April 27, 2026 • 61 mins
Sir David Attenborough turns 100 this year—and no one has done more to shape how humanity sees our planet. But for years, there was one issue he didn’t talk about. Emmanuel & Kai chart the story of how one nerdy rock-collecting kid became one of TV’s biggest stars, and took on the most important mission of his life.
Additional archive: Our Planet II, Netflix 2023
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin from BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries. This is big lines.
I'm Manguel Jochi, I'm Kyrie And on this show what
we do is we take a single cultural icon and
break down their legacy with the help of the BBC's
vast archive. And today Kai, we're going to be talking
(00:39):
about Sir David Attenborough.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Sir David Edinburgh, even the sir, even the surpert.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I know, I had special joy in like adding that
bit to I was like, it is Sir David, thank
you very much. But okay, when you think of Sir
David Attenborough, what do you think of.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
An old man crawling around in the dirt whispering at
a bug? Ye are like a snake or lion or
something you know.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
And I have to.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Say also because I just covered David Attenborough late in life,
you know it's once he was older and then I
looked back at like who was he as a young man?
Also I think of he was a snack.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Oh okay, that is not what I expect. It's a
bona fid snack. But yes, you are right, the old
man whispering like describing nature like just stuff like this.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
This is a poison dart frog males raise their young
in a very special way. A father who replaced each
one of his tadpoles in his own tiny pool of water.
This is one nice and safe.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Ah. Listen to his voices like sliding into a warm bath.
You know what I mean. Yes, Sir David Attenborough is
of course the world's most famous nature broadcaster. That voice
we've talked about and that we've been gushing over is
so distinctive, and I don't know, he's basically I feel
like my entire lifetime, but also my parents' entire life.
(02:23):
He has been the voice of the natural world. Like
he's been making nature programming for the BBC at this
point for over seventy years. Is actually his one hundredth birthday.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
This may oh wow, because he's still making stuff, like
I still think from him fairly recently.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
He's still making stuff. It's funny he described him like
both as an older man and as a younger man,
because in my brain he's kind of always been old.
But I say that with the utmost respect, you know,
I mean, he's always been this old kind of revered figure,
this this voice.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
The thing I've always loved about him is this narration
that he does. It doesn't shy away from like the
truth of the way the natural world works, right, like
things dying to get killed. But he's always talking from
this place of just utmost wonder, you know, like almost
childlike wonder. But recently I had a kind of different experience.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
You're not getting ready, ruin David adboro for me, are you?
Speaker 1 (03:20):
No? No, no, no no no. But you know, occasionally
I am prone to like the occasional bout of insomnia.
And a couple of weeks ago, I was unable to
sleep and I just rolled over, pulled out my phone,
was like, you know what I should watch to get
to sleep. I should just watch like some nature program
and David seething voice will put me to sleep, you
(03:40):
know what I mean? What was the land of my vibe?
And you know I was watching this episode and it's
this beautiful scene. It's basically takes place in what I
guess I can only describe as a ocean sort of nursery,
right picture, like beautiful pristine waters. And in these pristine waters,
this g whale has just given birth to like her
(04:03):
calf and is raising it. And it's the most idyllic
sort of fun, and so they Atton Brook comes in
and sort of sets up. You know, they've been in
this wonderful place for months and months, but you know
they're gonna have to move on because they've gotta go
get get food and to play a bit of it
here for you.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
It's time for the pill to head north. Since arriving
three months ago, the female has lost a third of
her body weight, so now she must begin the long
trick back to her feeding grange.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
And I was like, Okay, I've been here before.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I've seen this one. I've seen this.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
When I wrote to me, I'm like, I'm thirty two.
I've been watching these programs my whole life. I know
that you have introduced me to as cute as hell
little baby calf, and it is gonna have to find
some way to survive on this journey in the open water.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You are gonna put this calf in danger, David, adgirl.
We know it's coming.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
But what's interesting is you don't go immediately to like
some other sea animal coming out of nowhere to have
this baby. Well. Instead, these whales have to go through
shipping lanes.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
The constant engine noise disrupts the underwater soundscape, disorientating the
whales and increasing the risk of a collision. Scores of
whales die every year in ship strikes in these waters.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
And guess what happens, guy, we kill a whale. No,
what does happen is that the whale gets her baby
calf through all these shipping lanes without incident. Everything's great,
and then a bunch of orcers coming and just murk
our kids like killer whales. Listen. The propaganda that three
(05:57):
really perpetuated about the killer whales needs to be studied.
They really tricked us as a species. But I digress.
I digress. I was sitting there heart broken, but still
kind of stuck on the whole shipping lane part of it,
because I was just like, oh, this is this is
so different to the sort of nature programming that I
(06:18):
feel like I grew up watching, right, Like it felt
like all these animals took part in a world kind
of a little bit divorced from us, you know that
he was narrating, and.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Like you're just like, Oh, they're just we're just watching
We're just you know, we're just watching nature.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I know. And it's not a whole TV show. It
takes place in the real world right, where like animals
don't do exactly what you want them to do, and yeah,
humans are destroying the planet. And as I lay there
now very much not able to go to sleep, I
don't know, I was like, Oh, David attonbrom is someone
who even at nearly one hundred years old, is still evolving,
you know. And as I went through the BBC archive
(06:56):
to just learn more about him, I realized that his
life's work was really shaped our complicated and thought relationship
with the Earth for the last seventy odd years. And
I don't know, Okay, it made me question and some
things about the effort to say the planet in a
way that really surprised me.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I am excited to hear about this because I have
two been challenged by David Abrough.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
All right, let's get to it after the break. Welcome
back to Big Lives today. We're talking about So David Attenborough,
so guy, like I said earlier, So David is turning
one hundred on the eighth of May, which means he
(07:43):
was born in nineteen twenty six in the Midlands in
the UK and he's part of this generation of British
Men who seem to enter the world at the exact
right time. And what I mean by that is he
grew up and was old enough to have to live
through World War two, right, but he was young enough
(08:05):
that he got to experience the building of society that
took place after World War Two. Right post World War two,
there are all of these things that are being created
in almost every single sector of life, Like all these
institutions that we now take for granted as existing forever,
they're coming into therefore after the Second World War, and
(08:27):
he's part of that first generation that is totally allowed
to take advantage of all of it. Anything they want
to do, they can kind of do because it's starting. Yes, yes,
the white definitely, the white ones. Yes, I should preface
this by saying it's a great time to be a
white man, which it kind of always is, but it
definitely was.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
This was the.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Definitely and maybe unsurprisingly, as he grows up, he's a
nerd from the off right. He has all these stories
about just like riding his bike around the Midlands looking
at rocks because he's so into them, like that's that's
that's his whole thing as a kid. Here's him talking
(09:10):
about that in an interview he did in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
I used to bicycle a great deal all over the Midlands.
And from a geological point of view, of course, Midlands
is marvelous because well, for one thing it.
Speaker 5 (09:23):
Is not is provincial.
Speaker 6 (09:24):
Is the Midlands is enormously famous throughout the world amongst geologists.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
There's a fossil.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
There's a little village which I used to know very well,
and I'm sure it's still there. Whether whether it's a
village still, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
Tilton.
Speaker 6 (09:39):
Tilton is on the Armstone Country and there's one particular
kind of fossil called tilt and us rus, which was
internationally known after that little village. The Childwood Forest one
of the key sites where people really discover some of
the oldest rocks on the surface of the earth.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
His brother is Richard Attenborough, who you know, famous vespian
known to many people as the old guy in Jurassic
Park who owns the park.
Speaker 7 (10:04):
Oh wait, I didn't know this, Yeah, yeah, that is
his brother, the brothers. Yes, wow, okay, totally. And he's
interested in so many different things besides this rock. So
you know, he ends up studying a bunch of sciences
at university, including zoology. He ends up like sort of
joining the Navy. He's doing that for a while.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Then he goes on to work in editing, like he's
editing children's textbooks for a while, and then he decides, okay,
that's not actually my jam, and so what he picks
is the BBC, which has existed of course in radio
for years, but in terms of the TV sort of
started during the war, but it was really coming to
the fore now like in this period after the Second
(10:49):
World War. And he gets hired versus a production system
and becomes a producer and in these days, like the
BBC is not that big as a TV institution. If
you're a producer, you kind of get to do whatever
you want, and you're doing all sorts of programming. And
what David really wanted to do were nature programs, except
(11:12):
you know, nature programs back then and by now we're
talking about, like the fifties look very different to what
they look like now. I'm just going to play you
a clip of David explaining this from an interview he
did on the BBC in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
The man in the early fifties for animals was very
great naturalists called George Camsdale and George Cansdale was at
the London Zoo and he used to bring in animals
from the zoo and he would show them on a table.
It's sort of doormat thing, which is absolutely the right
way to do it, and the animals always bit him
more escaped or something, and of course great headlines in newspapers.
(11:47):
But of course the trouble with that was that you
the animal looked sudden, as though it was extraordinary. You
didn't understand why it had legs that shape or tail
that shape, and you could only understand that if you
saw it in the wild.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
I don't know if you remember this from kindergarten and
this is the experience, but it's like I remember being
in kindergarten and like one day in the class there'd
be somebody from the zoo who bring like a chinchilla. Yeah, yeah,
like that's kind of what they would do.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
But just on TV it became a David Letterman bit.
It was like that's what I remember it from me.
He had that guy they would bring on like animals
and the animal would wold out and then it'd be
like human getting crazy.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
One hundred percent, just the whole thing of like what
if you put an Ostrich in a studio what happens?
But David wanted to be out in the world filming
animals in their live habitats. And to be fair, there
were people that were doing that, and they were doing
it in a very kind of extreme way to what
we do now. You had people like Jacques Cousteau out
(12:45):
making these sort of big films. There's a very infamous
one from like the nineteen fifties in which he's trying
to show people a bunch of fish underwater in this
coral reef, and there's no real underwater camera technology that
we have today. So the dude literally just frowze dynamite
into the core reef and just films as all of
(13:07):
the fish just rise shorter up. No, it is so
they the coral reef, they blow up the coral reef
and you just see like all of these fish just
kind of floating in the water. And then they put
all of them onto shore and you see this poor
little puff of fish just kind of like puffing its
(13:29):
heart out like it's it's dark, it's it's it's dark.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
That is wild.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
You have that on one extreme like not suitable really
for public TV.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Just who was the producer that was like, oh my,
I got it. I know what we'll do. We'll blow
it up and then the bodies will come out and will.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, a lot of that. So you have you either
have stuff like that which is like kind of too
ghastly for TV even by both standards of that day, right,
and then you have another type of TV programming that
is really just more about the exploration of the place.
And there was this one couple, Armand and Mikayla Denise
(14:07):
and I just want to play you a bit of
their show so you see what that's like.
Speaker 8 (14:10):
The Flying Foxes camp was in the very heart of
the swamp. To get close enough to them for good pictures,
we had to make up our minds to cross the
swamp and reach their camp on foot.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
At any moment, you may miss your putting, go down
into this bubbling mat and be hardly able to extricate yourself.
