Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild

In a lifetime of natural history filmmaking

I've seen many odd animals, but few odder than these

proboscis monkeys in Borneo.

I first saw them 50 years ago.

'Late one evening, we had a great stroke of luck.'

'For a troupe of the extraordinary long nosed proboscis monkey

'had come down to the river bank to feed.'

'When I started filming such creatures,

'it was quite easy to show viewers animals that hitherto had only

'been seen in the wild by intrepid explorers.'

'As the years passed, one way and another, we got better

'and better shots and in the process, I had some memorable encounters.'

Boo!

This is a very intelligent animal.

And top of the menu right now is salmon.

SNARLING

I think that was pretty clear!

I've been lucky enough to live through what might be

considered the golden age of natural history filmmaking.

Almost every year it seemed we found some new way of revealing

new things about the natural world.

'In the 1950s, much of the wildlife of the planet was still unfilmed, even unknown.

'And in the following 60 years,

'a succession of technical innovations enabled us to reveal more

'and more of the natural world in increasing detail.'

This is the first natural history film I ever saw - in 1934, when I was eight.

And I thought it was wonderful.

Ladies and gentlemen.

Let me put you out of your misery at once.

You're not going to see me for long, although I am inviting

you to come on this trip with me, you will only see me occasionally.

The man in the pith helmet is Cherry Kearton, one of the first

people to try and capture the lives of wild animals on film.

There are five million penguins on this island, which are called

the jackass penguins.

I'm always polite to animals,

and as I intend to stay with the penguins for several months,

I am naturally adopting my most friendly manner.

Kearton travelled around the world filming wild animals that

had never been filmed before.

His approach was hardly scientific,

but nonetheless he was very entertaining.

His sister, a typical flapper,

not content with being one of the fair sex, wants to join the air sex

But resigns herself to just a flip here, a flap there,

and a flop in between.

For all its obvious flaws, his films captured my childish imagination

and made me dream of travelling to far-off places to film wild animals.

And this is one of the very cameras Cherry Kearton used.

It's enclosed in a wooden box.

It was driven by hand and used 35mm film.

This distance across.

Within a few years, it was superseded by improved models like this one,

which had a metal box and it worked by clockwork

and it had a variety of lenses.

But it still used hefty 35mm film.

Happily however, there were smaller versions available.

A camera like this.

This used 16mm film which was only half the size

and it was powered by clockwork.

But unfortunately the BBC thought cameras like this were unprofessional.

And there was a huge row as to whether or not I could be allowed to take it.

But in the end I did, and it was with this I set off

to ramble around the jungles of the world looking for unfilmed animals.

My first natural history series, Zoo Quest,

recorded the progress of animal collecting expeditions

arranged with the London Zoo and brought to the screen,

places and animals that had never before been seen on television,

or in the cinema, come to that.

One targeted the largest lizard in the world which

lived on the small Indonesian island of Komodo.

Few people had heard of it and Indonesia no-one seemed sure where the island was.

Eventually, we set off with a fisherman who said that he did,

but after a couple of days at sea, I had my doubts.

I said to the captain, "You have been to Komodo before, haven't you?"

And he said, "Baloom."

And I didn't know what baloom meant.

So I had to go and find my Indonesian dictionary and looked it up

and it said, "Not yet."

So, it was clear he didn't know the way.

After a week at sea and having survived encounters with coral reefs

and whirlpools, we arrived at what I thought must be Komodo.

And I remember wading ashore across a coral lagoon

and finding a tiny little village and saying, "Excuse me, is this Komodo?"

HE CHUCKLES

And they, "Komodo". So it was OK.

The locals recommended we should use a dead goat as bait.

Once in the bush we began to build a trap using materials

gathered from nearby, as I recorded in my journal.

This was the dragon trap with a little bait in there.

When the dragon, if he went in the front end, trod on there,

it pulled it down which then pulled the ring down which released the rod,

which then pulled down, because of the lump of rock on the bottom.

So, clunk, down it would go.

And now, all we had to do was to wait.

There was a rustle in the bush and there was the dragon.

Our first sight of this magnificent monster.

To my surprise, we were looking at the trap and I heard a noise behind me.

I turned round and there was the dragon.

