Attenborough's Journey (2010) - full transcript
David Attenborough has travelled
the globe countless times
to film the living
world in all its wonder. A-ha.
In a career that spans the age of
television itself, he has pioneered
new filming technologies,
produced some of the most iconic
moments in broadcasting,
and inspired a generation.
The blue whale!
Now, in his 80s, he's
on the road again, travelling across
continents and oceans to shoot
the latest instalment in his
epic account of life on earth.
This is a film about the life and
evolution of a very rare species,
caught on camera
in HIS natural habitat.
David is making an extraordinary
journey around the world
to film his latest landmark series,
the story
of the origin of life.
David Attenborough's First Life
is the series that will fulfil
his ambition to document and film
all the stages of life on earth.
Over the last 30-odd years
I've been filming
the range and variety
of animals and plants
that live on the world today.
What has been missing is the
very beginning of the story.
We've always started at chapter two.
So, I just want to go back and
show where this whole thing started.
When I was a boy, that was
regarded as totally unknown.
There was no evidence of how life
started and today there's evidence.
The first piece of evidence
was unearthed just 100 miles
north of David's London home.
This is the Charnwood Forest
in Leicestershire.
As a schoolboy, I grew up near here.
This was where, in the 1930s,
David first developed a passion
for the natural world and fossils.
This is the beginning
of the journey for David.
This is where, as a young boy,
he looked and found fossils
that got him fired up
and it really started
his career.
It's 70-odd years since
David was walking these woods
and cycling around them
and now, we're back here.
When I was a boy, growing up
in the Midlands, in Leicester,
the rocks and limestone we found
in the east of the county were
full of the most magical things.
You hit a stone and it suddenly fell
open and there was this amazing coil
shell - beautiful and extraordinary,
and nobody had seen that for
150 million years, except you.
So, I thought it was very romantic
and exciting.
It appealed to the small boy's
instinct of collecting things
that, to be honest,
I don't think I've really lost,
but I certainly had it then.
I was a passionate fossil collector.
But I never came to look for them in
this part of Charnwood and then a boy
from my very own school, just
a few years after I left it,
made an astounding discovery.
I can't remember where I heard about
the discovery of a Charnia,
but I certainly kicked myself
and I thought
"I could have been part of history.
"I could have discovered that.
"Why didn't I bother to look?"
And this is it.
It's called and is known around
the world as Charnia,
after the forest
in which it was discovered.
David is as passionate
about fossils today as he
was as a boy, an interest that was
nurtured by his academic parents.
He was the middle of three sons,
born to Mary and Frederick.
The family lived in a house in the
grounds of what is now Leicester
University,
just half a mile down the road
from the museum
where he is filming now.
Yes, there we are.
That was University - well, it
was, as the press were quick to
point, out a lunatic asylum.
It was taken over by the
University College, you see.
And we lived in that which
was the superintendent's
house, College House.
There was the big park,
Victoria Park.
There's my father.
He was principal of the University
College in the 1930s
and there he is,
looking younger than me,
though he didn't have any hair. But
not since he was about 28, I think.
David has two brothers - John and
Richard, with Richard growing up
to become an actor
and Oscar-winning director.
So what was the inspiration that
drove the boys to such success?
Perhaps it was their sense
of adventure, as they explored
the building that was once
a psychiatric hospital.
There were great areas of it that
were still in the condition of them
being a Victorian lunatic asylum,
and that included padded cells.
We, as boys,
used to wander around there,
getting in in various ways, which
I suppose we shouldn't have done.
My elder brother Richard took me into
this padded cell and shut the door.
That was horrible because inside it
was all quilted and where the door
shut there was no handle on the door.
So you couldn't even see where
the door was
and you knew that you could scream
to your heart's content,
or as loud as you wished,
and nobody could possibly hear you.
That was not a pleasant sensation.
I must remind him of it some time!
David went to Cambridge
to read natural sciences
and that enabled him
to indulge his growing fascination
with the natural world.
It's a passion that still drives
him on today.
David's journey to discover the
origins of all life is going to
take him around the entire planet,
encompassing four different
continents and 40,000 miles.
First stop, Morocco,
in North Africa.
We're here for trilobites.
Trilobites are the most
extraordinary, wonderful fossils.
Here are some of the
wonderfully prepared specimens.
Happily, and very, very fortunately,
the world's greatest expert
on trilobites -
or certainly one
of the first three - Richard Fortey,
an old friend of mine,
is here to show us around,
so we should be in
for a very privileged time.
I think they are just about as good
as you can get with preparation.
They look stunning.
Trilobites
are principal characters in the
story of the first life on earth.
They were one of the most successful
kinds of animal in history.
There are 50,000 species
that we know of, and probably
many more undiscovered.
They were the first animals
to see a fully-formed picture,
using lenses in their eyes,
made of rock.
In their heyday, they dominated
the globe for 250 million years.
Humans have been around
for just two.
What's that ridge there?
That is rock still in.
That is the system we use.
He very carefully left these
for us to see the process
in development, you see.
You're an artist. Thanks very much.
You really are.
Thank you very, very much.
Before filming begins tomorrow,
David has a chance to pick out the
best specimens for the programme.
He's also on the lookout
for a few pieces to add to
his private collection.
What sort of price
are we thinking about?
I have reserved all for a long time,
for you, more than three months.
Thank you again very much.
You are welcome any time,
no problem. Thank you.
If I was Mr Moneybags, I would
have bought the Ordovician ones,
the new ones, on the spot.
Which was the one that
really blew you away, David?
That was 15K.
The fossils David has just seen
are the best there are.
But other trilobites are widely
prepared and sold in the towns and
villages of this part of Morocco.
But, to an expert eye, there is
something about some of these
fossils that doesn't quite add up.
It's a nice little specimen.
Well, I've never seen a trident
bearer with a great long flared
median prong on its stripe,
so either it's true,
in which case it's weird,
or it's been, let's say nature
been helped along a little bit.
If it's fake, it's carefully done.
I've seen lots of
different ones in my time.
I've never seen that before.
Or maybe it's pathological.
A diseased trilobite.
We don't want one of them,
not round these parts!
You don't want anybody
catching anything.
A-ha. Thank you.
Thank you. This one?
This one I like but it's too much.
Give me 1,000 dirham, it's a
good price. It's a good price.
750?
No. 1,000.
800? 800? 90.
850?
90 dirham.
850?
90.
It's very sad.
How much? OK. OK.
OK? Yes.
Shake on it. 850?
OK.
Thank you very much.
At 850 Moroccan dirham, David's
got a bargain - that's roughly £70.
20, 200, 400, 600, 800 and 50.
With the shopping spree over,
work begins.
David is filming
at a local museum
where there's a collection
of some of the strangest
and largest trilobites
in existence.
Action.
The shape of these eyes can in
themselves tell us a great deal
about the way the animal lived.
Some of these - we're talking...
thousands of pounds of some of
these things,
if not tens of
thousands of pounds,
of something
that's completely unknown to
science and spectacular to boot.
There is a sort of a standard rule
about this, that when you see
a really lovely thing -
and you're silly enough to say
that's a really lovely thing -
the person concerned said, "Of
course, private collection".
I have some for sale,
but that one is my collection.
I think every time you ask whether
it's a private collection or not,
it goes up by another multiple,
you see. This one is my collection.
Are the other ones curled up?
Are they as
beautifully prepared as that?
Nice.
What sort of money?
OK. Until I show it to you,
I can't tell you.
David Attenborough is a name that
is synonymous with television.