Speaker 8 (14:31):
It takes some true devotion to photography and on the
part of their wife, some true devotion to her husband
to go and set up cameras in the middle of
a manglove swamp.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
It sounds like a Melbrox, it does it does and
no shade to them. It's like, you know, and you're
hearing that narration right as you see these two like
white people walking through the swamp. You can barely even
see the animals that they are getting to, the flying
foxes and besides that little bit of human To be honest,
(15:03):
it's kind of boring, right, yeah, like there's not that
much that happens. And actually is David Attamborough talking about
that again from that nineteen seventies interview.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
Nobody thought that the elephants were going to charge them,
or bite them or do the other things they would
do to George Cansdale. So I thought, if you could
put the two things together, you might have quite a
good recipe for a program. So let's do one where
you film the animal in the wild, it's then caught
and then you have it in the studio live.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
And that was the basis of zoo Quest.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Now. Zoo Quest was David Adamberg's first big coming out
party in terms of nature programming. It came out in
nineteen fifty four and it was like revolutionary.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Tonight, We've got rather different programs for it.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Zoo Quest was so massive because it was in the wild,
right I feel like the way nature programs were because
we're just in the wild looking at anything, and David
Attenborough was telling us about that thing, right. But what
David did was he constructed a whole sort of storyline
and a reason for them to be in Africa for example,
for the first season. And the whole program is David
(16:16):
Attenborough and in BBC tagging along with the London Zoo
as they capture animals to bring back to that zoo.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Oh wow, so he was literal in his description.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yes, like literal zoo quest. Like the whole first series
is framed around basically this small, cool looking bird called
the Pickaparties that looks like a miniature balled Ostrich. It's like,
we're gonna look for this bird, and along the way
of looking for this bird in this sort of quest,
they then show you all these other animals. And David
(16:50):
Attenborough is not the initial host of this program. The
initial host of his program is one of his friends
who works at the zoo who's sort of helping lead
his expedition. This man named Jack Lester, and so David's
producing him offering the program. Then Jack gets sick and
he can't actually host the first episode, and so David
(17:11):
takes over. And the format of this show is that
it's still kind of a live show in so far
as it kind of looks like the nightly news. So
David Addbruh is there sitting at a desk, and I
just have to say seeing him young like that is
mind blowing. One. He's very good looking.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
This is what I said. I had to look it up.
I looked it up. At one point I was like,
what was this man? Because he's like I only know
him as this old, old, old man, and I was like,
what's he look like? And I was like, damn, he's
a snag.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
You know. At this point, he's in his thirties, right
the prime of his life, and you can tell he
looks he's got it going on. And I don't know,
it's so interesting to see him because even though you
know he is like a fully grown man at this point,
he still looks so youthful and so wide eyed. And
so yeah, I'm just so excited and happy to be
(18:04):
doing the thing. I'm just going to play you this
scene from Zoo Quest to set the scene for you.
David Attenborough and like his colleagues, they're sort of looking
I think in the undergoth for one specific animal when
they hear another animal might be nearby and they go
after him. I'm going to play you this.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
There was a rustle on the other side of the thicket.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
We looked up.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
And there was the antea itself, galloping across the savannahs.
Without thinking how we're actually going to catch it, Jack
and I set off wildly in pursuit, and.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Like, literally that's what you watch. You watch a young
David Attenborough chasing across the savannah on foot after an
antita that wants no parts of this. And I mean
it's messed up in a bunch of ways, but it
is funny because David Attenborough is bad at catching this anteea.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
It's not in his nature. He already does like this
isn't what I'm supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, and he doesn't have a wheels like that. But
basically what happens is one of the local that's helping
them capture the antis and they're like, okay, here it is,
We're taking it off to the zoo and then you
would see it later in the studio with David, so
you sort of have that sort of combo thing but yeah,
the show is a real program of its times. There's
(19:26):
no real discussion at any point, like you can it
doesn't even occur to anybody that, huh, you know, how
many of these like animals are there for us to
just take from this place? And I have to say,
very times I feel uncomfortable watching it because the whole
sort of conceit of it is like, right, we're out
(19:50):
in the world exploring this pristine land that we can
just take stuff from. So it does feel very much
still a creature of colonialism, you know what I mean.
Like they're dressed up like the bad guy in Jumanji,
you know, just like the like sort of khucky like
pants and like that white like they have on all
(20:11):
of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
British people Roman the world figuring out was mine totally.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
And it's interesting because like the local people exist in it,
but they exist in it kind of as a vehicle
for like you know, like they're part of the attraction
in that kind of way. But you know, fifties the
show is a massive hit.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
That was the end of our zoo quest good Night, and.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I should say today if it is on record now
basically being like yeah, it's it's not age, well, this
is what we did at the time that would not
fly now for the rest of it. But it's a
big hit, and they do it for a couple of eeas,
and they do these different excursions to different parts of
the globe. Even at that time, that sort of practice
(21:00):
of zoos just going to any country they want in
the world and just grabbing animals, it's starting to get
frowned upon. Like the wild Life Fund is up and
running by this point, and it's not necessarily your organization
that it would become today, but you know, essentially a
bunch of rich people come together and are like, you
know what, we should conserve some of these animals that
(21:23):
we've been collecting. We've collected enough, and so they start
basically trying to replicate the national parks model that exists
here in the US like in other places to preserve
some of these animals. And so a show like zoo
Quest is not really the vibe ah and as it is.
David Attenborough has sort of flirted with being a host,
(21:44):
liked it, but ultimately he's still a producer at heart
and goes into the development work as like an exec
like that's the track you choose it. He basically chooses
to be the version of our boss.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
That's crazy, rightly imagine David Attenborough running around as an
executive to be like, how do we fund this thing.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
One hundred percent? But that is exactly what he does,
and he rides through the ranks pretty quickly at this time.
So much change is happening at the BBC right Like
you know, I have said they were pretty small when
he started there, and he's there as it starts expanding.
So BBC at first was just like one channel, like
BBC one, but then it grows, so then you have
BBC two, and BBC two becomes sort of like the cool,
(22:23):
younger cousin of BBC one and is doing all these
different sorts of experimental programming, particularly really leaning into color television.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, good evening.
Speaker 9 (22:35):
This is BBC two.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
And the person who really helps usher in that era
and who gets tapped to around BBC two is David Attenborough.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Wow. I did not know this, but.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
More I learnt about this, I was like, oh this
makes sense, you know, you know, when you learn about something,
you're like, oh, right, the rules of television are still
being made up, even with color television. So I'll just
give you example. So you know how tennis balls are
the color that they are, like yellow and stuff. Do
you know why that is?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I could guess for Wimbledon to be able to see
the ball going back exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
But you know who really pushes for that.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
No, David Attenborough.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
David Attenborough pushes for that because he's just like with
transition to college, you can't really see the balls up
against the grass. At Wimbledon, we should really change the
ball color, and so that's what happens.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
It's just funny. I don't it's kind of blower in
my mind because it's making me think of him so differently,
you know, Like I just I really do think of
him as a naturalist, you know, like who somebody was
like point a camera at this guy, you know. But
he's a TV genius, is what you're telling me, Like
he is like creating TV.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
And at the same time as he's making these decisions,
the BBC is expanding one of his key units, which
is its Natural History unit, which is this team of producers,
but also this team of scientists who was devoted to
like natural world programming. Now by this point we've left
the fifties behind and now we're moving coon closer to
(24:11):
the seventies, and the technology for filming nature has moved
ahead leaps and bounds, and there are a bunch of
young people a BBC who want to do stuff with that,
and they want to put it into like a never
before seen TV spectacle. And so David Adsonbury, here's about
this and it is just like being executive has been fun.
(24:32):
But I actually think that I would rather go back
to programming, which is a big deal because he is
so good at his job that people are talking about
him running the entirety of a BBC Wow. So he
quits and what he ends up doing becomes like this
seminal program. It is this big, massive demonstration that just
(24:55):
captures life on Earth. And that is exactly what it
is called. It's this problem called life on Earth. I'm
just going to play you a quip of it.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
There are some four million different kinds of animals and
plants in the world, four million different solutions to the
problems of staying alive. This is the story of how
a few of them came to be as they are.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
So I saw a flash of recognition in your face
when I said life on Earth. Did you watch this
as a kid, not.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
As a kid. I mean, this stuff was on in
the background. But I have to say, you know, I've
been on for the last like three or four years,
this journey for myself around like my relationship to the
natural world. And at one point in that started binging
David Attenboroughshow, WHOA and Life on Earth like it was
all I would watch on television for a really long time.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Wow wow wow, Well, so I don't need to explain
you like, Life on Earth is extraordinary. So the version
that I remember seeing as a kid, they had edited
it down into like three episodes basically, but actually the
way it originally aired, it was like thirteen episodes, but
(26:09):
every week, and it was must see appointment television. What
it did was it told essentially the story of evolution
by looking at modern animals that exist today. And it's extraordinary.
And it's funny because I watched it again in preparation
for this episode, and I have to say, you know,
as beautiful as all the nature programming is now, the
(26:32):
shots of this are just gorgeous, like really really beautiful,
And in the middle of it all, holding it all
together is Sir David. And the thing that he does
that is revolutionary in this program is that he really
inhabits for the first time the sort of narration we
(26:52):
know him for in a bunch of different ways, which
is that it's not just that you're watching a nature program.
It's not that you're watching him exploring through nature in
some sort of colonial way. What you have is this
authoritative voice who is telling you a story, who is
making an argument, and what's it. You can tell he's
having fun doing it, like so so much fun doing it,
(27:15):
and he's you know, the talk of the town. He
goes on this like late night talk show hosted by
this guy, Terry Wogan, and I just want to pay
you a little bit of it because it's just so
fun to see him talking about just how big it was,
Like we'll be the British people just marveling at like wow.
This became a global sensation.
Speaker 9 (27:34):
Life on Earth, the Monu metalal series, done in nineteen
seventy nine, three years to do and seen all over
the world. It must be, it must be famous worldwide.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
Some I talk finish rather remarkably well.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
I walked into into a hotel in hell Sinky and
saw myself saying all these said these Finnish words, which
rather than impressed me because they're dubbed it to finish.
Speaker 9 (27:58):
But in America, I understand they decided your voice wasn't
good enough.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
No, they they actually they did take it as it was.
Speaker 9 (28:08):
And then I've read somewhere that that one of the
Americas said, no, well he's a little too British for us.
Speaker 5 (28:13):
We had to argue about that and we won.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Oh yeah, but basically he gets dubbed right in allviously
different languages, and so the whole world gets to see
this nature program which like superduces it. Yeah, as you've
probably realized by now, we're in the late seventies, nineteen
seventy nine, we're into eighty, and all of this is
happening at this time when modern environmental activism is really
(28:39):
really taking off, right, Like you know, I talked about
the World Wildlife Fund being formed like in the sixties.
Ten years later the seventies, we have the Saber Whale Campaign,
We have Earth Day, this big sort of collective campaign
to get people interested in the earth and interested in
green policy in a way that they never have been before.
(28:59):
So that together with all of us expanded programming that
David Attenborough is doing happens at exactly the right time,
and so the ratings of Through the Roof and VUVI eighties,
he sort of starts making the stuff that, in a
way we sort of know him for. And it's interesting
to watch him in the shows that he does after
(29:20):
Life on Earth because he's in the shots like way more.
Obviously now that he's an older man, he's not actually
in nature doing as much anymore. He's mostly a voice,
occasionally popping in front of the camera. But in those
days he's in it quite a lot. And I watched
one particular interview that really surprised me and sort of
(29:42):
changed my view of him a little. So I'm gonna
set the scene for you. It's nineteen eighty four. David
Anderbrew is appearing on that same late night TV show, Wogan.
Speaker 9 (29:55):
My next guest, is also pretty well known as a traveler.
Of all the people in television peraps, he's the one
who receives not only the most popular but also the
most critical acclaim. David Attenborough.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
And David Addbrook comes on and him and his host
Terry Wogan get talking about just the difficulties of this job.
Because Wogan is legitimately curious. He's like, how are you
doing this?
Speaker 5 (30:20):
How are you.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Doing like because even the concept of like shooting something
like that over a period of three years right where
you have to be in the right spot to watch
like a frog give birth, that was all still new
to the public.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
It's still pretty marvelous. I still watch this stuff and
I'm like, how much money did this require? How much
time this requires?
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Is pretty marvelous totally. And David Adam protells his anecdote
about a recent shoot he's been on where him and
his team come up with this stunt that he's going
to do where the whole point is he's going to
talk about the upper canopy of the rainforest and how
important that is while actually being in the upper canopy
of the rainforest and their brainstorming how they're going to
(31:04):
do this because these trees that he's talking about are
like eighty feet tour, right, so how are they going
to get to the top, And one of his producers
comes up to him, It's just like, we'll make it work.