That was taken at that particular moment.

Looking at me straight in the eye from only about a couple of yards away.

We looked at each other and I thought, at least I might take your photograph.

So that was the photograph I took of him.

Then, he rather wearily heaved himself up and strolled round us

and went down into the dry riverbed where we'd made the trap.

And down came the door.

Hastily we piled boulders on the door so he couldn't lift it up.

We'd got him.

Those early films seem pretty ordinarily these days,

but they were nonetheless popular

because what ever we showed was new to most of our viewers.

So, in the 1950s we were taking cameras like this all over the world.

And then, an Austrian biologist and filmmaker decided to try

and take it under water.

His name was Hans Hass,

and he developed his own special housing to do that.

Hans and his wife Lotte

were the first to bring the wonders of life under the sea to television.

And their programs were all the more sensational

because few people at that time had scuba dived.

Take care, down there are sharks.

We are right on the reef's edge.

In the '50s, sharks had a terrible reputation.

They were the killers of the sea.

Anybody in water alongside a shark was clearly courting certain death.

Here were Hans and Lotte swimming alongside them.

The nation was astounded.

The sequence certainly had shock value, but perhaps it was also

the first step in changing our perceptions of sharks.

And like all television, it was still shown in black and white.

So, during the Zoo Quest series I had to describe an animal's colour in words.

This one was among the most brilliantly coloured of all

chameleons in the world.

His eyeballs are bright, rust-red and his body and legs striped

and blotched with a vivid green.

But, television was changing fast.

In the 1960s, the BBC was given a second television network

operating on a higher technical standard with the specific

job of introducing colour television.

And in 1965, I was put in charge of it with an office

here in the Television Centre in London.

To demonstrate colour on television could be both accurate and not garish,

I commissioned a series about the history of art.

It was called Civilisation.

I'm standing in the Sistine Chapel

and above my head is one of the greatest works of man,

Michelangelo's ceiling.

It was presented by Kenneth Clarke and became a great success.

So we followed it with other series on a similar scale about science,

economics and the history of America.

But I knew the most dazzlingly colourful series would be one about wildlife.

After eight years in administration,

I decided I wanted to go back to making programs.

And I put up a suggestion we should make 13 one-hour programmes

in colour tracing the whole history of life on Earth.

Thanks to the development of jet air travel,

we were able to film in 30 countries around the globe.

And as I traced the history of life on the planet, I could appear

to move from one continent to another in the space of a single sequence.

The South American rainforests are the richest

and varied assemblage of life in the world.

These limestones in Morocco...

Macaques live in many parts of Japan.

WHINING

Life On Earth was shown in 100 different countries

and seen by perhaps as many as 500 million people.

Natural history television was now a global phenomenon,

revealing our wonderful world in colour to all.

During the series, we made full use of both colour

and scuba gear to help show the underwater world as never before.

I even tried to follow Hans Hass' lead exploring the underwater world.

One of the problems with underwater films was you cannot talk underwater.

Most of the time if you have a breathing apparatus on your back,

you have something in your mouth.

But Alistair, one of my producer colleagues, was very keen we should

try and introduce the presenter talking to camera underwater.

There was a wonderful new invention called the bubble helmet and this is it.

You can put a microphone in one side of it.

So, we went down to the swimming pool in the hotel where we were staying

and this was screwed on my head.

It took a long time to screw it down tight to make it watertight.

I put it on like this.

I waded it into the water and I hadn't gone more than a foot underwater,

When suddenly, water started bubbling in, very alarming.

It was rising around you and I was going to drown.

How long would it take to get this off?

So I came out in a hurry. There was a fault, I said.

"Nonsense," said Alistair, "give it to me." He put it on his shoulders.

And I, with some pleasure screwed it down quite tight

and he waded into the pool.

And he came out even quicker than me with water

and he was gesticulating to get it off.

And I finally took it off and he said, "There's a fault."

I said, "Yes, there is".

So I happily left the helmet behind and reverted to my old mask

and scuba gear when it came to my next underwater assignment -

to reveal the extraordinary social behaviour and intelligence of dolphins.

They are full of curiosity,

they play with odd things they find, such as twigs,

and swimming among them leaves you in no doubt