First Life will be his
50th series as a presenter.
But surprising as it seems, his long
career in TV began quite by chance.
I saw an advertisement in The Times
for a sound radio job which I applied
for and didn't even get an interview,
but a week or so afterwards,
I got a letter from someone who said
they'd got this new thing called
television, would I be interested?
Then they said they would pay me
£1,000 to go on the training course.
That was three times what I was being
paid at the time in the publishers
so I thought I would give it a go.
Television in the '50s
was brand-new, with the BBC
providing the first public
service programmes in Europe.
David had never seen a
television programme before,
but nevertheless began work as
a trainee at Alexandra Palace.
I was apprenticed to a producer
who was regarded
as a very experienced man
because he'd been there for
three months and he had already
produced one programme, you know,
so he knew where everything was, so
I joined him and we worked on a quiz
called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.
David's obsession with mysterious
objects of the past was put to
good use behind the scenes.
Lovely, isn't it? A very...
It was his job to source
artefacts to be identified
by a panel of esteemed academics.
..and there, what my Hungarian
colleagues would call...
David's academic background
and his analytical mind
gave him an affinity
with scholars and scientists
that endures to this day.
I've known David
for rather a long time
and we certainly share certain
aspects of humour.
Somebody should make a proper
feature movie,
about trilobites
called Thoracic Park!
This horse is unfit for heavy work.
One of the great privileges is having
an expert like Richard Fortey, who is
a world authority on these...
particular animals and
who knows this locality very well.
Richard is now stomping
around on the horizon.
It will be very interesting - I bet
you he comes back and he'll say,
you know, there was a nice one and he
shows you this, that and the other.
What do you think of the chances
of this being a piece
of worked jasper?
In other words, you think
this is a spear point?
I think it is. I think it's got a
broken tip and probably was thrown
away, or discarded, do you think?
I do. It's jolly old because it's
got this polish on it, wind polish.
Yes. I think also that that is
probably a xerophytic horsetail,
which I didn't know existed.
I was just going to borrow your
lens to have a look to see if it
has got the characteristic joints.
I've got the characteristic joints!
Certainly falling to bits,
the way they always do.
David's appetite for knowledge
is insatiable.
And in the 1950s, that hunger drove
him to come up with a programme idea
that would provide the perfect
opportunity to travel and film
in the remotest parts of the world.
I had a friend in London Zoo
and he and I cooked up an idea
that the London Zoo should
send out a collecting expedition,
which of course we
wouldn't conceivably do now, but
in those days it was possible.
And the idea would be that
I would accompany this chap,
who was an expert on snakes, and I
would see him pouncing on a snake
and then from that film sequence,
we would go to him in the studio
live with the same snake and he
be able to talk about the details.
That was the basis, called Zoo Quest.
The series didn't quite turn out
as planned for David the producer.
Jack Lester was the man from the zoo
and he acquired a tropical disease,
he collapsed after the first show
and the head of my department, or the
head of television said, "Oh look,
if Jack Lester can't do it,
"the show's got to go on - the only
other person there
who could do is Attenborough.
"Tell him he has to leave
the producer's gallery and go
down on the floor and do it."
We spent the first part of our
trip in Paraguay...
From those first moments
in front of the camera,
David has had plenty of time
to hone his distinctive
presenting style.
His 50-year career in television
spans the life
of the industry itself.
The First Life shoot
has moved to Australia
and this morning he's performing
the same ritual
he has gone through
hundreds of times before.
What is the piece in your head now?
Very good question.
You've got to convey something,
some fact, you've got to
get it right.
In 1946, geologist Reg Sprigg found
fossils here in the Ediacara Hills...
Once having got it right
in your mind, you then try
and put it into words.
..Which, until that moment...
had been, until... no...
And the first words that come out of
my lips at any rate are jumbled,
and confused, and...
circumlocutory,
and fumbling for exactitude.
It was the discovery of, in the
Charnwood Forest,
the creature in what
was undoubtedly pre-cambrian...
And then you decide that that will
distil into the following sentences.
That is the gist. OK.
Very difficult to think about it when
someone is fumbling in your genitals!
It's sort of tricky.
It was a discovery in 1957...
I have to walk up and down and
say it to myself and hope I'll
be able to say it to the camera.
In 1946, an Australian geologist,
Reg Sprigg, working here in the
Ediacara Hills of South Australia...
David's trademark delivery has
endeared him to millions
and the producers of Zoo Quest
saw that talent grow.
He was given the job of presenter
on a permanent basis.
I explained to the men as best
I could that I had come to their
valley to try and get some of
the birds of paradise alive.
But they explained to me in gestures
that they shot the birds
with bows and arrows.
Making a documentary isn't
all about talking to camera.
David understands better
than anyone else that some
sequences are a necessary chore.
We're going to do some
tracking shots,
vehicle to vehicle tracking shots.
We're going to have Pete in the back
of this vehicle, leading vehicle,
shooting backwards and we've got
David and Jim in this vehicle...
It's one of the rewards that you
get, the real joys of driving up
there and then they say,
would you drive back, and then they
say, we think we'd like it
a little faster
and then they say, we were wrong.
It was better a little bit slower,
so would you go back again? So it's
actually not the pits of filming,
the pits of filming is when
you have to walk through the
forest looking interested.
And not only interested,
but eagle-eyed.
You say, "Where will
this experienced traveller
"suddenly spot the...
My goodness, there it is!"
That's hard doing.
There are variations - you can
give them the John Wayne, which
is tight-buttocked like that -
that is one of my specialities!
I'm not allowed to do it much these
days. I have to be a bit more
slouched and relaxed, you know.
But of course intelligent,
which is the tricky bit.
That was lovely.
I loved it, when he asked us to do it
again slightly faster, what a thrill!
We only had your enjoyment in mind!
David is filming with a team
of palaeontologists in the Flinders
Ranges of South Australia,
unearthing fossils that
describe how early animals evolved.
How and why did animals
first begin to move?
There is a great thrill
of being alongside these people
who know what they're doing
and know what they're looking for
and know how to look for it.
And of course, you naively think it
would be wonderful
to turn over a rock and say,
"Ah! It's a new species!"
Well, looking for fossils
is not like that, except
that it actually happened.
That's just contributed about...
Have a look! Have a look!
And there it was, and Jim took
a brush and brushed it away.
And bless me, he said,
I don't know, I don't know.
Look at that.
That is what I would just...
It's the weirdest one
I've ever seen.
I've never seen one with that...
It's the relief...
It has to be a footprint.
And we're still waiting as to
hear whether in fact that was the
discovery moment of a new species.
I think it probably was.
The mud on the sea floor
can tell us a great deal
about these animals and not just what
they look like, but how they behaved.
One appears on the telly and
everybody thinks you're an expert,
but I had, last Christmas, some new
neighbours came over
and I'd ever met them
before but the lady said,
Oh just the person I want to meet
because little Julian is so excited
about natural history, thrilled,
"He'll be thrilled to meet you and
he's got some questions for you,"
and I thought oh, dear, oh, dear.
Come along, Julian, ask Sir David
the questions. Julian said,
"How long is the komodo dragon?"
Big relief.
I said, "Well, as a matter of fact,
"Julian, I can tell you the answer
to that. I said, I've been to Komodo
three times.
"And I've actually measured them
and they can grow
to 12 feet long."
And he said, "Wrong!"
He'd been reading too much
Guinness Book of Records.
This is a side-necked turtle.
Over six series of Zoo Quest,
komodo dragons were just one of the
many species David encountered,
collecting animals for London Zoo.