We'll put you in this sort of super complex Pulley
system and I'm just going to play you a bit
of David Adsmborth describing this.
Speaker 5 (31:23):
What we'll do is.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
We'll shoot the ropes over with bow and arrow or
that sort of thing.
Speaker 5 (31:28):
Or I will climb up and we'll tie.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Rope so that we eventually end up with a rope,
one rope which goes from one hundred and fifty feet
up down to the sea, and then you climb up it.
And I said how, and he said, well, you've got
these sort of handles with ratchets on them which will
go up, and you have slings and you put your
legs and then you just work your way up. And
(31:51):
when you want to come down again, you just take
the rope and you pass it around here, and you
bring that round there. Then you unclip this, and then
you make sure that you undo that.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
Then you do the other.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
Take four more turns around the rope and fall back,
and you'll be absolutely okay. Oh yes, I said, fine.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Of course, this poor man has no idea what the
hell his producer is talking about, but he knows the love.
He starts pulling himself up, and you know, at first
he is going pretty well.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Right, first eighteen inches, it's good, you know, it's amazing.
And after about two feet you think it's quite tiring.
After about three foot six, you think, go a long way.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Up, but he's really high up in the air. When
he realizes, oh, I'm kind of screwed because I can't
remember all these instructions as to how to come down,
and he's too far up away from all his producers
to give him instructions. This is ridiculous one more time.
So I'm just going to tell you what happens next.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
And so I started talking to myself, and I was
saying things like, now, there is no need to panic.
Speaker 5 (32:59):
All you have to do is to remember.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
The little rabbit came out of his hole, and he
went around the log three times, and then he went
back in there.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
And then I started to swear in.
Speaker 6 (33:11):
And I looked down and I saw the boys from
the cruise he falling about the laughter, and I couldn't
think what they were laughing at. And of course I'd
fallen for the oldest trick in the game. I had
forgotten that I got a radio.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
MI can't.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Part of the intoxication of watching those shows.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
He is a great storyteller, such a great storyteller, and
he's funny. And around the time he goes and makes
what was one of the first Nature programs I ever
saw called The Trials of Life. And the whole point
of this film is to basically point out in a
way the humanity of animals. And you know, this is
(33:55):
where I feel like you start seeing the shift to
what we know. So David does super well right, which
is just like really storifying the lives of animals, like
presenting them as characters in a narrative plot, like telling
that we go on to I'm going to pay you
with his grip from another interview he does with Terry
Wrogan in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
I think we were actually very.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
Brave and ambitious to do this because this is entirely
about behavior. It's easy enough to get a shot of
an animal sitting in a tree or going to sleep,
but if an animal actually doing the thing you want
to do, whether it's fighting or finding the way or
signaling or courting, is very much more difficult. And this
entire series is made up of those sort of things.
Speaker 9 (34:36):
And why do you hope the series will achieve?
Speaker 4 (34:39):
I hope it will bring a realization to people that
animals we are, and we animals share a certain attitude
to life.
Speaker 5 (34:49):
We're all born, we all die.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
We all hope to mate and leave our genes in
another generation, and we all actually have extraordinarily similar problems
looking after the children. In the first second program, there's
a sequence when a little fly gets very upset.
Speaker 5 (35:07):
Because it's children being attacked.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
And you wouldn't think it would bring a lump to
your throat, a fie.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I sure you will, so you can see that. He's like,
he's like, right, that's what we're out for here is empathy, Yeah, right,
empathy and storytelling with these animals.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And it is profound, Like I really have to say,
like I do think the mission he describes there, it's
a profound one that had a profound effect on me
watching him execute it all these years, decades after it.
You know, if you binge them the way I did,
of like, yeah, life is some basics, you know, like
(35:43):
to get born, you got to take care of the kids,
you gotta find some food, you gotta have sex in
order to revert, you know, like we're all trying to
have sex and then like you're gonna face death, you know,
Like that's it, Like there's some basics here, and it
is a profound point totally.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I think that's one of the things that is so
competiting about his work. And it's interesting watching that because
he's projecting humanity in that kind of way onto animals,
getting us to see empathy in that way. But I
think that is kind of striking about these films is
like it completely ignores the human existence. Actually we're talking
(36:22):
about animals in a human way with about talking about people.
It's the very few instances, even in his narration, where
he's open about the fact that they're filming in like
a national preserve somewhere. You know, you just kind of
there's a sense of wonder and glory and to the
point of almost like religious adoration right about like what
(36:44):
we're seeing without talking about the fact really that right
we're giving these there's like mentions here and there of
poaching and stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Like that, all this human culture around it.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
And it's and to be fair, at that time, that's
not out of the ordinary. I feel like people were
committed to what is known as the wilderness myth. Are
you familiar with that at all?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Yes, right, it's just like the idea, right that you
create these national parks who preserve to sort of conserve nature,
but those places are a live like we have many
of them in the US in a sense, right, Like
it's great, I can high conceal all these beauties, that
all these animals are protected, but that land was yanked
from a bunch of people, so that was possible.
Speaker 8 (37:30):
M h.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
And that like the wilderness idea, that there's this little
tiny piece of it that is left quote wild, right,
and that we are apart from that most of the time,
and thus like we have no impact on the planet
if we're apart from the wilderness.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
One hundred percent. And you know, that's the water that
to David is swimming in right at that point, and
really the birth of the green movement that's happening and
pulsating throughout this period. Like him not talking about that
as much in his programming actually is a calculated choice
of it he makes philosophically, David doesn't think at this
(38:08):
point he should be talking about that kind of stuff
in programming. I'm going to play you a clip of
him talking about it from slightly earlier. This is in
the seventies when he's really sort of making that transition
out of a BBC to programming again. The interview he
gave him the BBC around that time.
Speaker 6 (38:23):
Well, I personally get huge pleasure from seeing certain things.
From seeing, let us say, a lake covered with flamingos
in the early dawn in Africa, which is a marvelous, thrilling,
exciting site. Now when it happens, you'll get this enormous pleasure. Now,
(38:45):
I actually get an additional pleasure from telling you about it,
or from telling anybody about it. And if I can
communicate that pleasure to others through various devices like television,
cameras or whatever else, that is an enormous reinforcement of
the pleasure for me. And I'm not proselytizing, though I
dare say perhaps I.
Speaker 5 (39:07):
Am unconsciously so doing.
Speaker 6 (39:09):
But I'm not doing it because I wanting to go
out and tell people that they ought to do something.
I'm just saying I think this is enormously pleasurable and
inspiring and irefore I thought you might like to see it.
Speaker 10 (39:22):
So you are taking enjoyment to people. But are you
taking to them something that it is important for them
to know, important for them perhaps to take some action about.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
Well, to be to speak purely personally.
Speaker 6 (39:38):
I think there is a role for the program, which
is the pioneering, hard hitting campaigning program. Sure it's playing
a proper role in society and all that. On the
other hand, I personally can have enough of people leaning
(39:59):
out of the television screen and saying, you lazy, irresponsible,
ignorant chap sitting there in your comfortable suburban home. Why
don't you care for this or subscribe to that, or
go out and do the other. I mean, there is
a place for that, but not for me.
Speaker 10 (40:15):
There's a lot of that in nature programs on television.
Speaker 5 (40:19):
Well, I hope there's not too much.
Speaker 6 (40:21):
I mean, I think every now and again that it's
worth reminding people that these splendid things have got to
be looked after. But primarily I think the programs are
so that people may share the delight in the things
that have brought you delight.
Speaker 10 (40:34):
Are you worried about conservation?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Very much?
Speaker 10 (40:38):
But you don't feel that it's part of your job
to take this message to people.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Oh? I do. And perhaps I am being a little.
Speaker 6 (40:48):
What I don't know, but I actually think the best
way of taking the message to the people is by
showing them the pleasure, not necessarily by saying every time,
you've got to do something about it, but by.
Speaker 5 (41:00):
Saying, look, isn't this lovely?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
And the other bit follows.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, so Ba's all of its philosophy is that in attendance,
isn't this lovely? And been leaving you to do black?
Speaker 2 (41:11):
The thing is that what he's articulating there. What year
was that?
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Nineteen seventy four, seventy four?
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Yes, And honestly, I mean, I guess like the thought
processes around how to make us as human beings give
a shit about our impact on the planet, and you
know that has changed and involved in gone through all
kinds of twists and turns. But he's articulating an idea
there that is now today quite a modern concept that
(41:40):
like it has to start with our relationship that we have,
and it's the one that I have become intoxicated with
that like a fundamental problem we have is we have
a colonial relationship to other species and we got to
start with like understanding we have a relationship, we relate
to one another and find joy in it if we're
(42:04):
ever going to figure out how to then have a
more responsible relationship. That's a modern idea. He's articulating it
in seventy four, and I find it very compelling.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
No, it is, and you know he's going to evolve
that view, you know what I mean, And that evolution
is what is at the heart of so much of
Sir David's work nowadays. And we're going to get into
that right after the break. Welcome back to Big Lives.
(42:37):
Today we're talking about Sir David Attenborough. And when we
left off Kai we were talking about how for a
lot of his career, so David's approach right to environmental
issues was really not to proselytize, right. But I feel
like there's one key thing we've kind of left out here,
which is just like we've talked about, you know, this
(42:59):
burgeoning wave of consolation and you know, campaigns like Earth
Day and Save the Whales, but we haven't uttered the
words climate change. I was wondering when we were gonna
get that right. And you know, that's partly because in
terms of the mainstream, it was not in the mainstream
for the seventies and the eighties, even if it was
(43:20):
a thing about scientists are sort of hip to. And
I guess one thing I realized that I was watching
all of his programming and sort of nearing the present day,
was I was like, right, we're talking about conservation in
terms of littering and like all that kind of stuff,
Like when does climate change in the picture for Sir David,
And it's kind of hard to tell. And the reason
it's hard to tell is because for a long time,
(43:43):
Sir David Attenburg actually did not know how we felt
about climate change. Really, yes, So David's approach for years
was basically, well, yes, there are temperature fluctuations, but there
have been temperature fluctuations throughout the history of the world.
He was kind of a little bit of a climate
(44:07):
change skeptic really.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
I mean until when, because we'd, like you say, you
have to remember, like it was not until like the
late eighties that that there began a mainstream conversation about
the humans impact on the climate.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Well, so this is the thing that really surprised me
until two thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Oh no, so you are going to ruin sir David
for me?
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Well, okay, hold that for hold that for okay. So
now we're in my era. Okay, I remember two thousand
and four. And what happens in two thousand and four
is David Attenbrook. He attends this lecture in the city
in Belgium called The Age and this lecture is given
(44:53):
by this American climate professor named Ralph Cicerone. What this
American climate change scientist is doing in this lecture is
he's just showing with cold hard data, basically, here's what's
happening to the atmosphere's chemistry. And I'm just going to
read you a little quote from Sir David about this.
He showed a series of graphs showing world temperature and
(45:15):
critically population as well as ingredients within the atmosphere. The
congruents of those things convinced me beyond any doubt whatever
that not only was the climate changing, but that humanity
was responsible for that. Until then, one knows that the
climate has changed of a geological history. And I was
not totally sure that this was not just an aberration
(45:36):
within the parameters of their ability. But basically that professor's
graphs convinced him beyond any doubt at all.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
It's interesting because I always thought that David Attenborough was
a scientist, m.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
You know, like you know in time. I mean, he
did study zoology at university like that. That is true,
design is in that way. But but yeah, he's a talent.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
I assumed he had a career in science, like in
natural sciences of some sort. And then somebody came along
and was like, this guy's great, let's make TV with him.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Right, So, given what I now know, I.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Guess this is not is yeah, you know, I mean,
he's a TV guy who likes nature, and so for
him to come to understand this in two thousand and four,
I guess isn't as shocking to me now that I
learned what you have told me as it would have
been before this.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Conversation, right right right. And the thing is, at the
time he took criticism for it, he was taking criticism
from environmental activists who were just like, come on, you
are the voice of the natural world. You like most
people on Earth who speak English, van production to nature
of the way they think about it is totally framed
by you. Like if we get you on our side, Yeah,
(46:53):
if you hit you and outside, we can beat this thing.
