Attenborough 60 Years in the Wild

In a lifetime of natural history filmmaking,

I have seen many odd animals

but few odder than these proboscis monkeys in Borneo.

I first saw them some 50 years ago.

1956 ATTENBOROUGH: Late one evening we had a great stroke of luck,

for a troop of the extraordinary long-nosed proboscis monkey

had come down to the riverbank 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.

I think that was pretty clear.

I've been lucky enough to live through

what well 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,

back 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 are not going to see me for long.

Although I'm 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 5 million penguins on this island,

which are called the jackass penguin.

I am 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 round the world filming wild animals

that of course 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 flap in between.

For all its obvious flaws,

Kearton's 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 that Cherry Kearton used.

It's enclosed in a wooden box,

it was driven by hand

and it used 35-millimetre 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 35-millimetre film.

Happily, however, there were smaller versions available.

A camera like this.

This used 16-millimetre 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 that 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 for 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 in Indonesia, no one seemed very 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, "Belum," and I didn't know what belum meant,

so I had to go down into the hold and find my Indonesian dictionary.

I looked up belum and it said "not yet".

So it was clear that 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 the coral lagoon

and finding a tiny little village and saying,

"Excuse me but um is this Komodo?"

And they said, "Yeah, this is Komodo." That was okay.

The locals recommended that 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

and when the dragon, if he went in the front end,

trod on there, that pulled it down, which then pulled the ring down,

which released that rod, which then pulled down,

because there was a lump of rock on the bottom,

so clunk, down it would go.

1956 ATTENBOROUGH: 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 out at the trap

and I heard a noise behind me and 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.

And I looked at it and it looked at me and I thought,

"Well, at least I might take your photograph."

So that was the photograph I took of him.

And then eventually he rather wearily

heaved himself up and strolled round us

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

1956 ATTENBOROUGH: And down came the door.

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

We'd got him.

Those early films seem pretty ordinary these days,

but they were nonetheless popular because whatever 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 underwater.

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 programmes 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, of course, had a terrible reputation.

I mean, they were the killers of the sea.

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

And yet, 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.

1961 ATTENBOROUGH: 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 that colour on television could be both accurate and not garish,

I commissioned a series about the history of art.

It was called Civilisation.

I am 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 Clark

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 well that the most dazzlingly colourful series

would be one about wildlife.

After eight years in administration,

I decided that I wanted to go back to making programmes.

And I put up a suggestion

that 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 rainforest,

the richest and most varied assemblage of life in the world.

These lime stones here in Morocco...

Macaques live in many parts of Japan.

Life on Earth was shown in a hundred 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 Haas's lead, exploring the underwater world.

One of the problems with underwater films, of course,

was that you can't talk underwater.

Most of the time, if you've got a breathing apparatus on your back,

you've got something in your mouth,

but Alastair, one of my producer colleagues,

was very keen that we should try and introduce the presenter

talking to camera underwater.