They couldn't take them all
so David stepped in -
his home became a menagerie with
his wife and children helping
with the upkeep of the animals.
We had a pair of lemurs at home and
some lovely birds called blue-crowned
hanging parakeets,
which we brought back from Borneo,
and chameleons. We
had a breeding colony of bush babies.
They had an unfortunate habit
of peeing on their hands
and then rubbing their hands
together and patting everything
around to make them smell good.
Friends coming to dinner would
arrive and open the door and you
could see them dilate their nostrils
and think,
That's not mulligatawny
soup, what are we going to have
for dinner tonight?
I regret to say
it was bush baby urine so, after
a bit, my dear wife thought this
was not compatible with domestic
hospitality and one thing and
the other so we got rid of them.
David, of course, is famous
for his love of animals.
To help tell the story of the
first life on earth,
he's in a rainforest in north-west
Australia filming
living fossils,
animals with evolutionary links
to the past.
David, we're going to be on
close-ups on the animal,
but it might help us
if you deliver your line anyway.
I think for me the highlight was
in the rainforest when David was
there with this little velvet worm
on his hand and his connection with
animals just really came through,
you could see he adored this
little creature, this weird worm
crawling on his arm.
Action, David.
And this is what I was looking for.
This extraordinary and enchanting
little creature, sometimes
called a velvet worm...
He just, you know, he gave
it personality and he was
in awe of this thing.
Just to see that was such an
enlightening thing, sitting in the
middle of a rainforest
with fireflies popping off
all around you,
you have to pinch yourself because
it had a dream-like quality to it.
It has one further attribute
which Ayesha could not have had.
It has tiny little holes all along
its flanks which enable it
to breathe air,
so this is one of the
first creatures
that moved on to land
540 million years ago.
Nice one. Yes.
Yes, it's the ring tailed gecko.
What's your favourite gecko?
The tokay gecko.
It goes to-kay, to-kay.
And in Indonesia most people
are terrified of it and they
said one bite, certain death.
And I caught one once and I said,
Look, they're absolutely harmless,
you see, and I pointed my finger,
Nothing to be afraid of,
and the gecko went like this,
and I said, nothing to be frightened
of, it's not poisonous at all.
But I couldn't get it off.
I put it on to a tap, I pulled it,
it just hung on and hung on
and it was on for...
After about five minutes, you get
quite bored with it, and it was quite
upsetting, it was a very long time.
I didn't come clever dick again
for quite some time.
Ten minutes, maybe!
Action. Cue David.
As the oxygen levels rose,
so eventually they reached
a level when it was possible for
air-breathing animals to live.
Crikey.
As they say in Australia,
got the bastard!
They only come in ones, do they?
Limited edition. Two wafers.
I think one of the great things
about working with David
is that he fits in with the team
around him
and is interested
in everybody in the team.
Being part of a team is one
of the pleasures.
It takes some time to
become a team, you can't just slot
in like that because it depends
upon knowing the personalities
of the people
you're involved with.
I suppose in one way if you
going on long journeys together
with people, you ought to be,
to do a job, you ought to be
sufficiently professional to be
able to get on with anybody.
And if you find that the
way they comb their hair or
something is irritating, then you
learn to suppress that irritation.
But one of the ways,
once you begin to sort that out,
you do begin
to develop jokes between you.
To illustrate the evolution of
backboned animals,
David is on his
way to a zoo to film a white rhino.
He'll be delivering his lines just
inches from the two tonne animal,
so even David must be
briefed on safety.
HORN BLARES
Well, you can hand feed him
if you are happy to do that,
otherwise you can just pop
that leaves in over the log.
There's no danger of him giving
me a nip with his front teeth?
He won't be able to nip you.
He won't do that.
Obviously, as you
know, the lips are very muscly.
Accustomed as I am to
rhinoceros feeding,
the problem
is a trivial one, really.
Just you might lose in your hand at
the wrist, that's all, you know?
Nothing to worry about, really!
The lips are very muscular,
so you might lose a finger or two,
but nothing really to worry about,
you know, I'm told!
I was driving through Kenya once.
The chap I was with was a very
knowledgeable biologist
and an expert on elephants.
Suddenly he said, "Did you
hear that pitter-patter?"
And I said, "No, what?" He said,
"Well, we were charged by a rhino."
I said, "We were?" "Yes", he
said, "but it was a dummy charge."
There was another pitter-patter,
but this time it didn't fade away.
This time, wallop, hit the back end
of the Land Rover
and actually
lifted it up and shook it.
And I remember seeing his hands
on the wheel
showing white at the knuckles as the
thing came a second time.
Crash! Bang! And it shook.
And then he backed off, and I said,
"Hell of a dummy charge that, Roy."
He said, "Don't joke!" He came in the
third time, wrecked the back wheel,
ripped up the tyre
and by the time he'd finished,
the car was undrivable.
David can't go anywhere without
being recognised by someone. His
popularity spans the generations.
Please keep it up. It's the only
stuff on telly worth watching!
And this level of fame is
something he's had to get used to.
By the mid-Sixties,
David Attenborough had
become a household name.
Mr David Attenborough, here.
Bless his heart.
Then, still in his thirties, an
unexpected opportunity came his way.
The BBC needed young blood to run
their brand-new channel, BBC Two.
I remember deliberately saying to
myself, "Now, you've got to make up
"your mind, Attenborough, are
you a television man or are
you some kind of scientist?"
I decided at that time that I was
really at heart a television man.
Therefore, if I was a
television man,
there could not be a more interesting
job in television than that
one that was being offered to me.
We shall continue to look for the
new stars, the experimental stars.
As Controller of BBC Two, David
introduced a new wave of programming
that would stand the test of time.
He also pioneered a whole new era
of television as the BBC raced
to make Britain the first nation
in Europe to broadcast in colour.
Then, of course, we discovered that
in fact Germany
was preparing to
going into colour and this,
you must remember,
this was in the Sixties
and so there was still a sort of
feeling about Germany, you know?
We'd just won the war, after all,
and I was thinking,
"Come on, the BBC should
be the first in colour in Europe."
And it suddenly dawned on me we could
use colour cameras in Wimbledon
and with just four or five colour
cameras, which is all I
think we had,
we could get hours and
hours and hours of colour television.
We would launch as soon
as we could do at least
50% of the programmes in colour
and Wimbledon allowed us to do that.
And what is more, it allowed us to
get on the air before Germany did!
David's challenge was to promote
the virtues of colour TV.
He came up with a new concept,
a series of big budget programmes
designed to showcase colour
in all its glory.
The first of this new genre of
landmark programmes,
known then as Sledgehammers,
was an arts programme
called Civilisation.
It was going to be the finest things
that Western Europeans had produced
artistically from the beginning of
the 5th, 6th century onwards,
which simply had
a phenomenal success.
BBC Two was riding high,
so we commissioned Ascent
Of Man there and then.
Ascent Of Man was the
model for science television.
If I'm to take the ascent of
man back to its beginnings...
It set a trend for the
epic programming for which
David is now synonymous.
And epic programmes need epic shots.
So somebody needs to be up on the
hill who can give David the cue.
'Standing by for a take.
Yes, Kirsty.'
For here you can see fossils
of the very first animals
that evolved on this planet.
'That was good for us.'
This location is a key place
in the story of the first life.
The rocks here are covered in
600-million-year old fossils from
the same family
as the one found in Leicestershire
where David grew up.
OK, David, it you could gesture
towards this one.
We're going to do a pull focus
to this one. That was fantastic.
