VOICE OF NATURE

At 94 years old, the most famous voice in natural history documentary, Sir David Attenborough, still has a lot to say.

During the lockdown, the legendary 94-year-old broadcaster Sir David Attenborough was as busy as ever, if not doing what he had planned. He was teaching geography lessons on the BBC’s Bitesize Daily, an online learning platform helping children being schooled at home during the UK’s lockdown as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. He was also fronting a campaign to help save the London Zoo, which was closed for 12 weeks, putting its survival in grave danger.

“A zoo is a very important thing scientifically,” he said. “London was the first scientific zoo in the world, founded nearly 200 years ago, and has been at the forefront of technology and advances ever since then. If this country can’t support it, it would be a scandal.”

What he actually had planned for the lockdown period was the launch of his latest film, A Life On Our Planet: My Witness Statement And Vision For The Future, which was originally scheduled to premiere on 16 April at the Royal Albert Hall, but is now being launched, along with an accompanying book, in October.

The film will be released on Netflix, which is a departure from his long association with the BBC, where he started his career in TV at the very inception of the medium. For this new installation in Attenborough’s extraordinary portfolio of work, he considers today’s issues – climate change, pollution, extinction – through the lens of his own career, and his own experience on the planet, as possibly the human being who has witnessed first-hand more of the natural world than any other person alive. “I’ve had an extraordinary life,” says Attenborough. “It’s only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.”

It’s a terrifying prospect that, just as the zoo was threatened during the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole of the planet is threatened by humanity’s return to its usual ways. If we do not heed warnings like Attenborough’s, the zoo might be the only place any of the world’s natural wonders survive.

Funnily enough, the London Zoo played a major role in launching the veteran broadcaster’s extraordinary career. After working for a few years in educational publishing, Attenborough applied for a job in radio, which he didn’t get, but was later invited to try out a new thing they were launching at the BBC: television.

He took that up, and as a young exec in the 1950s was central to introducing and commissioning some of the ground-breaking programmes that played such a definitive role in establishing the new mass media, from Kenneth’s Clarke’s era-defining series Civilisations to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

While dabbling in some mostly studio-based broadcasting himself, his personal breakthrough on screen came when he presented a programme called Zoo Quest, a documentary series in which he accompanied zoo employees on expeditions around the world to find animals for the London Zoo. People simply hadn’t seen the creatures and places he was showing them before, and along with his unique style of presentation, the show was a hit.

Not only did that series launch Attenborough’s six-decade-plus career in broadcasting, but laid the template for the nature documentary as we know it today. He blended the sheer wonder of wildlife footage with an approach that had its roots in something like Clarke’s Civilisations, applied to the natural world: visual spectacle given a clearly and easily digestible narrative shape.

The nature documentary, and a star, was born, and the wonders of the natural world have been beamed into living rooms around the world to those inimitable vocal intonations ever since. Attenborough’s catalogue stands as a roll call of classics such asLife on Earth (1979), and The Living Planet (1984), the epicThe Trials of Life (1990) and explorations into the less spectacular (but utterly fascinating) The Private Life of Plants (1995). The new century didn’t slow him down at all, with The Blue Planet(2001),Life of Mammals (2002), Planet Earth(2006) and more recently 2018’s Blue Planet II andDynasties, proving the ongoing popularity of the man and the appetite for the subjects he is passionate about.

The culmination of these extraordinary decades of broadcast brilliance, however, in Attenborough’s ‘witness statement’, raises the dark shadow of all the wonder he has shown us: how documenting the natural world, through no design of his own, has taken the shape of a narrative of the destruction of the planet and the extinction of species.

“As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world – but it was an illusion,” says Attenborough. “The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day: the loss of our planet’s wild places, its biodiversity. I have been witness to this decline. A Life on Our Planet is my witness statement, and my vision for the future. It is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake – and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right. We have one final chance to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited. All we need is the will to do so.”

And so what might initially seem introspective and retrospective actually reveals itself to be future focussed, and concerned less with himself than with everyone (and everything ) else.

The new books’ slogan – See the world. Then make it better – neatly sums up Attenborough’s approach. To care enough to save the natural world, you first have to be aware of it, and awestruck by it. For decades, Attenborough’s films and series have enchanted us first, but have ended with the warning that everything we’ve just been marvelling at on our screens is being taken away, and will disappear forever unless we do something to stop it.

I have been witness to this decline. A Life on Our Planet is my witness statement, and my vision for the future.

For a sense of the urgency of his message, consider this documentary he narrated just two years ago: Namibian-based conservationist Maria Diekmann’s Pangolins: the World’s Most Wanted Animal, in which Attenborough helped uncover the world’s illegal rare animal trade, particularly the smuggling of vast quantities of pangolin flesh and scales in the East. What if we had listened and acted more swiftly and decisively?

For one thing, we’d probably all have watched A Life On Our Planet by now!

But in a world in which the issues of the day seem to be driven by youth activists, from Malala Yousafzai to Greta Thunberg, the depth and cumulative insights of a 94-year-old just might be what is needed to give their youthful zeal some substance, and their urgency some real scope. Attenborough has his eye on the future and, at 94, it’s clear it’s not for himself. Let’s hope the children of the future have been watching his output, or all the wonders he’s seen first-hand might be consigned forever to the BBC archive and the London Zoo.

As he told Gideon Rachman in an interview for the Financial Times last year, “The whole of our civilisation is dependent on the health of the natural world.” It’s not just the natural world that is at stake.

WATCH THE PREVIEW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-91umZ7cQE