You know. And I'm just going to play you a
little bit of him talking about his evolution as part
of some testimony he gave to a UK Parliament committee
a few years ago.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
I'm not, by nature a propagandist, and I'm not even
I mean, I started making natural history programs because I
thought there was nothing that I preferred to see more
on television than the beauties of the natural world. And
I would love to just be going on doing that.
I mean, that's what I enjoy. I enjoyed looking at
(47:28):
birds of Paradise, in displaying, I enjoy Conroy. So I
enjoy these things and I enjoy bringing them to people
who don't have the good.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Luck that I've had.
Speaker 4 (47:37):
So that's that's fine. But if you become aware of
what is happening actual, well you don't have any alternative. Now.
Fifty years ago we weren't doing And fifty years ago
there were quite a lot of people who would say, no, no, no,
it's rubbish. Of course your artitect me. Ever, so there
were a lot of people saying that. And if you're
on to work with the BBC, which is what I
(47:59):
did and have done all my life, fifty years ago
we were there was a duoperty, there was BBC in
those commercial televisions, and the BBC was a pub big service.
And if you're in public service, you have to represent
a public point of view and you can't use it
for propaganda.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
But so therefore, did you waited for the public mood
to change before we started becoming quite assertive with the
impact that humans were having on the natural world.
Speaker 4 (48:26):
Not quite as easy as that. I didn't wait for
public opinion to change. I waited until the fact seemed incontroversible.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
And yeah, So that lecture he attends in Belgium, that
is his Oh, this is incontrovertible moment, right. But as
influential as Sir David's been right as the voice of
the natural world, he still is the talent. So what
he does after attending that lecture is he goes to
the BBC and the BBC is actually having discussions about this,
(48:55):
because you know, early two thousands we're still in this
era of sort of like should we be both sizing
things and if we're presenting something as factor, we need
to totally make sure that it is fact and et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. And so they ask him, you know,
what do you think, and he's like, well, no, I
absolutely believe it. This is the case. And he says,
(49:16):
if you want me to go and investigate and talk
to people, I will gladly do so. So what he
does is he makes a couple of programs that come
out in two thousand and six that really examine the
climate change question, and really it's him talking to scientists
about this. I'm just going to play you a clip
(49:37):
from one of those programs, Planet Earth.
Speaker 4 (49:46):
In four thousand, five hundred million years, our world has
gone through many natural changes. Now it's changing once again,
but this time we ourselves are contributing to those changes.
Speaker 5 (50:03):
We are coursing the world the heat up.
Speaker 4 (50:08):
If we continue to p behave as we are doing,
our children and grandchildren will have to deal with extreme
and potentially catastrophic changes. The vast forests of the Amazon
could wither and burn. The oceans could turn acid, destroying
much of the life they presently contain. The Arctic could
(50:32):
be transformed, its ice could melt, and its most famous
animals vanish forever. Rising tides could cast millions of people adrift.
Many of our coastal cities could be flooded and drowned.
(51:03):
We still have time. There are ways to minimize these
changes if we all choose now to adopt them, But
the next few years will be crucial. If we miss
our chance, the future may be grim, indeed for life
on planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
So in that right, he's explicitly doing the thing he
said he would never do. Yeah, whereas he's like, we
can do this, we must do this, we must change.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
And I've seen a lot of this programming, like that's
part of my introduction to our my deep dive on
him was this kind of stuff. So that's why I
was a little alarmed when you were like, wait, he
was a climate schedules, Like what are you talking about.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Toby, And I think in that way, to be honest,
it's I don't know. I found it surprising, but then
also a little bit inspiring at the same time, where
you're just like, right, on the one hand, it's really
a bummer that one of the most powerful people on
the face of the earth when it comes to messaging
about nature wasn't banging the drum. On the other hand,
(52:09):
you're just like, oh, here's someone who saw the science
and just had a reaction of just like oh let
me change, like yeah, yeah, my bad, Like let's just
do this and lean hard into it.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
And it meant had something at stake in the change.
It meant like, I'm famous for doing one thing, yeah,
do it really really well. I really didn't want to
do something different because I'm really good at that, and
now I have received information that tells me, well, you
have to do it.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
Different totally, totally.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
I got to figure out how to be good at
the new thing too. That part is really.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Inspiring, right, And you know in that part of it,
And I'm glad you said that, like you's still figuring
out how to do it well, how to quet that
kind of messaging. So you know, that whole program is
a whole program devoted to climate change talking to scientists,
and it has like long Sterli agrees like that one, right,
but it's almost kind of divorced a little bit. It's
like a different version of the same sort of problem
(53:03):
that I guess I had with life on Earth, right,
which is you've told me that humans are having an
effect on the planet, but that effect on the planet
still feels somehow not tangible, Like I'm not seeing humans
and animals in concert with each other in a way
that I experienced in my everyday life. Right. And so
he starts making programming that does that in like a
(53:24):
real way and talking more about climate change, and I
feel like the way he talks about climate change actually
starts bleeding into other stuff he's doing, Like he always
talked on some level about human waste in the ocean,
for example, but the way he talks about it changes,
Like I'm just going to play you a really famous
one that he does. This is from Blue Planet too,
(53:47):
And just to set the scene for you, like this
again is a scene with whales, and you imagine like
you're in a shot of the ocean and you sort
of zoom in on like this little whale pod and
here's that clip.
Speaker 4 (54:00):
A mother is holding her newborn young it's dead. She
is reluctant to let it go, and has been carrying
it around for many days. In top predators like these,
industrial chemicals can build up to lethal levels, and plastic
could be part of the problem. As plastic breaks down,
(54:24):
it combines with these other pollutants that are consumed by
vast numbers of marine creatures. Its possible per Calf may
have been poisoned by her own contaminated milk. Pilot whales
have quig rains, they can certainly experience emotions, judging from
(54:44):
the behavior of the adults. The loss of the infant
has affected the entire family. Unless the flow of plastics
and industrial pollution into the world's oceans is reduced marine
life will be poisoned by them from many centuries to cool.
The creatures that live in the Big Blue are perhaps
(55:07):
more remote than any animals on the planet, but not
remote enough it seems to escape the effects of what
we are doing to their world.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
And that whole scene is just like it's so sad.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
You know, but it's exactly what you said going into it,
Like now we're at a point of whether it's both
and it's not. You know, you have politics over here,
you have love for nature over here where he's like,
you're in relationship to this animal. Also that relationship is
causing damage to.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
It and you in the end totally you're watching like
a natural phenomenon, but it is human caused. It's like,
on the one hand, I'm so proud of this man
for making the change, you know, And this stuff is
so shocking and has tangible results, like that plastics thing
we just played. When that aired, it led to like
real legislative action in the UK over plastics and stuff.
(56:04):
It's like people watch that and we're outraged, but we
exist in an outrage deluge constantly.
Speaker 2 (56:14):
And it's overwhelming and it makes us sad. But I
don't think he's trafficking an outrage a manual because I again,
for me on my own journey about my relationship to
the natural world, he is a big part of that,
Like going into his programs has been a big part
of that. And I just think a lot of what
he is doing now when he talks about climate is
(56:36):
exactly where a lot of the climate activists I've interviewed
in reporting on this have said, we got to get
which is we already know the bad news, you know,
I mean, set aside the deniers, but it's a mainstream
relief now that humans have been on this suicidal rampage
with the climate, and like science has done its job,
(56:59):
Science has done enough that we can fix it, Like
we have all the necessary tools as a consequence of
advancements in science. What's missing is a shared will to
do so. And there's a lot of belief that we
are stuck in a place where as people who now
that we care about it, we immediately shut down in
(57:20):
the way that you're describing because it seems overwhelming and
insolvable and we can't move past and Okay, the sin
is already done, and that there has to be a
place where we figure out how to shift our actual
emotional relationship to other species from this, you know, long
(57:41):
standing colonial relationship, whether it's about taking stuff for our
needs and destroying the planet or taking care of the
planet for our needs. Right, the idea that we are
the stewards is the problem and get ourselves to we
are in relationship. And that's what he's doing, is he's
teaching us how to be in relationship in these more
(58:01):
modern programs, or that's what I'm hearing, right and showing that, like,
here's what's at stake if you can't change your relationship.
I think it's the kind of thing that we need
right now, which is why again I was shocked to
hear that he was later.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
But that's the thing. It's like he's a person on
a journey. His life has been the journey of that relationship.
And yeah, I don't know. You put it really beautifully.
And I think one of the reasons I stayed up
all night when I first watched this program was I
was just like, I'm watching it in this way, Now,
how's my child? Should I have children gonna watch this?
Speaker 2 (58:38):
You know that's the bread Listen, I don't have children.
I'm never gonna have children, and that part I always
think about, Like, God, what if I had a kid?
I just can't imagine how you would think about the
future on the specific question of climate change, like in
the world we're gonna live in for your child, that
would be really overwhelming to me.
Speaker 1 (58:58):
Totally, totally, And I think in that way for future generations.
I mean, we don't know much about what the future
is gonna hold, but I don't know if we're gonna
look at this man and people like like this whole
generation of people you're talking about, people like him, Jane
Goodall like their prophets. You know.
Speaker 2 (59:18):
Well I heard David Attenborough, the snack who had to grow?
Speaker 1 (59:26):
So who do you have for me next week?
Speaker 2 (59:29):
Okay, Well, let's go to the clips. Let's see if
you can guess who this is.
Speaker 11 (59:33):
When I was thirteen, we went to New York and
I went to a Broadway show with Mohamma and the
show is called Bye Bye Bertie. And I looked up
and I saw all these kids singing and dancing. I thought,
that looks like fun too. Wait a minute, that maybe
that's what I want to do.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
Bye Bye Bertie.
Speaker 2 (59:52):
Okay, Now there's a lot of people for whom that voice, yes,
immediately recognizable.
Speaker 1 (59:57):
And I am ashamed to say I'm not one of them.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
You're not one of them. Okay, they were all the
content clues as well. All right, let's hear the next one.
Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
I was reading last night through through a list of awards,
which took two and a half pages to get through.
Speaker 5 (01:00:12):
What do you do with them?
Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
Where are they?
Speaker 11 (01:00:15):
I sort of put them up on a shelf and
every once in a while I passed by them and think, yeah,
that was a couple of really good years.
Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
So you know, she was big, Okay, has been big
in the past. What more?
Speaker 5 (01:00:27):
I really had to win the audience.
Speaker 11 (01:00:30):
I mean it was, you know, well, Judy grown is
bringing a daughter on and I think that they were
kind of putting up with that, and so I really
had to work hard and they appreciated that.
Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
Okay, I'm intrigued. All right.
Speaker 8 (01:00:44):
Wait.
Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Big Lives is a production of BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries.
Is hosted by me Manuel Jochi and Kay Wright. Our
team over at BBC Studios includes producer Emma Reverel, archive
producer Samir Chowdery, found design by Melvin rickerby our executive
producer is Annie Brown. Our production coordinator is Gayalen Davis Connolly,
(01:01:08):
our friend is Amy Woods, and our production manager is
Mabel Finnegan Write. The team over at Pushkin Industries includes
executive producer Costanzo Goyardo, producer Daphne Chen. Our legal advisor
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Jordan McMillan.
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
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Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
Thanks for your support.
Pushkin from BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries. This is big lines.