You know, I've grown up to believe
that that little fossil in the
Charnwood Forest that long,
just one of them, was one of the most
precious fossils in the world,
and they are walking over them!
Dozens of them! Well, hundreds of
them, literally hundreds of them.
It's a good place for David to
indulge his passion for photography.
Aren't we right in thinking that
the photograph on the front of
Life On Earth was one of yours?
You are absolutely correct,
absolutely correct.
I heard this terrible noise in
my ear as I lay on a camp bed...
Not on a camp bed, I lay on the
ground in Panama, like somebody
hitting an anvil with a mallet and
I turned round and there was this...
I went click
and it was a frog
and it was the front cover of
Life On Earth. Look at that.
You see how this boy's got
talent in his fingers, he
just doesn't know about!
THE CREW LAUGH
What on Earth's that?
You panicked and pressed
the button by accident!
HE LAUGHS
Filming moves across Canada
to the Rocky Mountains.
The next location is a remote fossil
quarry some 2,000 metres above sea
level, and getting there isn't easy.
David and the crew will need to fly
part of the way
and then hike for
half an hour up a steep icy path.
I'm going to give you a quick safety
briefing here on the helicopter.
This one is done up, it
doesn't hang out like that.
You put your headset on.
You don't have to press any buttons
to talk, it's just voice-activated.
I just wish I could remember
any of these instructions.
I mean, it's like with the
air hostesses on jets, I
can't remember a thing!
Well, if you look above you,
there are some clouds in the sky.
Those are getting thicker,
which means you can't fly,
so we've got to get up there and see
if we can land,
find the spot for the piece and then
get out before it all closes over.
The original and best.
Thank you, sir, I do appreciate it.
Thank you. Anybody who bought one of
my books deserves to have it signed.
You can't say that, I'm still here!
Every day is a highlight for me.
Of course it is, Martin, thank
you very much. This one is
the best of far, definitely.
What was wrong with yesterday?
Well, we weren't filming, David.
Oh, yeah, you're quite right.
David may be an octogenarian,
but his determination is
just as it ever was.
We have planned
this in so many ways.
We've discussed having
helicopters airlifting him up in
a sort of sling underneath.
We've had the possibility of a sedan
chair to come up here, but actually
David's perfectly fine
and perfectly willing, so all our
anxieties are evaporating away,
really.
I may be some time.
The struggle will be worth it.
Near the summit, David will find one
of the richest fossil locations
in the world, the Burgess Shales.
Here, they're found
all over the place.
They're called trilobites. That's
the head, there's the middle bit.
'David is so interested in things.
He's fascinated by everybody.'
If there's a table of people,
he'll say, "Who is
that and what do they do?"
He's fascinated by that.
David reads endlessly.
I mean, on the plane he read two
books coming out from England.
He absorbs. His study is full
of books that he's reading.
He's up to date with science. He's
reading the latest science papers.
This is a man who, I think, will go
on and on because I think he's so
fascinated by the world,
as long as he can walk,
as long as he can move around,
he'll be interacting with it.
Filming at the top of a mountain
is not without hazards, as
the weather closes in.
Unfortunately, the cloud's come down.
We have got a helicopter here.
The pilot also wants to go home.
We wouldn't mind not spending a night
on the mountain, so I guess we won't
be able to stay here for too long,
but at the moment the mist is down.
We're going to have to get into the
chopper, sit there ready to go and if
it lifts and if you can see the lake
at the bottom then, with any luck,
we might put our heads on a pillow
tonight in the warmth. Here's hoping!
There's plenty to keep David busy
while he waits for the weather to
clear. There are fossils everywhere.
OK, fellas, he says
it's time we left.
There you go. Thanks a lot.
No problem, eh? Really great.
How was it, David? Terrible!
Do you mind being taken up to these
far flung, inhospitable places?
No, that's why I'm here!
I don't mind! It's what I came for!
Back in the Seventies,
David's passion for exploring
far flung places was the catalyst
for his resignation from
management at the BBC.
The success of his commissions
only served to remind
the desk-bound Attenborough of
the life he was missing.
I was fretting a bit and concluding
that the rest of my life was
not to be spent behind a desk.
I couldn't bear it.
And so I managed to resign after
eight years of administration.
And the first thing I did on having
resigned was the head of the Natural
History Unit came to see me and said,
"Look, don't you think it
would be a great idea if
"we did a 12-part series about the
natural world and would you do it?"
"Oh," I said, "What a good idea!"
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.
Life on Earth was the series that
would define David as the world's
greatest natural history presenter.
It gave him the opportunity to go to
the places he'd always dreamed of
and to see the animals he'd always
wanted to see.
But much more than that,
it revolutionised the viewers'
perspective of the
small world in which they lived.
It was only in the mid-Seventies that
you had really such a comprehensive
airline service around the world,
such a reliable airline service
around the world, that you could
go pretty well anywhere, which
meant that in the programmes we
could hop from the Barrier Reef
to the Sahara just like that,
if you wanted to do so, in a shot.
And then, about 20 or 30 years ago,
people realised that they'd been
looking in the wrong rocks and in the
wrong way. These are the right rocks.
It had a sort of liberating effect
that somehow,
and this was just after the
moon shots of course, that somehow
for the first time we were getting
a vision of the natural world,
of the globe, of the Earth,
with the zoosphere, with the animals
and plants that clothed it all.
For the first time you were getting
a comprehensive view of that
and people felt that quite clearly.
So it seems really very unfair
that man should have
chosen the gorilla
to symbolise all that
is aggressive and violent
when that's the
one thing that the gorilla
is not, and that we are.
The reason we had gone to gorillas
was in order to illustrate a point
I was making about the evolutionary
significance of climbing
primates, of climbing mammals,
who had to grasp branches.
And to grasp a branch you need to
be able to
put your thumb and your
forefinger together like that.
So on the day in question, I crawled
off and prepared to go on about
the thumb and the forefinger.
And as I was about to say that
I suddenly felt a weight
on my feet and there was a baby
gorilla undoing my shoelaces!
Well, it didn't seem to be the
right moment to be talking
about the thumb and forefinger
and while I was concluding on
that, a hand came down on my head
and there was the adult female!
And she opened my mouth, put her
hand, a huge great hand
and stuck a finger in my mouth
and I couldn't talk about the thumb
and forefinger even then!
By this time I was in a
sort of delirium, really.
I mean, it just seemed paradisal.
I mean, absolutely extraordinary.
Took my breath away.
It did cause a huge sensation that
here is a presenter
looking at the camera,
when suddenly a gorilla comes
out of the bush and sits on him!
I mean, it's quite odd!
Back in the UK, David is in the back
room of Edinburgh's National Museum
filming a fossil of a huge animal
that lived 420 million years ago.
A deadly sea scorpion, one of the
largest predators of its time.
Gosh!
Well, this is a magnificent example
of just how big an animal can grow
if it has an external skeleton.
Yeah, my friend Richard Fortey, he's
got a few stories about what goes
on in the back rooms of museums!
Yeah, I mean, they are
strange, arcane places.
I've seen a very old
film projector there,
a Kalee film projector, the like of
which must have shown Buster Keaton
and things like that I would think.
35mm. I started filming on 35mm back
in the Fifties,
so I don't feel as astounded at that,
but I now find
that people coming into our business
are astonished to see 16mm film.
"Amazing, film! Good Lord!"
I mean, you can actually look at it!
And they're used to videotape.
So the world changes.
Yielding place to new.
And God
fulfils himself in many ways lest one
good custom should corrupt the world.
