Bullets flew past David Attenborough’s head as furious soldiers flagged down his minibus. “The road was blocked,” he would later write in his diary. “There was no escape”. It was January 1978 and the 51-year-old was filming Life on Earth, the series that would seal his reputation as Britain’s greatest natural history programme-maker.
The Rwandan soldiers suspected that the BBC crew were, in collaboration with conservationist Dian Fossey, making a film critical of the Rwandan authorities’ failure to protect the mountain gorillas. The crew was driven to the local police headquarters and interrogated. After a night of hotel arrest, Attenborough and episode director John Sparks were taken to an army compound.
Just how close they came, as Attenborough puts it, “to losing everything”, is one of the revelations in Bobin’s documentary, which marks Attenborough’s 100th birthday by going back half a century to the broadcaster’s greatest television triumph. The 13-part 1979 BBC series, made with Warner Brothers, was an ambitious attempt to explain the development of life on our planet. Filming took three years and had the team crossing the globe as Attenborough attempted to cover “every aspect of animal behaviour” in over 100 locations.
To make the new documentary, Bobin took Attenborough to a small cinema, played a selection of episodes from the original series, pointed a camera at him and asked the great man to remember, a process aided by his impeccably kept diaries. “He has phenomenal recall,” says Bobin. “And he’s a lot of fun to be with, still excited about things at nearly 100. It’s easy to forget his age, because his passion for programme making is undimmed.”
“I think the thing that worries him most is losing the power of his mind, because he has an incredible memory and is an incredibly good writer; he is a profound thinker about culture and conservation and the future of the world. But his mind is as sharp as ever.”
As well as Life on Earth itself, the new documentary employs footage of Attenborough’s earlier career, exploring the backstory of how the series came about. Attenborough had achieved some fame in the 1950s as the presenter of Zoo Quest, a programme that (unthinkably now) went on expeditions to find animals for London Zoo. But it was sheer chance that he came to be seen on our TV screens.
Attenborough’s derring-do (he ran after anteaters and caught baby alligators in his jacket), clean-cut looks and enthusiasm chimed with the times, and Zoo Quest became immensely popular.
In 1967, Attenborough oversaw the arrival of colour television in the UK with coverage of tennis at Wimbledon. Then, in 1969, he launched Pot Black and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. For the first time, snooker balls and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were seen in something like their true hues. What if he could do the same with leopards and jellyfish?
In the early 1970s Attenborough was in line for the job of director-general. He claims he would have been a poor DG: “I don’t have political skills. I don’t have political sensitivities. I may know about birds of paradise,” he tells Bobin, “but I certainly don’t know about prime ministers.” In 1973 he resigned as director of programmes and convinced the corporation to okay Life on Earth, with him as writer and presenter.
View oEmbed on the source websiteThere were other dangers. At one point in the mountain gorilla episode, director John Sparks thought an adult female was going to pull Attenborough’s head off. Going down into Arizona’s Grand Canyon, Attenborough had a violent allergic reaction to the donkey he was riding and his eyes closed up. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, their hotel was commandeered by an Iraqi tank division. Yet the team never doubted Attenborough.
When the Life on Earth crew arrived in the Comoros Islands off the east coast of Africa, the left-wing government had just been overthrown by French mercenaries, who shot the president. Permissions to foreign television crews were cancelled, but Attenborough persuaded officials to let them film.
Apart from the gorilla scene, the series featured several never-before-seen moments, including a lion hunt, a male frog spawning a youngster out of its mouth and, in the Comoros, a living coelacanth fish. Yet Life on Earth didn’t begin with gorillas or lions hunting in Tanzania – rather, the first episode was concerned with primitive algae. “I think that was very confident of them,” says executive producer of the new documentary Mike Davis. “One American co-producer at the time said, ‘An episode about green slime, are you crazy? How do you hook an audience across 13 hours?’ Today’s commissioners probably wouldn’t be brave enough with the audience’s attention span.”
“I was just about to start talking about the oppositional thumb and forefinger,” says Attenborough. “When I felt a hand come on top of my head. It was the adult female, she twisted my head, looked straight into my eyes and put a finger in my mouth.” Attenborough crawled back to director John Sparks and said, “Did we get much? And he said, ‘Well, we got a bit. I was waiting for you. I didn’t want to run out of film while you were explaining about the thumb and the forefinger’.”
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