I didn’t bother writing anything about David Attenborough’s new series, Life in Cold Blood, last week because the world and their dog were already doing that, and they're all better writers than me.
As a consequence of reading what everyone else was writing, I discovered that this is likely to be his final major series. I find this saddening.
I have fantastic memories of being a small boy and being allowed to stay up late to watch his programme – I think it would probably have been Life on Earth at the time – on the basis that it was educational, and also that I made a big fuss to be allowed to watch it, because it fascinated me.
Part of his appeal I suppose is that he’s been around for moons, and so is depending on your age either a kind of favourite uncle or a cool grandfather – or even great grandfather – to a considerable proportion of the population. Another is that natural sciences probably seem more accessible and more compelling to most people than other programming based on scientific content, however ‘popular’ in touch, and so makes us feel better about ourselves for watching something educational instead of some crap about property, or Katie Price, or whatever, as usual.
But that’s just petty really, because the real reason is his infectious enthusiasm and genuine sense of awe about what he is talking about, his charm, and his ability to engage and therefore to educate, whether we like it or not. It’s a well known pedagogical technique, but not many people are actually that good at it. I’d swap about 10,000 Robert Winstons or David Starkeys for one Attenborough, for example.
Watching his very early broadcasts is fascinating now, because they were so basic. I’m sure I’ve seen programmes he made decades ago where it was just him in a studio, sat with an animal, talking about it – ‘yes, this is it’s tail you see, it’s very interesting, because…’ and you still find yourself getting sucked in, however low-rent it seems now. Incidentally if you watch old comedy sketch programmes like Not the Nine O’clock News now, they often aren’t that funny, because too many of the cultural references have disappeared into the past, but a sketch that references Attenborough and Gorillas still makes sense because it’s one of the things from that era which is still emblazoned on people’s minds, because it so captured our imagination.
Even more extraordinary to me is the size of the budget and production values his programmes attract now. I can’t imagine even the most Reithian head of the BBC granting anything like the time, resources and budget that have become the norm in natural science programming were it not for the specific popularity and all round wondrousness of Attenborough. That makes us all richer.
I quite like the short ‘making of’ codas that he has included in more recent series as well. There he was, tonight, tracking down a striking bright orange thing called a golden frog, in Panama, with a biologist who was making frog call noises, which Attenborough was trying and failing to imitate himself. Again, the strength of Attenborough is to make you think this is a noble pursuit, rather than a thing that makes you think biologists are a bit mental. If you have ever spent much time with biologists then you’ll know, as I do, what a tremendous achievement even that fact is.
The thing about these frogs is that they use specific gestures as well as calls when they are attracting a mate or despatching a rival male. Attenborough was in full-on jovial grandfather mode, provoking a male frog into variously waving, calling or fighting with a small plastic model frog to illustrate the point. It was really a small point in the whole programme, but the significance within this coda was that you’d just watched the best hour long advert for preserving biodiversity and treating our natural environment as a precious asset that I can think of, excepting possibly another programme by Attenborough, and these frogs were seemingly literally on the edge of extinction as a consequence of the environmental impact of human development, such as a local road-building scheme, and the advance of a fungus.
So In Attenborough’s (possibly) last big series of programmes, we had just been introduced to a species of frog that the tiniest percentage of us would have even heard about before we’d started watching, and we were made to care about its plight, and dwell on the significance of its imminent loss, in a very brief lecture, utterly lacking any hectoring quality, but no less powerful or significant for its brevity or its tone. And a substantial part of the nation, I hope, felt privileged to have seen this waving orange frog, if only on television, before it is lost to us forever, and to muse on what that means not just for a locality in Panama where they had once been numerous, but what the threat to biodiversity means around the world and to us all.
It is easy to be cynical about tv in an age of Big Brother, Nuts TV, and possibly (though I hope not) even worse – and believe me I often am – but I think the kind of tv David Attenborough has been responsible for making may be about the finest justification for the BBC imagineable.
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