We're in Crail in Fife and when
I came here on the recce it was
a beautiful sunny day,
fantastically picturesque.
Mother Nature is a difficult beast
to tame
and I can't do anything
about how she's going to be.
She's obviously in a bad mood today.
How do you feel, David? >
I just regret I haven't
brought my chest wig!
It's just the sort of
weather you need one.
Are you sure you need your blazer?
It makes you look a little
uncomfortable.
What? Are you sure you want your
blazer on? My blazer!
It's not a blazer.
OK, your jacket from M&S! M&S!
M&S!
This is rather good, isn't it?
That's a good hat. I mean,
now, be honest.
No, that's a good hat.
The scarf's very classy.
You can wear the glasses.
They're meant for these conditions,
aren't they? They're titanium.
They are titanium. Well, the problem
is they're better on than off.
Keep them on until we do the
piece, otherwise you might walk
in the water or something!
They haven't got screen wipers,
have they?
Do you like coming to Scotland,
apart from the weather?
I served in the Navy here,
hardened up,
toughened up by life in the
Forces up on the Firth of Forth.
It was like this all the time!
CREW LAUGH
Yeah?
Action!
And on the expanses of sand that
stretch between those huge trees,
sand that's now become this
sandstone rock, there are tracks.
Are you RSPB?
No, we are dissertation. We're
from St Andrew's University, so...
What are you looking for, birds?
The redshanks.
Redshanks. How nice.
Are their numbers doing well?
Yeah, they're fine.
Doing well. Yeah.
Well, you're shanks get pretty
red in this weather, I'll tell you!
It was desperately cold, I must
say, and blowing a gale, but
kind friends lent me gear.
Thank you very much, David.
No, thank you. Not at all.
Was it your underwear?
No, it wasn't my underwear.
It was my outerwear.
Your outerwear. Oh, well, that's not
quite so intimate, so I'm not going
to thank you quite so intimately.
No shared bodily warmth!
David has always been
at the forefront of new
filming technologies.
His programmes have pioneered
miniature cameras, infrared,
super slow-motion, time-lapse
and aerial photography.
The arrival of colour brought a huge
advance as far as making natural
history programmes were concerned.
You could now show the
splendour of bird displays.
You could talk about how insects
would see different colours
in different plants
and you could
see what you were talking about.
The next big change, I suppose,
was the arrival of hypersensitive
cameras and infrared cameras.
We maintained a fiction that
really lions were idle creatures
that spent most of the time lying
around in the sunshine and
just occasionally hunted.
The truth of course is quite
different and that was lions
are lying around
during the day because they hunted
during the night.
But with hypersensitive
cameras we were able to show
that for the first time.
Then sensitive cameras enabled you to
put the film through the camera at a
much greater speed which meant that,
in effect,
you could slow things down,
so that changed, so you could
show how animals ran, for example.
On top of that, the next change
came the other way round, in that
by use of computers and so on,
we could slow down the speed at which
the frames passed through the camera
and at the same time move the camera
and get pictures of, for example,
a speeded up activity when you
showed it of plants developing.
That produced a great change.
And then suddenly, computer-generated
imaging came along
and to an improved degree, instead of
the rather crude and clumsy things
that had been seen in the past.
Making First Life, David is at
the cutting edge once again
as palaeontology and
technology join forces
to bring the earliest animals
on Earth back to life for the first
time in half a billion years.
OK, David, here's
the head of the unit.
Seeing these animals
living and breathing
is something David has
dreamt of since he was a boy.
Oh, that's terrific!
My old friend, anomalocaris!
Like you've never seen it before.
Hi! Oh, it's terrific!
The really
thrilling thing for me
is that by using a computer graphic
and imaging,
you can take these tiny little marks
and with total justification,
scientific backing, you can make
that animal really come to life,
come out of the rock and move.
That's knock out stuff, you know?
I mean, that is knock out, isn't it?
Look at that!
How could you not believe in that?
Just thrilling, actually.
Just thrilling.
I've been given this model and
I put some bones inside of it.
There weren't any bones!
It's just the... But for your point
you've got to have bones.
Yeah, it's the only way the computer
can understand what to move where.
I was going to say, next time
you go for a lobster supper...!
Now I know perfectly well
that you can see a shot of,
say, a shrimp and a coral reef and
another one rather different shrimp
comes round the
corner and you are very hard put
to know which is the real one.
Once you've finished this stage
you can make it do anything.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
You can make it go right, left and
upside down. Exactly, yeah, yeah.
And just direct it. Yeah.
It sounds
like a television presenter, really!
It's pretty exciting looking at
a piece of rock, turning it over
and seeing the image of an animal
there, but to see that come to life
in this vivid, vivid way
is more than
you can possibly hope for, really.
It actually helps the scientist,
too, because when you see the thing
you suddenly realise that
certain things are possible.
You realise that it couldn't possibly
have done that, it must
have done the other.
David is on his way to
the Great Barrier Reef.
He's going to a remote island 50
miles off the coast of Australia
where he'll be filming the most
primitive animals there are.
How nice.
The comfiest seat in the house!
If you hold it to the left it'll
give you up to 30 degrees.
And they tell me you're going out
to do a documentary on sponges.
On sponges. Well, we're not doing
an entire documentary on sponges.
That could be a bit of a... You know?
Because sponges don't do a lot!
Sponges are just clumps
of simple animal cells
that have stuck together.
It's at this point that the
basic patterns of animal
form are established.
Animals developed legs
and arms and television shows!
CREW LAUGH
There's another very
important sequence to film
on the Great Barrier Reef.
Three miles from Heron
Island there's a vast sandbar.
It's to be used for the
opening scene in First Life.
But to get the shot,
David must
be left on the sandbar alone in
40 degree heat with no shade.
The team must work fast.
Within hours the tide will come in
flooding the sandbar
and stranding David.
It's no mean feat for
a man in his eighties.
Am I prepared? I've got all kinds
of electronic gear up by backside!
I'm on a fantastic journey to
look for the origins of life.
David seems to have this
unbelievable amount of energy.
I don't think I'll have
anything like the energy
that he has when I'm 83.
In a way, one of the things that
drives David on on these things,
long after most people would
have retired,
is not just the quest for
more things, which, of course,
will always drive someone who's
interested in the natural world, but
also he actually enjoys getting back
with a team of people like the old
times on some of his great series,
and having that fun and drinking
the occasional bottle of red wine
and being in these amazing places.
I don't think David is ever...
I mean, I can't imagine
him ever retiring.
I have to confess, I'm
fascinated by armadillos.
As far as I'm concerned, they
are some of the nicest and most
curious animals in the world.
I'm standing on the brink
of one of the most densely
populated parts of the sea.
I am on the edge of a
coral reef at low tide.
And top of the menu
right now is salmon!
This programme means
a lot to me, actually.
And, rather surprisingly, I didn't
realise how much it meant to me
until I started doing it,
because I have spent over the last
25, 30 years
making a series of programmes about
different groups of animals
as they have emerged
through evolution
and I've never made anything
about the very beginning of life.
Doing this programme not only
makes a lovely programme to
make that whole series correct
and complete, but, happily, takes me
to the places to see where they are.
And it's actually very moving,
really, you know, to see suddenly
a magnificent sheet of fossils,
innumerable, complex fossils
which were alive right at the very
beginning of life on this planet
500 million years ago.
So this series, to a degree, which
are really didn't fully appreciate
until I started working on it,
really completes the set.
Some creatures managed
to crawl up onto the land.
But all of us alive today owe
our very existence to them.