I'm Manguel Jochi, I'm Kyrie And on this show what
we do is we take a single cultural icon and
break down their legacy with the help of the BBC's
vast archive. And today Kai, we're going to be talking
(00:39):
about Sir David Attenborough.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Sir David Edinburgh, even the sir, even the surpert.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I know, I had special joy in like adding that
bit to I was like, it is Sir David, thank
you very much. But okay, when you think of Sir
David Attenborough, what do you think of.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
An old man crawling around in the dirt whispering at
a bug? Ye are like a snake or lion or
something you know.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
And I have to.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Say also because I just covered David Attenborough late in life,
you know it's once he was older and then I
looked back at like who was he as a young man?
Also I think of he was a snack.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Oh okay, that is not what I expect. It's a
bona fid snack. But yes, you are right, the old
man whispering like describing nature like just stuff like this.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
This is a poison dart frog males raise their young
in a very special way. A father who replaced each
one of his tadpoles in his own tiny pool of water.
This is one nice and safe.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Ah. Listen to his voices like sliding into a warm bath.
You know what I mean. Yes, Sir David Attenborough is
of course the world's most famous nature broadcaster. That voice
we've talked about and that we've been gushing over is
so distinctive, and I don't know, he's basically I feel
like my entire lifetime, but also my parents' entire life.
(02:23):
He has been the voice of the natural world. Like
he's been making nature programming for the BBC at this
point for over seventy years. Is actually his one hundredth birthday.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
This may oh wow, because he's still making stuff, like
I still think from him fairly recently.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
He's still making stuff. It's funny he described him like
both as an older man and as a younger man,
because in my brain he's kind of always been old.
But I say that with the utmost respect, you know,
I mean, he's always been this old kind of revered figure,
this this voice.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
You know.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
The thing I've always loved about him is this narration
that he does. It doesn't shy away from like the
truth of the way the natural world works, right, like
things dying to get killed. But he's always talking from
this place of just utmost wonder, you know, like almost
childlike wonder. But recently I had a kind of different experience.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
You're not getting ready, ruin David adboro for me, are you?
Speaker 1 (03:20):
No? No, no, no no no. But you know, occasionally
I am prone to like the occasional bout of insomnia.
And a couple of weeks ago, I was unable to
sleep and I just rolled over, pulled out my phone,
was like, you know what I should watch to get
to sleep. I should just watch like some nature program
and David seething voice will put me to sleep, you
(03:40):
know what I mean? What was the land of my vibe?
And you know I was watching this episode and it's
this beautiful scene. It's basically takes place in what I
guess I can only describe as a ocean sort of nursery,
right picture, like beautiful pristine waters. And in these pristine waters,
this g whale has just given birth to like her
(04:03):
calf and is raising it. And it's the most idyllic
sort of fun, and so they Atton Brook comes in
and sort of sets up. You know, they've been in
this wonderful place for months and months, but you know
they're gonna have to move on because they've gotta go
get get food and to play a bit of it
here for you.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
It's time for the pill to head north. Since arriving
three months ago, the female has lost a third of
her body weight, so now she must begin the long
trick back to her feeding grange.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
And I was like, Okay, I've been here before.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
I've seen this one. I've seen this.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
When I wrote to me, I'm like, I'm thirty two.
I've been watching these programs my whole life. I know
that you have introduced me to as cute as hell
little baby calf, and it is gonna have to find
some way to survive on this journey in the open water.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
You are gonna put this calf in danger, David, adgirl.
We know it's coming.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
But what's interesting is you don't go immediately to like
some other sea animal coming out of nowhere to have
this baby. Well. Instead, these whales have to go through
shipping lanes.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
The constant engine noise disrupts the underwater soundscape, disorientating the
whales and increasing the risk of a collision. Scores of
whales die every year in ship strikes in these waters.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
And guess what happens, guy, we kill a whale. No,
what does happen is that the whale gets her baby
calf through all these shipping lanes without incident. Everything's great,
and then a bunch of orcers coming and just murk
our kids like killer whales. Listen. The propaganda that three
(05:57):
really perpetuated about the killer whales needs to be studied.
They really tricked us as a species. But I digress.
I digress. I was sitting there heart broken, but still
kind of stuck on the whole shipping lane part of it,
because I was just like, oh, this is this is
so different to the sort of nature programming that I
(06:18):
feel like I grew up watching, right, Like it felt
like all these animals took part in a world kind
of a little bit divorced from us, you know that
he was narrating, and.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Like you're just like, Oh, they're just we're just watching
We're just you know, we're just watching nature.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
I know. And it's not a whole TV show. It
takes place in the real world right, where like animals
don't do exactly what you want them to do, and yeah,
humans are destroying the planet. And as I lay there
now very much not able to go to sleep, I
don't know, I was like, Oh, David attonbrom is someone
who even at nearly one hundred years old, is still evolving,
you know. And as I went through the BBC archive
(06:56):
to just learn more about him, I realized that his
life's work was really shaped our complicated and thought relationship
with the Earth for the last seventy odd years. And
I don't know, Okay, it made me question and some
things about the effort to say the planet in a
way that really surprised me.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I am excited to hear about this because I have
two been challenged by David Abrough.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
All right, let's get to it after the break. Welcome
back to Big Lives today. We're talking about So David Attenborough,
so guy, like I said earlier, So David is turning
one hundred on the eighth of May, which means he
(07:43):
was born in nineteen twenty six in the Midlands in
the UK and he's part of this generation of British
Men who seem to enter the world at the exact
right time. And what I mean by that is he
grew up and was old enough to have to live
through World War two, right, but he was young enough
(08:05):
that he got to experience the building of society that
took place after World War Two. Right post World War two,
there are all of these things that are being created
in almost every single sector of life, Like all these
institutions that we now take for granted as existing forever,
they're coming into therefore after the Second World War, and
(08:27):
he's part of that first generation that is totally allowed
to take advantage of all of it. Anything they want
to do, they can kind of do because it's starting. Yes, yes,
the white definitely, the white ones. Yes, I should preface
this by saying it's a great time to be a
white man, which it kind of always is, but it
definitely was.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
This was the.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Definitely and maybe unsurprisingly, as he grows up, he's a
nerd from the off right. He has all these stories
about just like riding his bike around the Midlands looking
at rocks because he's so into them, like that's that's
that's his whole thing as a kid. Here's him talking
(09:10):
about that in an interview he did in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
I used to bicycle a great deal all over the Midlands.
And from a geological point of view, of course, Midlands
is marvelous because well, for one thing it.
Speaker 5 (09:23):
Is not is provincial.
Speaker 6 (09:24):
Is the Midlands is enormously famous throughout the world amongst geologists.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
There's a fossil.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
There's a little village which I used to know very well,
and I'm sure it's still there. Whether whether it's a
village still, I don't know.
Speaker 5 (09:38):
Tilton.
Speaker 6 (09:39):
Tilton is on the Armstone Country and there's one particular
kind of fossil called tilt and us rus, which was
internationally known after that little village. The Childwood Forest one
of the key sites where people really discover some of
the oldest rocks on the surface of the earth.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
His brother is Richard Attenborough, who you know, famous vespian
known to many people as the old guy in Jurassic
Park who owns the park.
Speaker 7 (10:04):
Oh wait, I didn't know this, Yeah, yeah, that is
his brother, the brothers. Yes, wow, okay, totally. And he's
interested in so many different things besides this rock. So
you know, he ends up studying a bunch of sciences
at university, including zoology. He ends up like sort of
joining the Navy. He's doing that for a while.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Then he goes on to work in editing, like he's
editing children's textbooks for a while, and then he decides, okay,
that's not actually my jam, and so what he picks
is the BBC, which has existed of course in radio
for years, but in terms of the TV sort of
started during the war, but it was really coming to
the fore now like in this period after the Second
(10:49):
World War. And he gets hired versus a production system
and becomes a producer and in these days, like the
BBC is not that big as a TV institution. If
you're a producer, you kind of get to do whatever
you want, and you're doing all sorts of programming. And
what David really wanted to do were nature programs, except
(11:12):
you know, nature programs back then and by now we're
talking about, like the fifties look very different to what
they look like now. I'm just going to play you
a clip of David explaining this from an interview he
did on the BBC in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
The man in the early fifties for animals was very
great naturalists called George Camsdale and George Cansdale was at
the London Zoo and he used to bring in animals
from the zoo and he would show them on a table.
It's sort of doormat thing, which is absolutely the right
way to do it, and the animals always bit him
more escaped or something, and of course great headlines in newspapers.
(11:47):
But of course the trouble with that was that you
the animal looked sudden, as though it was extraordinary. You
didn't understand why it had legs that shape or tail
that shape, and you could only understand that if you
saw it in the wild.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
I don't know if you remember this from kindergarten and
this is the experience, but it's like I remember being
in kindergarten and like one day in the class there'd
be somebody from the zoo who bring like a chinchilla. Yeah, yeah,
like that's kind of what they would do.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
But just on TV it became a David Letterman bit.
It was like that's what I remember it from me.
He had that guy they would bring on like animals
and the animal would wold out and then it'd be
like human getting crazy.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
One hundred percent, just the whole thing of like what
if you put an Ostrich in a studio what happens?
But David wanted to be out in the world filming
animals in their live habitats. And to be fair, there
were people that were doing that, and they were doing
it in a very kind of extreme way to what
we do now. You had people like Jacques Cousteau out
(12:45):
making these sort of big films. There's a very infamous
one from like the nineteen fifties in which he's trying
to show people a bunch of fish underwater in this
coral reef, and there's no real underwater camera technology that
we have today. So the dude literally just frowze dynamite
into the core reef and just films as all of
(13:07):
the fish just rise shorter up. No, it is so
they the coral reef, they blow up the coral reef
and you just see like all of these fish just
kind of floating in the water. And then they put
all of them onto shore and you see this poor
little puff of fish just kind of like puffing its
(13:29):
heart out like it's it's dark, it's it's it's dark.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
That is wild.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
You have that on one extreme like not suitable really
for public TV.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Just who was the producer that was like, oh my,
I got it. I know what we'll do. We'll blow
it up and then the bodies will come out and will.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, a lot of that. So you have you either
have stuff like that which is like kind of too
ghastly for TV even by both standards of that day, right,
and then you have another type of TV programming that
is really just more about the exploration of the place.
And there was this one couple, Armand and Mikayla Denise
(14:07):
and I just want to play you a bit of
their show so you see what that's like.
Speaker 8 (14:10):
The Flying Foxes camp was in the very heart of
the swamp. To get close enough to them for good pictures,
we had to make up our minds to cross the
swamp and reach their camp on foot.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
At any moment, you may miss your putting, go down
into this bubbling mat and be hardly able to extricate yourself.
Speaker 8 (14:31):
It takes some true devotion to photography and on the
part of their wife, some true devotion to her husband
to go and set up cameras in the middle of
a manglove swamp.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
It sounds like a Melbrox, it does it does and
no shade to them. It's like, you know, and you're
hearing that narration right as you see these two like
white people walking through the swamp. You can barely even
see the animals that they are getting to, the flying
foxes and besides that little bit of human To be honest,
(15:03):
it's kind of boring, right, yeah, like there's not that
much that happens. And actually is David Attamborough talking about
that again from that nineteen seventies interview.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
Nobody thought that the elephants were going to charge them,
or bite them or do the other things they would
do to George Cansdale. So I thought, if you could
put the two things together, you might have quite a
good recipe for a program. So let's do one where
you film the animal in the wild, it's then caught
and then you have it in the studio live.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
And that was the basis of zoo Quest.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
Now. Zoo Quest was David Adamberg's first big coming out
party in terms of nature programming. It came out in
nineteen fifty four and it was like revolutionary.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Tonight, We've got rather different programs for it.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Zoo Quest was so massive because it was in the wild,
right I feel like the way nature programs were because
we're just in the wild looking at anything, and David
Attenborough was telling us about that thing, right. But what
David did was he constructed a whole sort of storyline
and a reason for them to be in Africa for example,
for the first season. And the whole program is David
(16:16):
Attenborough and in BBC tagging along with the London Zoo
as they capture animals to bring back to that zoo.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Oh wow, so he was literal in his description.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yes, like literal zoo quest. Like the whole first series
is framed around basically this small, cool looking bird called
the Pickaparties that looks like a miniature balled Ostrich. It's like,
we're gonna look for this bird, and along the way
of looking for this bird in this sort of quest,
they then show you all these other animals. And David
(16:50):
Attenborough is not the initial host of this program. The
initial host of his program is one of his friends
who works at the zoo who's sort of helping lead
his expedition. This man named Jack Lester, and so David's
producing him offering the program. Then Jack gets sick and
he can't actually host the first episode, and so David
(17:11):
takes over. And the format of this show is that
it's still kind of a live show in so far
as it kind of looks like the nightly news. So
David Addbruh is there sitting at a desk, and I
just have to say seeing him young like that is
mind blowing. One. He's very good looking.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
This is what I said. I had to look it up.
