners and so forth.

Thus began an unparalleled streak of award-winning programming, including 1990’s The Trials of Life, with its famous/notorious footage of a killer whale springing on a sea lion colony in Patagonia and “playing” with its prey before devouring it. He also had the privilege of crawling inside a termite mound – a space so cramped he couldn’t turn around and so had to back in and out painstakingly between shots.

This was followed by Life in the Freezer (1993), a study of animals in arctic environments that featured a distressing sequence in which a leopard seal killed and dismembered a young penguin (Attenborough has always insisted that it would be wrong to step in and interfere, no matter how harrowing the events caught on camera). Then came The Private Life of Plants (1995) and the The Life of Birds (1998), the latter of which provided a flash of Attenborough’s underrated wit as he struggled to keep a straight face as an agitated bird-of-paradise constantly interrupted with its excited hoots.

Technological advancements meant that the sophistication of the images Attenborough and the BBC could present increased over time. With 2001’s The Blue Planet, he stunned audiences with revolutionary aerial footage of migrating whales and dolphins.

And 2006’s Planet Earth set jaws agape with its images of giraffes sweeping across the Savannah. He also sat down with then US President Barack Obama in 2015 (with lifelong fan Obama interviewing Attenborough rather than the other way around), “narrated” an Adele video for BBC Radio 1’s Greg James and, last April, nattered with the Queen for an ITV documentary.

But it was with the 2017 Blue Planet follow-up – the imaginatively titled Blue Planet II – that Attenborough confronted the lasting damage humanity was inflicting upon the environment. His warning about the threat posed by plastics had a genuine impact – with the subject raised in the House of Commons and the European Parliament voting to ban single use plastics such as straws.

“It is now increasingly apparent,” cautioned Attenborough with uncommon severity, “that one species, our own, has developed the unique ability of so altering its surroundings it can destroy whole species, whole environments.”

The theme will be returned to in Dynasties, though Attenborough would seem to view it as his task to persuade rather than lecture the viewer. The series will reference the tension between humanity’s desire to raise itself up and the impact this is having on the natural world – though there is to be no preaching to the punter.

“It’s a very difficult thing to deal with – men, women and children need space too,” Attenborough commented recently. “Look at tigers in India. Tigers eat human children, they hunt them, they do. So people living alongside tigers have got a very, very tough problem. They have to be very strongly convinced that tigers have a right to live. Our job is to raise people’s passion and belief and desire to recognise that animals have a right to some sort of space.”

It’s a testament to Attenborough’s authority that he can convey a stark message about the environment without coming across as superior or all-knowing. Perhaps that is because his journey from observer of nature to advocate on its behalf has been ongoing and intensely personal.

“I was interested in the natural world, but it was nothing to do with saving the planet. There were people who thought the country had been desecrated in terms of putting up pylons and things like that. But the idea that you could actually destroy the Earth didn’t really occur….It was assumed the world was big enough. Maybe it was. But when I was a kid there were only a third of the people on the planet that there are today. It doesn’t seem big enough any more.”

Dynasties begins on BBC1 on Sunday at 8.30pm