Well, in a curious way, in the end,
the end of my last sort of making
series like this, is my beginning.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
the globe countless times
to film the living
world in all its wonder. A-ha.
In a career that spans the age of
television itself, he has pioneered
new filming technologies,
produced some of the most iconic
moments in broadcasting,
and inspired a generation.
The blue whale!
Now, in his 80s, he's
on the road again, travelling across
continents and oceans to shoot
the latest instalment in his
epic account of life on earth.
This is a film about the life and
evolution of a very rare species,
caught on camera
in HIS natural habitat.
David is making an extraordinary
journey around the world
to film his latest landmark series,
the story
of the origin of life.
David Attenborough's First Life
is the series that will fulfil
his ambition to document and film
all the stages of life on earth.
Over the last 30-odd years
I've been filming
the range and variety
of animals and plants
that live on the world today.
What has been missing is the
very beginning of the story.
We've always started at chapter two.
So, I just want to go back and
show where this whole thing started.
When I was a boy, that was
regarded as totally unknown.
There was no evidence of how life
started and today there's evidence.
The first piece of evidence
was unearthed just 100 miles
north of David's London home.
This is the Charnwood Forest
in Leicestershire.
As a schoolboy, I grew up near here.
This was where, in the 1930s,
David first developed a passion
for the natural world and fossils.
This is the beginning
of the journey for David.
This is where, as a young boy,
he looked and found fossils
that got him fired up
and it really started
his career.
It's 70-odd years since
David was walking these woods
and cycling around them
and now, we're back here.
When I was a boy, growing up
in the Midlands, in Leicester,
the rocks and limestone we found
in the east of the county were
full of the most magical things.
You hit a stone and it suddenly fell
open and there was this amazing coil
shell - beautiful and extraordinary,
and nobody had seen that for
150 million years, except you.
So, I thought it was very romantic
and exciting.
It appealed to the small boy's
instinct of collecting things
that, to be honest,
I don't think I've really lost,
but I certainly had it then.
I was a passionate fossil collector.
But I never came to look for them in
this part of Charnwood and then a boy
from my very own school, just
a few years after I left it,
made an astounding discovery.
I can't remember where I heard about
the discovery of a Charnia,
but I certainly kicked myself
and I thought
"I could have been part of history.
"I could have discovered that.
"Why didn't I bother to look?"
And this is it.
It's called and is known around
the world as Charnia,
after the forest
in which it was discovered.
David is as passionate
about fossils today as he
was as a boy, an interest that was
nurtured by his academic parents.
He was the middle of three sons,
born to Mary and Frederick.
The family lived in a house in the
grounds of what is now Leicester
University,
just half a mile down the road
from the museum
where he is filming now.
Yes, there we are.
That was University - well, it
was, as the press were quick to
point, out a lunatic asylum.
It was taken over by the
University College, you see.
And we lived in that which
was the superintendent's
house, College House.
There was the big park,
Victoria Park.
There's my father.
He was principal of the University
College in the 1930s
and there he is,
looking younger than me,
though he didn't have any hair. But
not since he was about 28, I think.
David has two brothers - John and
Richard, with Richard growing up
to become an actor
and Oscar-winning director.
So what was the inspiration that
drove the boys to such success?
Perhaps it was their sense
of adventure, as they explored
the building that was once
a psychiatric hospital.
There were great areas of it that
were still in the condition of them
being a Victorian lunatic asylum,
and that included padded cells.
We, as boys,
used to wander around there,
getting in in various ways, which
I suppose we shouldn't have done.
My elder brother Richard took me into
this padded cell and shut the door.
That was horrible because inside it
was all quilted and where the door
shut there was no handle on the door.
So you couldn't even see where
the door was
and you knew that you could scream
to your heart's content,
or as loud as you wished,
and nobody could possibly hear you.
That was not a pleasant sensation.
I must remind him of it some time!
David went to Cambridge
to read natural sciences
and that enabled him
to indulge his growing fascination
with the natural world.
It's a passion that still drives
him on today.
David's journey to discover the
origins of all life is going to
take him around the entire planet,
encompassing four different
continents and 40,000 miles.
First stop, Morocco,
in North Africa.
We're here for trilobites.
Trilobites are the most
extraordinary, wonderful fossils.
Here are some of the
wonderfully prepared specimens.
Happily, and very, very fortunately,
the world's greatest expert
on trilobites -
or certainly one
of the first three - Richard Fortey,
an old friend of mine,
is here to show us around,
so we should be in
for a very privileged time.
I think they are just about as good
as you can get with preparation.
They look stunning.
Trilobites
are principal characters in the
story of the first life on earth.
They were one of the most successful
kinds of animal in history.
There are 50,000 species
that we know of, and probably
many more undiscovered.
They were the first animals
to see a fully-formed picture,
using lenses in their eyes,
made of rock.
In their heyday, they dominated
the globe for 250 million years.
Humans have been around
for just two.
What's that ridge there?
That is rock still in.
That is the system we use.
He very carefully left these
for us to see the process
in development, you see.
You're an artist. Thanks very much.
You really are.
Thank you very, very much.
Before filming begins tomorrow,
David has a chance to pick out the
best specimens for the programme.
He's also on the lookout
for a few pieces to add to
his private collection.
What sort of price
are we thinking about?
I have reserved all for a long time,
for you, more than three months.
Thank you again very much.
You are welcome any time,
no problem. Thank you.
If I was Mr Moneybags, I would
have bought the Ordovician ones,
the new ones, on the spot.
Which was the one that
really blew you away, David?
That was 15K.
The fossils David has just seen
are the best there are.
But other trilobites are widely
prepared and sold in the towns and
villages of this part of Morocco.
But, to an expert eye, there is
something about some of these
fossils that doesn't quite add up.
It's a nice little specimen.
Well, I've never seen a trident
bearer with a great long flared
median prong on its stripe,
so either it's true,
in which case it's weird,
or it's been, let's say nature
been helped along a little bit.
If it's fake, it's carefully done.
I've seen lots of
different ones in my time.
I've never seen that before.
Or maybe it's pathological.
A diseased trilobite.
We don't want one of them,
not round these parts!
You don't want anybody
catching anything.
A-ha. Thank you.
Thank you. This one?
This one I like but it's too much.
Give me 1,000 dirham, it's a
good price. It's a good price.
750?
No. 1,000.
800? 800? 90.
850?
90 dirham.
850?
90.
It's very sad.
How much? OK. OK.
OK? Yes.
Shake on it. 850?
OK.
Thank you very much.
At 850 Moroccan dirham, David's
got a bargain - that's roughly £70.
20, 200, 400, 600, 800 and 50.
With the shopping spree over,
work begins.
David is filming
at a local museum
where there's a collection
of some of the strangest
and largest trilobites
in existence.
Action.
The shape of these eyes can in
themselves tell us a great deal
about the way the animal lived.
Some of these - we're talking...
thousands of pounds of some of
these things,
if not tens of
thousands of pounds,
of something
that's completely unknown to
science and spectacular to boot.
There is a sort of a standard rule
about this, that when you see
a really lovely thing -
and you're silly enough to say
that's a really lovely thing -
the person concerned said, "Of
course, private collection".
I have some for sale,
but that one is my collection.
I think every time you ask whether
it's a private collection or not,
it goes up by another multiple,
you see. This one is my collection.
Are the other ones curled up?
Are they as
beautifully prepared as that?
Nice.
What sort of money?
OK. Until I show it to you,
I can't tell you.
David Attenborough is a name that
is synonymous with television.