I looked it up. At one point I was like,
what was this man? Because he's like I only know
him as this old, old, old man, and I was like,
what's he look like? And I was like, damn, he's
a snag.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
You know. At this point, he's in his thirties, right
the prime of his life, and you can tell he
looks he's got it going on. And I don't know,
it's so interesting to see him because even though you
know he is like a fully grown man at this point,
he still looks so youthful and so wide eyed. And
so yeah, I'm just so excited and happy to be
(18:04):
doing the thing. I'm just going to play you this
scene from Zoo Quest to set the scene for you.
David Attenborough and like his colleagues, they're sort of looking
I think in the undergoth for one specific animal when
they hear another animal might be nearby and they go
after him. I'm going to play you this.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
There was a rustle on the other side of the thicket.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
We looked up.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
And there was the antea itself, galloping across the savannahs.
Without thinking how we're actually going to catch it, Jack
and I set off wildly in pursuit, and.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Like, literally that's what you watch. You watch a young
David Attenborough chasing across the savannah on foot after an
antita that wants no parts of this. And I mean
it's messed up in a bunch of ways, but it
is funny because David Attenborough is bad at catching this anteea.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
It's not in his nature. He already does like this
isn't what I'm supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah, and he doesn't have a wheels like that. But
basically what happens is one of the local that's helping
them capture the antis and they're like, okay, here it is,
We're taking it off to the zoo and then you
would see it later in the studio with David, so
you sort of have that sort of combo thing but yeah,
the show is a real program of its times. There's
(19:26):
no real discussion at any point, like you can it
doesn't even occur to anybody that, huh, you know, how
many of these like animals are there for us to
just take from this place? And I have to say,
very times I feel uncomfortable watching it because the whole
sort of conceit of it is like, right, we're out
(19:50):
in the world exploring this pristine land that we can
just take stuff from. So it does feel very much
still a creature of colonialism, you know what I mean.
Like they're dressed up like the bad guy in Jumanji,
you know, just like the like sort of khucky like
pants and like that white like they have on all
(20:11):
of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
British people Roman the world figuring out was mine totally.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
And it's interesting because like the local people exist in it,
but they exist in it kind of as a vehicle
for like you know, like they're part of the attraction
in that kind of way. But you know, fifties the
show is a massive hit.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
That was the end of our zoo quest good Night, and.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I should say today if it is on record now
basically being like yeah, it's it's not age, well, this
is what we did at the time that would not
fly now for the rest of it. But it's a
big hit, and they do it for a couple of eeas,
and they do these different excursions to different parts of
the globe. Even at that time, that sort of practice
(21:00):
of zoos just going to any country they want in
the world and just grabbing animals, it's starting to get
frowned upon. Like the wild Life Fund is up and
running by this point, and it's not necessarily your organization
that it would become today, but you know, essentially a
bunch of rich people come together and are like, you
know what, we should conserve some of these animals that
(21:23):
we've been collecting. We've collected enough, and so they start
basically trying to replicate the national parks model that exists
here in the US like in other places to preserve
some of these animals. And so a show like zoo
Quest is not really the vibe ah and as it is.
David Attenborough has sort of flirted with being a host,
(21:44):
liked it, but ultimately he's still a producer at heart
and goes into the development work as like an exec
like that's the track you choose it. He basically chooses
to be the version of our boss.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
That's crazy, rightly imagine David Attenborough running around as an
executive to be like, how do we fund this thing.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
One hundred percent? But that is exactly what he does,
and he rides through the ranks pretty quickly at this time.
So much change is happening at the BBC right Like
you know, I have said they were pretty small when
he started there, and he's there as it starts expanding.
So BBC at first was just like one channel, like
BBC one, but then it grows, so then you have
BBC two, and BBC two becomes sort of like the cool,
(22:23):
younger cousin of BBC one and is doing all these
different sorts of experimental programming, particularly really leaning into color television.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, good evening.
Speaker 9 (22:35):
This is BBC two.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
And the person who really helps usher in that era
and who gets tapped to around BBC two is David Attenborough.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Wow. I did not know this, but.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
More I learnt about this, I was like, oh this
makes sense, you know, you know, when you learn about something,
you're like, oh, right, the rules of television are still
being made up, even with color television. So I'll just
give you example. So you know how tennis balls are
the color that they are, like yellow and stuff. Do
you know why that is?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I could guess for Wimbledon to be able to see
the ball going back exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
But you know who really pushes for that.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
No, David Attenborough.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
David Attenborough pushes for that because he's just like with
transition to college, you can't really see the balls up
against the grass. At Wimbledon, we should really change the
ball color, and so that's what happens.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
It's just funny. I don't it's kind of blower in
my mind because it's making me think of him so differently,
you know, Like I just I really do think of
him as a naturalist, you know, like who somebody was
like point a camera at this guy, you know. But
he's a TV genius, is what you're telling me, Like
he is like creating TV.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
And at the same time as he's making these decisions,
the BBC is expanding one of his key units, which
is its Natural History unit, which is this team of producers,
but also this team of scientists who was devoted to
like natural world programming. Now by this point we've left
the fifties behind and now we're moving coon closer to
(24:11):
the seventies, and the technology for filming nature has moved
ahead leaps and bounds, and there are a bunch of
young people a BBC who want to do stuff with that,
and they want to put it into like a never
before seen TV spectacle. And so David Adsonbury, here's about
this and it is just like being executive has been fun.
(24:32):
But I actually think that I would rather go back
to programming, which is a big deal because he is
so good at his job that people are talking about
him running the entirety of a BBC Wow. So he
quits and what he ends up doing becomes like this
seminal program. It is this big, massive demonstration that just
(24:55):
captures life on Earth. And that is exactly what it
is called. It's this problem called life on Earth. I'm
just going to play you a quip of it.
Speaker 4 (25:05):
There are some four million different kinds of animals and
plants in the world, four million different solutions to the
problems of staying alive. This is the story of how
a few of them came to be as they are.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
So I saw a flash of recognition in your face
when I said life on Earth. Did you watch this
as a kid, not.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
As a kid. I mean, this stuff was on in
the background. But I have to say, you know, I've
been on for the last like three or four years,
this journey for myself around like my relationship to the
natural world. And at one point in that started binging
David Attenboroughshow, WHOA and Life on Earth like it was
all I would watch on television for a really long time.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Wow wow wow, Well, so I don't need to explain
you like, Life on Earth is extraordinary. So the version
that I remember seeing as a kid, they had edited
it down into like three episodes basically, but actually the
way it originally aired, it was like thirteen episodes, but
(26:09):
every week, and it was must see appointment television. What
it did was it told essentially the story of evolution
by looking at modern animals that exist today. And it's extraordinary.
And it's funny because I watched it again in preparation
for this episode, and I have to say, you know,
as beautiful as all the nature programming is now, the
(26:32):
shots of this are just gorgeous, like really really beautiful,
And in the middle of it all, holding it all
together is Sir David. And the thing that he does
that is revolutionary in this program is that he really
inhabits for the first time the sort of narration we
(26:52):
know him for in a bunch of different ways, which
is that it's not just that you're watching a nature program.
It's not that you're watching him exploring through nature in
some sort of colonial way. What you have is this
authoritative voice who is telling you a story, who is
making an argument, and what's it. You can tell he's
having fun doing it, like so so much fun doing it,
(27:15):
and he's you know, the talk of the town. He
goes on this like late night talk show hosted by
this guy, Terry Wogan, and I just want to pay
you a little bit of it because it's just so
fun to see him talking about just how big it was,
Like we'll be the British people just marveling at like wow.
This became a global sensation.
Speaker 9 (27:34):
Life on Earth, the Monu metalal series, done in nineteen
seventy nine, three years to do and seen all over
the world. It must be, it must be famous worldwide.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
Some I talk finish rather remarkably well.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
I walked into into a hotel in hell Sinky and
saw myself saying all these said these Finnish words, which
rather than impressed me because they're dubbed it to finish.
Speaker 9 (27:58):
But in America, I understand they decided your voice wasn't
good enough.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
No, they they actually they did take it as it was.
Speaker 9 (28:08):
And then I've read somewhere that that one of the
Americas said, no, well he's a little too British for us.
Speaker 5 (28:13):
We had to argue about that and we won.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Oh yeah, but basically he gets dubbed right in allviously
different languages, and so the whole world gets to see
this nature program which like superduces it. Yeah, as you've
probably realized by now, we're in the late seventies, nineteen
seventy nine, we're into eighty, and all of this is
happening at this time when modern environmental activism is really
(28:39):
really taking off, right, Like you know, I talked about
the World Wildlife Fund being formed like in the sixties.
Ten years later the seventies, we have the Saber Whale Campaign,
We have Earth Day, this big sort of collective campaign
to get people interested in the earth and interested in
green policy in a way that they never have been before.
(28:59):
So that together with all of us expanded programming that
David Attenborough is doing happens at exactly the right time,
and so the ratings of Through the Roof and VUVI eighties,
he sort of starts making the stuff that, in a
way we sort of know him for. And it's interesting
to watch him in the shows that he does after
(29:20):
Life on Earth because he's in the shots like way more.
Obviously now that he's an older man, he's not actually
in nature doing as much anymore. He's mostly a voice,
occasionally popping in front of the camera. But in those
days he's in it quite a lot. And I watched
one particular interview that really surprised me and sort of
(29:42):
changed my view of him a little. So I'm gonna
set the scene for you. It's nineteen eighty four. David
Anderbrew is appearing on that same late night TV show, Wogan.
Speaker 9 (29:55):
My next guest, is also pretty well known as a traveler.
Of all the people in television peraps, he's the one
who receives not only the most popular but also the
most critical acclaim. David Attenborough.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
And David Addbrook comes on and him and his host
Terry Wogan get talking about just the difficulties of this job.
Because Wogan is legitimately curious. He's like, how are you
doing this?
Speaker 5 (30:20):
How are you.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Doing like because even the concept of like shooting something
like that over a period of three years right where
you have to be in the right spot to watch
like a frog give birth, that was all still new
to the public.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
It's still pretty marvelous. I still watch this stuff and
I'm like, how much money did this require? How much
time this requires?
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Is pretty marvelous totally. And David Adam protells his anecdote
about a recent shoot he's been on where him and
his team come up with this stunt that he's going
to do where the whole point is he's going to
talk about the upper canopy of the rainforest and how
important that is while actually being in the upper canopy
of the rainforest and their brainstorming how they're going to
(31:04):
do this because these trees that he's talking about are
like eighty feet tour, right, so how are they going
to get to the top, And one of his producers
comes up to him, It's just like, we'll make it work.
We'll put you in this sort of super complex Pulley
system and I'm just going to play you a bit
of David Adsmborth describing this.
Speaker 5 (31:23):
What we'll do is.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
We'll shoot the ropes over with bow and arrow or
that sort of thing.
