Uncle to the nation

It was only when David Attenborough’s autobiography arrived for review that I realised I had been dodging his television programmes for years. Nothing personal; it was just that a pigeon on the pavement is more interesting to me than a bird of paradise on a television screen, a peep-show, that seems to push me further from ‘nature’, not nearer. This perhaps snooty self-revelation is only intended to highlight the way, when I came to open his book, I found myself laughing delightedly, and greatly warming to him.

He is just a jobbing tellyman after all, a ‘programme-maker’, with all the compromises that entails, and he fell into it by accident. Bored with a job in educational publishing, he applied for a place on a BBC training course (Sound) and was turned down. His rejected application was seen by someone at the television part of the BBC, which was just getting going again after the war, and he was invited to apply again. ‘I have little memory of the selection board. I spared them my views about the social function of public service broadcasting in a democratic country, since I hadn’t thought about it. Nor could I offer them a critique of any recent programmes, since I hadn’t seen any.’ What a glorious amateur muddle BBC TV (Talks) then was: trainees were shown charts of the structure of the Corporation by a man notable for a book on mediaeval witchcraft, and the head of the department was an expert on the Icelandic sagas.

Also, how gloriously awful some of those early programmes must have been. Most of the people invited to take part in them considered television merely silly – telecelebrity had not yet been thought of; they either didn’t try at all or sent the whole thing up. One of the young Attenborough’s first suggestions consisted of asking people to identify photographs of places and then to talk about them. For the pilot he began with an easy one, the Burning Ghats at Benares.

Sari-clad women were bathing in the holy waters of the Ganges, wisps of smoke rose from funeral pyres, etc. ‘Osbert Lancaster, what do you think?’ Long pause. ‘No idea.’ ‘Peter Fleming?’ ‘Stumped.’ ‘John Betjeman?’ Betjeman looked long and hard at the picture, the pagodas, the veiled women, the smoking pyres. ‘Got it!’ he said, triumphantly. ‘The Thames just above Maidenhead.’

Those were the days. There was one successful programme in which a curator from the London zoo handled animals in the studio and was occasionally bitten, which was a high spot. ‘Surely we could do better than this?’ asked Attenborough (the question could be a motto for his whole career). To cut a long and well-told story short, Attenborough, then a mere studio producer of what were more or less panel games, somehow talked the London zoo into mounting an animal-hunting expedition to Sierra Leone, and his masters at the BBC into sending him to film it. A famous programme, Zoo Quest, was the result. Part of the deal was to bundle up the pretty creatures they had filmed and bring them back to the zoo. This did not seem to worry Attenborough; perhaps it would not have concerned many at the time. Seems like cheating to me: thrilling people with film of wild creatures, and then putting them in bags. The zoo curator who was to have fronted the film fell ill, so Attenborough had to go before the camera himself. A career was born, and an obsession. For the next 50 years he was to jump at every chance (creating many of them for himself) to get as far away from the studios as possible and into the most nearly impossible places.

At first he had to travel like Sanders of the River, with hundreds of porters. He had to film on 16mm, unheard of on TV, but 35mm cameras would have been too cumbersome in jungles and the like. These noisy cameras could not record synchronised sound, but that was solved back home by ‘Beryl the Boot’, who could reproduce all sorts of footsteps (in snow, by rhythmically squeezing a silk stocking filled with custard powder) as well as, by chewing, reproduce the sound of an owl ingesting a vole. (There is always something phoney about filming.) Attenborough was nearly drowned on his way to make the famous film of the ‘dragons’ of Komodo, and he learned that on the way back his rascally skipper planned to murder him. But his curiosities contain other dangers. Going to film the dragons again, years later, being short of ‘footage’ for his latest venture, he is forced to sigh, ‘It is usually a mistake to go back.’ This time he travelled in a powerful ferry loaded with tourists, and was confronted on the island by a note saying, ‘No Smoking’ and another, ‘Beware dragons crossing.’ ‘I could hardly absolve myself from having contributed in some measure to this sorry transformation.’ He consoles himself with the thought that if the animals did not ‘earn their keep’ they might not survive at all. This book is an account of how he, ingeniously, albeit obsessively, earned his own keep, thereby becoming a sort of naturalist uncle to the nation.

John Beteman used to call him ‘nephew’, appropriating the title ‘uncle’ for himself, at least for a while, but surely also with slyness suggesting that he foresaw what Attenborough was to become.