First Life will be his
50th series as a presenter.
But surprising as it seems, his long
career in TV began quite by chance.
I saw an advertisement in The Times
for a sound radio job which I applied
for and didn't even get an interview,
but a week or so afterwards,
I got a letter from someone who said
they'd got this new thing called
television, would I be interested?
Then they said they would pay me
£1,000 to go on the training course.
That was three times what I was being
paid at the time in the publishers
so I thought I would give it a go.
Television in the '50s
was brand-new, with the BBC
providing the first public
service programmes in Europe.
David had never seen a
television programme before,
but nevertheless began work as
a trainee at Alexandra Palace.
I was apprenticed to a producer
who was regarded
as a very experienced man
because he'd been there for
three months and he had already
produced one programme, you know,
so he knew where everything was, so
I joined him and we worked on a quiz
called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.
David's obsession with mysterious
objects of the past was put to
good use behind the scenes.
Lovely, isn't it? A very...
It was his job to source
artefacts to be identified
by a panel of esteemed academics.
..and there, what my Hungarian
colleagues would call...
David's academic background
and his analytical mind
gave him an affinity
with scholars and scientists
that endures to this day.
I've known David
for rather a long time
and we certainly share certain
aspects of humour.
Somebody should make a proper
feature movie,
about trilobites
called Thoracic Park!
This horse is unfit for heavy work.
One of the great privileges is having
an expert like Richard Fortey, who is
a world authority on these...
particular animals and
who knows this locality very well.
Richard is now stomping
around on the horizon.
It will be very interesting - I bet
you he comes back and he'll say,
you know, there was a nice one and he
shows you this, that and the other.
What do you think of the chances
of this being a piece
of worked jasper?
In other words, you think
this is a spear point?
I think it is. I think it's got a
broken tip and probably was thrown
away, or discarded, do you think?
I do. It's jolly old because it's
got this polish on it, wind polish.
Yes. I think also that that is
probably a xerophytic horsetail,
which I didn't know existed.
I was just going to borrow your
lens to have a look to see if it
has got the characteristic joints.
I've got the characteristic joints!
Certainly falling to bits,
the way they always do.
David's appetite for knowledge
is insatiable.
And in the 1950s, that hunger drove
him to come up with a programme idea
that would provide the perfect
opportunity to travel and film
in the remotest parts of the world.
I had a friend in London Zoo
and he and I cooked up an idea
that the London Zoo should
send out a collecting expedition,
which of course we
wouldn't conceivably do now, but
in those days it was possible.
And the idea would be that
I would accompany this chap,
who was an expert on snakes, and I
would see him pouncing on a snake
and then from that film sequence,
we would go to him in the studio
live with the same snake and he
be able to talk about the details.
That was the basis, called Zoo Quest.
The series didn't quite turn out
as planned for David the producer.
Jack Lester was the man from the zoo
and he acquired a tropical disease,
he collapsed after the first show
and the head of my department, or the
head of television said, "Oh look,
if Jack Lester can't do it,
"the show's got to go on - the only
other person there
who could do is Attenborough.
"Tell him he has to leave
the producer's gallery and go
down on the floor and do it."
We spent the first part of our
trip in Paraguay...
From those first moments
in front of the camera,
David has had plenty of time
to hone his distinctive
presenting style.
His 50-year career in television
spans the life
of the industry itself.
The First Life shoot
has moved to Australia
and this morning he's performing
the same ritual
he has gone through
hundreds of times before.
What is the piece in your head now?
Very good question.
You've got to convey something,
some fact, you've got to
get it right.
In 1946, geologist Reg Sprigg found
fossils here in the Ediacara Hills...
Once having got it right
in your mind, you then try
and put it into words.
..Which, until that moment...
had been, until... no...
And the first words that come out of
my lips at any rate are jumbled,
and confused, and...
circumlocutory,
and fumbling for exactitude.
It was the discovery of, in the
Charnwood Forest,
the creature in what
was undoubtedly pre-cambrian...
And then you decide that that will
distil into the following sentences.
That is the gist. OK.
Very difficult to think about it when
someone is fumbling in your genitals!
It's sort of tricky.
It was a discovery in 1957...
I have to walk up and down and
say it to myself and hope I'll
be able to say it to the camera.
In 1946, an Australian geologist,
Reg Sprigg, working here in the
Ediacara Hills of South Australia...
David's trademark delivery has
endeared him to millions
and the producers of Zoo Quest
saw that talent grow.
He was given the job of presenter
on a permanent basis.
I explained to the men as best
I could that I had come to their
valley to try and get some of
the birds of paradise alive.
But they explained to me in gestures
that they shot the birds
with bows and arrows.
Making a documentary isn't
all about talking to camera.
David understands better
than anyone else that some
sequences are a necessary chore.
We're going to do some
tracking shots,
vehicle to vehicle tracking shots.
We're going to have Pete in the back
of this vehicle, leading vehicle,
shooting backwards and we've got
David and Jim in this vehicle...
It's one of the rewards that you
get, the real joys of driving up
there and then they say,
would you drive back, and then they
say, we think we'd like it
a little faster
and then they say, we were wrong.
It was better a little bit slower,
so would you go back again? So it's
actually not the pits of filming,
the pits of filming is when
you have to walk through the
forest looking interested.
And not only interested,
but eagle-eyed.
You say, "Where will
this experienced traveller
"suddenly spot the...
My goodness, there it is!"
That's hard doing.
There are variations - you can
give them the John Wayne, which
is tight-buttocked like that -
that is one of my specialities!
I'm not allowed to do it much these
days. I have to be a bit more
slouched and relaxed, you know.
But of course intelligent,
which is the tricky bit.
That was lovely.
I loved it, when he asked us to do it
again slightly faster, what a thrill!
We only had your enjoyment in mind!
David is filming with a team
of palaeontologists in the Flinders
Ranges of South Australia,
unearthing fossils that
describe how early animals evolved.
How and why did animals
first begin to move?
There is a great thrill
of being alongside these people
who know what they're doing
and know what they're looking for
and know how to look for it.
And of course, you naively think it
would be wonderful
to turn over a rock and say,
"Ah! It's a new species!"
Well, looking for fossils
is not like that, except
that it actually happened.
That's just contributed about...
Have a look! Have a look!
And there it was, and Jim took
a brush and brushed it away.
And bless me, he said,
I don't know, I don't know.
Look at that.
That is what I would just...
It's the weirdest one
I've ever seen.
I've never seen one with that...
It's the relief...
It has to be a footprint.
And we're still waiting as to
hear whether in fact that was the
discovery moment of a new species.
I think it probably was.
The mud on the sea floor
can tell us a great deal
about these animals and not just what
they look like, but how they behaved.
One appears on the telly and
everybody thinks you're an expert,
but I had, last Christmas, some new
neighbours came over
and I'd ever met them
before but the lady said,
Oh just the person I want to meet
because little Julian is so excited
about natural history, thrilled,
"He'll be thrilled to meet you and
he's got some questions for you,"
and I thought oh, dear, oh, dear.
Come along, Julian, ask Sir David
the questions. Julian said,
"How long is the komodo dragon?"
Big relief.
I said, "Well, as a matter of fact,
"Julian, I can tell you the answer
to that. I said, I've been to Komodo
three times.
"And I've actually measured them
and they can grow
to 12 feet long."
And he said, "Wrong!"
He'd been reading too much
Guinness Book of Records.
This is a side-necked turtle.
Over six series of Zoo Quest,
komodo dragons were just one of the
many species David encountered,
collecting animals for London Zoo.