Speaker 5 (31:28):
Or I will climb up and we'll tie.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Rope so that we eventually end up with a rope,
one rope which goes from one hundred and fifty feet
up down to the sea, and then you climb up it.
And I said how, and he said, well, you've got
these sort of handles with ratchets on them which will
go up, and you have slings and you put your
legs and then you just work your way up. And
(31:51):
when you want to come down again, you just take
the rope and you pass it around here, and you
bring that round there. Then you unclip this, and then
you make sure that you undo that.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
Then you do the other.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
Take four more turns around the rope and fall back,
and you'll be absolutely okay. Oh yes, I said, fine.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Of course, this poor man has no idea what the
hell his producer is talking about, but he knows the love.
He starts pulling himself up, and you know, at first
he is going pretty well.
Speaker 4 (32:20):
Right, first eighteen inches, it's good, you know, it's amazing.
And after about two feet you think it's quite tiring.
After about three foot six, you think, go a long way.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Up, but he's really high up in the air. When
he realizes, oh, I'm kind of screwed because I can't
remember all these instructions as to how to come down,
and he's too far up away from all his producers
to give him instructions. This is ridiculous one more time.
So I'm just going to tell you what happens next.
Speaker 4 (32:52):
And so I started talking to myself, and I was
saying things like, now, there is no need to panic.
Speaker 5 (32:59):
All you have to do is to remember.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
The little rabbit came out of his hole, and he
went around the log three times, and then he went
back in there.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
And then I started to swear in.
Speaker 6 (33:11):
And I looked down and I saw the boys from
the cruise he falling about the laughter, and I couldn't
think what they were laughing at. And of course I'd
fallen for the oldest trick in the game. I had
forgotten that I got a radio.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
MI can't.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Part of the intoxication of watching those shows.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
He is a great storyteller, such a great storyteller, and
he's funny. And around the time he goes and makes
what was one of the first Nature programs I ever
saw called The Trials of Life. And the whole point
of this film is to basically point out in a
way the humanity of animals. And you know, this is
(33:55):
where I feel like you start seeing the shift to
what we know. So David does super well right, which
is just like really storifying the lives of animals, like
presenting them as characters in a narrative plot, like telling
that we go on to I'm going to pay you
with his grip from another interview he does with Terry
Wrogan in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
I think we were actually very.
Speaker 4 (34:18):
Brave and ambitious to do this because this is entirely
about behavior. It's easy enough to get a shot of
an animal sitting in a tree or going to sleep,
but if an animal actually doing the thing you want
to do, whether it's fighting or finding the way or
signaling or courting, is very much more difficult. And this
entire series is made up of those sort of things.
Speaker 9 (34:36):
And why do you hope the series will achieve?
Speaker 4 (34:39):
I hope it will bring a realization to people that
animals we are, and we animals share a certain attitude
to life.
Speaker 5 (34:49):
We're all born, we all die.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
We all hope to mate and leave our genes in
another generation, and we all actually have extraordinarily similar problems
looking after the children. In the first second program, there's
a sequence when a little fly gets very upset.
Speaker 5 (35:07):
Because it's children being attacked.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
And you wouldn't think it would bring a lump to
your throat, a fie.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I sure you will, so you can see that. He's like,
he's like, right, that's what we're out for here is empathy, Yeah, right,
empathy and storytelling with these animals.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
And it is profound, Like I really have to say,
like I do think the mission he describes there, it's
a profound one that had a profound effect on me
watching him execute it all these years, decades after it.
You know, if you binge them the way I did,
of like, yeah, life is some basics, you know, like
(35:43):
to get born, you got to take care of the kids,
you gotta find some food, you gotta have sex in
order to revert, you know, like we're all trying to
have sex and then like you're gonna face death, you know,
Like that's it, Like there's some basics here, and it
is a profound point totally.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I think that's one of the things that is so
competiting about his work. And it's interesting watching that because
he's projecting humanity in that kind of way onto animals,
getting us to see empathy in that way. But I
think that is kind of striking about these films is
like it completely ignores the human existence. Actually we're talking
(36:22):
about animals in a human way with about talking about people.
It's the very few instances, even in his narration, where
he's open about the fact that they're filming in like
a national preserve somewhere. You know, you just kind of
there's a sense of wonder and glory and to the
point of almost like religious adoration right about like what
(36:44):
we're seeing without talking about the fact really that right
we're giving these there's like mentions here and there of
poaching and stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Like that, all this human culture around it.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
And it's and to be fair, at that time, that's
not out of the ordinary. I feel like people were
committed to what is known as the wilderness myth. Are
you familiar with that at all?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Yes, right, it's just like the idea, right that you
create these national parks who preserve to sort of conserve nature,
but those places are a live like we have many
of them in the US in a sense, right, Like
it's great, I can high conceal all these beauties, that
all these animals are protected, but that land was yanked
from a bunch of people, so that was possible.
Speaker 8 (37:30):
M h.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
And that like the wilderness idea, that there's this little
tiny piece of it that is left quote wild, right,
and that we are apart from that most of the time,
and thus like we have no impact on the planet
if we're apart from the wilderness.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
One hundred percent. And you know, that's the water that
to David is swimming in right at that point, and
really the birth of the green movement that's happening and
pulsating throughout this period. Like him not talking about that
as much in his programming actually is a calculated choice
of it he makes philosophically, David doesn't think at this
(38:08):
point he should be talking about that kind of stuff
in programming. I'm going to play you a clip of
him talking about it from slightly earlier. This is in
the seventies when he's really sort of making that transition
out of a BBC to programming again. The interview he
gave him the BBC around that time.
Speaker 6 (38:23):
Well, I personally get huge pleasure from seeing certain things.
From seeing, let us say, a lake covered with flamingos
in the early dawn in Africa, which is a marvelous, thrilling,
exciting site. Now when it happens, you'll get this enormous pleasure. Now,
(38:45):
I actually get an additional pleasure from telling you about it,
or from telling anybody about it. And if I can
communicate that pleasure to others through various devices like television,
cameras or whatever else, that is an enormous reinforcement of
the pleasure for me. And I'm not proselytizing, though I
dare say perhaps I.
Speaker 5 (39:07):
Am unconsciously so doing.
Speaker 6 (39:09):
But I'm not doing it because I wanting to go
out and tell people that they ought to do something.
I'm just saying I think this is enormously pleasurable and
inspiring and irefore I thought you might like to see it.
Speaker 10 (39:22):
So you are taking enjoyment to people. But are you
taking to them something that it is important for them
to know, important for them perhaps to take some action about.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
Well, to be to speak purely personally.
Speaker 6 (39:38):
I think there is a role for the program, which
is the pioneering, hard hitting campaigning program. Sure it's playing
a proper role in society and all that. On the
other hand, I personally can have enough of people leaning
(39:59):
out of the television screen and saying, you lazy, irresponsible,
ignorant chap sitting there in your comfortable suburban home. Why
don't you care for this or subscribe to that, or
go out and do the other. I mean, there is
a place for that, but not for me.
Speaker 10 (40:15):
There's a lot of that in nature programs on television.
Speaker 5 (40:19):
Well, I hope there's not too much.
Speaker 6 (40:21):
I mean, I think every now and again that it's
worth reminding people that these splendid things have got to
be looked after. But primarily I think the programs are
so that people may share the delight in the things
that have brought you delight.
Speaker 10 (40:34):
Are you worried about conservation?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
Very much?
Speaker 10 (40:38):
But you don't feel that it's part of your job
to take this message to people.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Oh? I do. And perhaps I am being a little.
Speaker 6 (40:48):
What I don't know, but I actually think the best
way of taking the message to the people is by
showing them the pleasure, not necessarily by saying every time,
you've got to do something about it, but by.
Speaker 5 (41:00):
Saying, look, isn't this lovely?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
And the other bit follows.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, so Ba's all of its philosophy is that in attendance,
isn't this lovely? And been leaving you to do black?
Speaker 2 (41:11):
The thing is that what he's articulating there. What year
was that?
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Nineteen seventy four, seventy four?
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Yes, And honestly, I mean, I guess like the thought
processes around how to make us as human beings give
a shit about our impact on the planet, and you
know that has changed and involved in gone through all
kinds of twists and turns. But he's articulating an idea
there that is now today quite a modern concept that
(41:40):
like it has to start with our relationship that we have,
and it's the one that I have become intoxicated with
that like a fundamental problem we have is we have
a colonial relationship to other species and we got to
start with like understanding we have a relationship, we relate
to one another and find joy in it if we're
(42:04):
ever going to figure out how to then have a
more responsible relationship. That's a modern idea. He's articulating it
in seventy four, and I find it very compelling.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
No, it is, and you know he's going to evolve
that view, you know what I mean, And that evolution
is what is at the heart of so much of
Sir David's work nowadays. And we're going to get into
that right after the break. Welcome back to Big Lives.
(42:37):
Today we're talking about Sir David Attenborough. And when we
left off Kai we were talking about how for a
lot of his career, so David's approach right to environmental
issues was really not to proselytize, right. But I feel
like there's one key thing we've kind of left out here,
which is just like we've talked about, you know, this
(42:59):
burgeoning wave of consolation and you know, campaigns like Earth
Day and Save the Whales, but we haven't uttered the
words climate change. I was wondering when we were gonna
get that right. And you know, that's partly because in
terms of the mainstream, it was not in the mainstream
for the seventies and the eighties, even if it was
(43:20):
a thing about scientists are sort of hip to. And
I guess one thing I realized that I was watching
all of his programming and sort of nearing the present day,
was I was like, right, we're talking about conservation in
terms of littering and like all that kind of stuff,
Like when does climate change in the picture for Sir David,
And it's kind of hard to tell. And the reason
it's hard to tell is because for a long time,
(43:43):
Sir David Attenburg actually did not know how we felt
about climate change. Really, yes, So David's approach for years
was basically, well, yes, there are temperature fluctuations, but there
have been temperature fluctuations throughout the history of the world.
He was kind of a little bit of a climate
(44:07):
change skeptic really.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
I mean until when, because we'd, like you say, you
have to remember, like it was not until like the
late eighties that that there began a mainstream conversation about
the humans impact on the climate.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Well, so this is the thing that really surprised me
until two thousand and four.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Oh no, so you are going to ruin sir David
for me?
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Well, okay, hold that for hold that for okay. So
now we're in my era. Okay, I remember two thousand
and four. And what happens in two thousand and four
is David Attenbrook. He attends this lecture in the city
in Belgium called The Age and this lecture is given
(44:53):
by this American climate professor named Ralph Cicerone. What this
American climate change scientist is doing in this lecture is
he's just showing with cold hard data, basically, here's what's
happening to the atmosphere's chemistry. And I'm just going to
read you a little quote from Sir David about this.
He showed a series of graphs showing world temperature and
(45:15):
critically population as well as ingredients within the atmosphere. The
congruents of those things convinced me beyond any doubt whatever
that not only was the climate changing, but that humanity
was responsible for that. Until then, one knows that the
climate has changed of a geological history. And I was
not totally sure that this was not just an aberration
(45:36):
within the parameters of their ability. But basically that professor's
graphs convinced him beyond any doubt at all.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
It's interesting because I always thought that David Attenborough was
a scientist, m.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
You know, like you know in time. I mean, he
did study zoology at university like that. That is true,
design is in that way. But but yeah, he's a talent.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
I assumed he had a career in science, like in
natural sciences of some sort. And then somebody came along
and was like, this guy's great, let's make TV with him.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Right, So, given what I now know, I.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Guess this is not is yeah, you know, I mean,
he's a TV guy who likes nature, and so for
him to come to understand this in two thousand and four,
I guess isn't as shocking to me now that I
learned what you have told me as it would have
been before this.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Conversation, right right right. And the thing is, at the
time he took criticism for it, he was taking criticism
from environmental activists who were just like, come on, you
are the voice of the natural world. You like most
people on Earth who speak English, van production to nature
of the way they think about it is totally framed
by you. Like if we get you on our side, Yeah,
(46:53):
if you hit you and outside, we can beat this thing.
You know. And I'm just going to play you a
little bit of him talking about his evolution as part
of some testimony he gave to a UK Parliament committee
a few years ago.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
I'm not, by nature a propagandist, and I'm not even
I mean, I started making natural history programs because I
thought there was nothing that I preferred to see more
on television than the beauties of the natural world. And
I would love to just be going on doing that.
I mean, that's what I enjoy. I enjoyed looking at
(47:28):
birds of Paradise, in displaying, I enjoy Conroy. So I
enjoy these things and I enjoy bringing them to people
who don't have the good.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Luck that I've had.
Speaker 4 (47:37):
So that's that's fine. But if you become aware of
what is happening actual, well you don't have any alternative. Now.
Fifty years ago we weren't doing And fifty years ago
there were quite a lot of people who would say, no, no, no,
it's rubbish. Of course your artitect me. Ever, so there
were a lot of people saying that. And if you're
on to work with the BBC, which is what I
(47:59):
did and have done all my life, fifty years ago
we were there was a duoperty, there was BBC in
those commercial televisions, and the BBC was a pub big service.
And if you're in public service, you have to represent
a public point of view and you can't use it
for propaganda.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
But so therefore, did you waited for the public mood
to change before we started becoming quite assertive with the
impact that humans were having on the natural world.
Speaker 4 (48:26):
Not quite as easy as that. I didn't wait for
public opinion to change. I waited until the fact seemed incontroversible.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
And yeah, So that lecture he attends in Belgium, that
is his Oh, this is incontrovertible moment, right. But as
influential as Sir David's been right as the voice of
the natural world, he still is the talent. So what
he does after attending that lecture is he goes to
the BBC and the BBC is actually having discussions about this,
(48:55):
because you know, early two thousands we're still in this
era of sort of like should we be both sizing
things and if we're presenting something as factor, we need
to totally make sure that it is fact and et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. And so they ask him, you know,
what do you think, and he's like, well, no, I
absolutely believe it. This is the case. And he says,
(49:16):
if you want me to go and investigate and talk
to people, I will gladly do so. So what he
does is he makes a couple of programs that come
out in two thousand and six that really examine the
climate change question, and really it's him talking to scientists
about this. I'm just going to play you a clip
(49:37):
from one of those programs, Planet Earth.
Speaker 4 (49:46):
In four thousand, five hundred million years, our world has
gone through many natural changes. Now it's changing once again,
but this time we ourselves are contributing to those changes.
Speaker 5 (50:03):
We are coursing the world the heat up.
Speaker 4 (50:08):
If we continue to p behave as we are doing,
our children and grandchildren will have to deal with extreme
and potentially catastrophic changes. The vast forests of the Amazon
could wither and burn. The oceans could turn acid, destroying
much of the life they presently contain. The Arctic could
(50:32):
be transformed, its ice could melt, and its most famous
animals vanish forever. Rising tides could cast millions of people adrift.
Many of our coastal cities could be flooded and drowned.
(51:03):
We still have time. There are ways to minimize these
changes if we all choose now to adopt them, But
the next few years will be crucial. If we miss
our chance, the future may be grim, indeed for life
on planet Earth.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
So in that right, he's explicitly doing the thing he
said he would never do. Yeah, whereas he's like, we
can do this, we must do this, we must change.
Speaker 2 (51:37):
And I've seen a lot of this programming, like that's
part of my introduction to our my deep dive on
him was this kind of stuff. So that's why I
was a little alarmed when you were like, wait, he
was a climate schedules, Like what are you talking about.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Toby, And I think in that way, to be honest,
it's I don't know. I found it surprising, but then
also a little bit inspiring at the same time, where
you're just like, right, on the one hand, it's really
a bummer that one of the most powerful people on
the face of the earth when it comes to messaging
about nature wasn't banging the drum. On the other hand,
(52:09):
you're just like, oh, here's someone who saw the science
and just had a reaction of just like oh let
me change, like yeah, yeah, my bad, Like let's just
do this and lean hard into it.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
And it meant had something at stake in the change.
It meant like, I'm famous for doing one thing, yeah,
do it really really well. I really didn't want to
do something different because I'm really good at that, and
now I have received information that tells me, well, you
have to do it.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
Different totally, totally.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
I got to figure out how to be good at
the new thing too. That part is really.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Inspiring, right, And you know in that part of it,
And I'm glad you said that, like you's still figuring
out how to do it well, how to quet that
kind of messaging. So you know, that whole program is
a whole program devoted to climate change talking to scientists,
and it has like long Sterli agrees like that one, right,
but it's almost kind of divorced a little bit. It's
like a different version of the same sort of problem
(53:03):
that I guess I had with life on Earth, right,
which is you've told me that humans are having an
effect on the planet, but that effect on the planet
still feels somehow not tangible, Like I'm not seeing humans
and animals in concert with each other in a way
that I experienced in my everyday life. Right. And so
he starts making programming that does that in like a
(53:24):
real way and talking more about climate change, and I
feel like the way he talks about climate change actually
starts bleeding into other stuff he's doing, Like he always
talked on some level about human waste in the ocean,
for example, but the way he talks about it changes,
Like I'm just going to play you a really famous
one that he does. This is from Blue Planet too,
(53:47):
And just to set the scene for you, like this
again is a scene with whales, and you imagine like
you're in a shot of the ocean and you sort
of zoom in on like this little whale pod and
here's that clip.
Speaker 4 (54:00):
A mother is holding her newborn young it's dead. She
is reluctant to let it go, and has been carrying
it around for many days. In top predators like these,
industrial chemicals can build up to lethal levels, and plastic
could be part of the problem. As plastic breaks down,
(54:24):
it combines with these other pollutants that are consumed by
vast numbers of marine creatures. Its possible per Calf may
have been poisoned by her own contaminated milk. Pilot whales
have quig rains, they can certainly experience emotions, judging from
(54:44):
the behavior of the adults. The loss of the infant
has affected the entire family. Unless the flow of plastics
and industrial pollution into the world's oceans is reduced marine
life will be poisoned by them from many centuries to cool.
The creatures that live in the Big Blue are perhaps
(55:07):
more remote than any animals on the planet, but not
remote enough it seems to escape the effects of what
we are doing to their world.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
And that whole scene is just like it's so sad.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
You know, but it's exactly what you said going into it,
Like now we're at a point of whether it's both
and it's not. You know, you have politics over here,
you have love for nature over here where he's like,
you're in relationship to this animal. Also that relationship is
causing damage to.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
It and you in the end totally you're watching like
a natural phenomenon, but it is human caused. It's like,
on the one hand, I'm so proud of this man
for making the change, you know, And this stuff is
so shocking and has tangible results, like that plastics thing
we just played. When that aired, it led to like
real legislative action in the UK over plastics and stuff.
(56:04):
It's like people watch that and we're outraged, but we
exist in an outrage deluge constantly.
Speaker 2 (56:14):
And it's overwhelming and it makes us sad. But I
don't think he's trafficking an outrage a manual because I again,
for me on my own journey about my relationship to
the natural world, he is a big part of that,
Like going into his programs has been a big part
of that. And I just think a lot of what
he is doing now when he talks about climate is
(56:36):
exactly where a lot of the climate activists I've interviewed
in reporting on this have said, we got to get
which is we already know the bad news, you know,
I mean, set aside the deniers, but it's a mainstream
relief now that humans have been on this suicidal rampage
with the climate, and like science has done its job,
(56:59):
Science has done enough that we can fix it, Like
we have all the necessary tools as a consequence of
advancements in science. What's missing is a shared will to
do so. And there's a lot of belief that we
are stuck in a place where as people who now
that we care about it, we immediately shut down in
(57:20):
the way that you're describing because it seems overwhelming and
insolvable and we can't move past and Okay, the sin
is already done, and that there has to be a
place where we figure out how to shift our actual
emotional relationship to other species from this, you know, long
(57:41):
standing colonial relationship, whether it's about taking stuff for our
needs and destroying the planet or taking care of the
planet for our needs. Right, the idea that we are
the stewards is the problem and get ourselves to we
are in relationship. And that's what he's doing, is he's
teaching us how to be in relationship in these more
(58:01):
modern programs, or that's what I'm hearing, right and showing that, like,
here's what's at stake if you can't change your relationship.
I think it's the kind of thing that we need
right now, which is why again I was shocked to
hear that he was later.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
But that's the thing. It's like he's a person on
a journey. His life has been the journey of that relationship.
And yeah, I don't know. You put it really beautifully.
And I think one of the reasons I stayed up
all night when I first watched this program was I
was just like, I'm watching it in this way, Now,
how's my child? Should I have children gonna watch this?
Speaker 2 (58:38):
You know that's the bread Listen, I don't have children.
I'm never gonna have children, and that part I always
think about, Like, God, what if I had a kid?
I just can't imagine how you would think about the
future on the specific question of climate change, like in
the world we're gonna live in for your child, that
would be really overwhelming to me.
Speaker 1 (58:58):
Totally, totally, And I think in that way for future generations.
I mean, we don't know much about what the future
is gonna hold, but I don't know if we're gonna
look at this man and people like like this whole
generation of people you're talking about, people like him, Jane
Goodall like their prophets. You know.
Speaker 2 (59:18):
Well I heard David Attenborough, the snack who had to grow?
Speaker 1 (59:26):
So who do you have for me next week?
Speaker 2 (59:29):
Okay, Well, let's go to the clips. Let's see if
you can guess who this is.
Speaker 11 (59:33):
When I was thirteen, we went to New York and
I went to a Broadway show with Mohamma and the
show is called Bye Bye Bertie. And I looked up
and I saw all these kids singing and dancing. I thought,
that looks like fun too. Wait a minute, that maybe
that's what I want to do.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
Bye Bye Bertie.
Speaker 2 (59:52):
Okay, Now there's a lot of people for whom that voice, yes,
immediately recognizable.
Speaker 1 (59:57):
And I am ashamed to say I'm not one of them.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
You're not one of them. Okay, they were all the
content clues as well. All right, let's hear the next one.
Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
I was reading last night through through a list of awards,
which took two and a half pages to get through.
Speaker 5 (01:00:12):
What do you do with them?
Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
Where are they?
Speaker 11 (01:00:15):
I sort of put them up on a shelf and
every once in a while I passed by them and think, yeah,
that was a couple of really good years.
Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
So you know, she was big, Okay, has been big
in the past. What more?
Speaker 5 (01:00:27):
I really had to win the audience.
Speaker 11 (01:00:30):
I mean it was, you know, well, Judy grown is
bringing a daughter on and I think that they were
kind of putting up with that, and so I really
had to work hard and they appreciated that.
Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
Okay, I'm intrigued. All right.
Speaker 8 (01:00:44):
Wait.
Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Big Lives is a production of BBC Studios and Pushkin Industries.
Is hosted by me Manuel Jochi and Kay Wright. Our
team over at BBC Studios includes producer Emma Reverel, archive
producer Samir Chowdery, found design by Melvin rickerby our executive
producer is Annie Brown. Our production coordinator is Gayalen Davis Connolly,
(01:01:08):
our friend is Amy Woods, and our production manager is
Mabel Finnegan Write. The team over at Pushkin Industries includes
executive producer Costanzo Goyardo, producer Daphne Chen. Our legal advisor
is Jake Flanagan. Our marketing team includes Morgan Ratner and
Jordan McMillan.
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Get add free episodes of Big Lives by subscribing to
Pushkin Plus. Subscribers also get ad free episodes of all
Pushkin shows, full audio books, series binges to shows like
Deep Cover and Revision, This History, and more. Sign up
on the Big Live Show page on Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus.
Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
Thanks for your support.
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