They couldn't take them all
so David stepped in -
his home became a menagerie with
his wife and children helping
with the upkeep of the animals.
We had a pair of lemurs at home and
some lovely birds called blue-crowned
hanging parakeets,
which we brought back from Borneo,
and chameleons. We
had a breeding colony of bush babies.
They had an unfortunate habit
of peeing on their hands
and then rubbing their hands
together and patting everything
around to make them smell good.
Friends coming to dinner would
arrive and open the door and you
could see them dilate their nostrils
and think,
That's not mulligatawny
soup, what are we going to have
for dinner tonight?
I regret to say
it was bush baby urine so, after
a bit, my dear wife thought this
was not compatible with domestic
hospitality and one thing and
the other so we got rid of them.
David, of course, is famous
for his love of animals.
To help tell the story of the
first life on earth,
he's in a rainforest in north-west
Australia filming
living fossils,
animals with evolutionary links
to the past.
David, we're going to be on
close-ups on the animal,
but it might help us
if you deliver your line anyway.
I think for me the highlight was
in the rainforest when David was
there with this little velvet worm
on his hand and his connection with
animals just really came through,
you could see he adored this
little creature, this weird worm
crawling on his arm.
Action, David.
And this is what I was looking for.
This extraordinary and enchanting
little creature, sometimes
called a velvet worm...
He just, you know, he gave
it personality and he was
in awe of this thing.
Just to see that was such an
enlightening thing, sitting in the
middle of a rainforest
with fireflies popping off
all around you,
you have to pinch yourself because
it had a dream-like quality to it.
It has one further attribute
which Ayesha could not have had.
It has tiny little holes all along
its flanks which enable it
to breathe air,
so this is one of the
first creatures
that moved on to land
540 million years ago.
Nice one. Yes.
Yes, it's the ring tailed gecko.
What's your favourite gecko?
The tokay gecko.
It goes to-kay, to-kay.
And in Indonesia most people
are terrified of it and they
said one bite, certain death.
And I caught one once and I said,
Look, they're absolutely harmless,
you see, and I pointed my finger,
Nothing to be afraid of,
and the gecko went like this,
and I said, nothing to be frightened
of, it's not poisonous at all.
But I couldn't get it off.
I put it on to a tap, I pulled it,
it just hung on and hung on
and it was on for...
After about five minutes, you get
quite bored with it, and it was quite
upsetting, it was a very long time.
I didn't come clever dick again
for quite some time.
Ten minutes, maybe!
Action. Cue David.
As the oxygen levels rose,
so eventually they reached
a level when it was possible for
air-breathing animals to live.
Crikey.
As they say in Australia,
got the bastard!
They only come in ones, do they?
Limited edition. Two wafers.
I think one of the great things
about working with David
is that he fits in with the team
around him
and is interested
in everybody in the team.
Being part of a team is one
of the pleasures.
It takes some time to
become a team, you can't just slot
in like that because it depends
upon knowing the personalities
of the people
you're involved with.
I suppose in one way if you
going on long journeys together
with people, you ought to be,
to do a job, you ought to be
sufficiently professional to be
able to get on with anybody.
And if you find that the
way they comb their hair or
something is irritating, then you
learn to suppress that irritation.
But one of the ways,
once you begin to sort that out,
you do begin
to develop jokes between you.
To illustrate the evolution of
backboned animals,
David is on his
way to a zoo to film a white rhino.
He'll be delivering his lines just
inches from the two tonne animal,
so even David must be
briefed on safety.
HORN BLARES
Well, you can hand feed him
if you are happy to do that,
otherwise you can just pop
that leaves in over the log.
There's no danger of him giving
me a nip with his front teeth?
He won't be able to nip you.
He won't do that.
Obviously, as you
know, the lips are very muscly.
Accustomed as I am to
rhinoceros feeding,
the problem
is a trivial one, really.
Just you might lose in your hand at
the wrist, that's all, you know?
Nothing to worry about, really!
The lips are very muscular,
so you might lose a finger or two,
but nothing really to worry about,
you know, I'm told!
I was driving through Kenya once.
The chap I was with was a very
knowledgeable biologist
and an expert on elephants.
Suddenly he said, "Did you
hear that pitter-patter?"
And I said, "No, what?" He said,
"Well, we were charged by a rhino."
I said, "We were?" "Yes", he
said, "but it was a dummy charge."
There was another pitter-patter,
but this time it didn't fade away.
This time, wallop, hit the back end
of the Land Rover
and actually
lifted it up and shook it.
And I remember seeing his hands
on the wheel
showing white at the knuckles as the
thing came a second time.
Crash! Bang! And it shook.
And then he backed off, and I said,
"Hell of a dummy charge that, Roy."
He said, "Don't joke!" He came in the
third time, wrecked the back wheel,
ripped up the tyre
and by the time he'd finished,
the car was undrivable.
David can't go anywhere without
being recognised by someone. His
popularity spans the generations.
Please keep it up. It's the only
stuff on telly worth watching!
And this level of fame is
something he's had to get used to.
By the mid-Sixties,
David Attenborough had
become a household name.
Mr David Attenborough, here.
Bless his heart.
Then, still in his thirties, an
unexpected opportunity came his way.
The BBC needed young blood to run
their brand-new channel, BBC Two.
I remember deliberately saying to
myself, "Now, you've got to make up
"your mind, Attenborough, are
you a television man or are
you some kind of scientist?"
I decided at that time that I was
really at heart a television man.
Therefore, if I was a
television man,
there could not be a more interesting
job in television than that
one that was being offered to me.
We shall continue to look for the
new stars, the experimental stars.
As Controller of BBC Two, David
introduced a new wave of programming
that would stand the test of time.
He also pioneered a whole new era
of television as the BBC raced
to make Britain the first nation
in Europe to broadcast in colour.
Then, of course, we discovered that
in fact Germany
was preparing to
going into colour and this,
you must remember,
this was in the Sixties
and so there was still a sort of
feeling about Germany, you know?
We'd just won the war, after all,
and I was thinking,
"Come on, the BBC should
be the first in colour in Europe."
And it suddenly dawned on me we could
use colour cameras in Wimbledon
and with just four or five colour
cameras, which is all I
think we had,
we could get hours and
hours and hours of colour television.
We would launch as soon
as we could do at least
50% of the programmes in colour
and Wimbledon allowed us to do that.
And what is more, it allowed us to
get on the air before Germany did!
David's challenge was to promote
the virtues of colour TV.
He came up with a new concept,
a series of big budget programmes
designed to showcase colour
in all its glory.
The first of this new genre of
landmark programmes,
known then as Sledgehammers,
was an arts programme
called Civilisation.
It was going to be the finest things
that Western Europeans had produced
artistically from the beginning of
the 5th, 6th century onwards,
which simply had
a phenomenal success.
BBC Two was riding high,
so we commissioned Ascent
Of Man there and then.
Ascent Of Man was the
model for science television.
If I'm to take the ascent of
man back to its beginnings...
It set a trend for the
epic programming for which
David is now synonymous.
And epic programmes need epic shots.
So somebody needs to be up on the
hill who can give David the cue.
'Standing by for a take.
Yes, Kirsty.'
For here you can see fossils
of the very first animals
that evolved on this planet.
'That was good for us.'
This location is a key place
in the story of the first life.
The rocks here are covered in
600-million-year old fossils from
the same family
as the one found in Leicestershire
where David grew up.
OK, David, it you could gesture
towards this one.
We're going to do a pull focus
to this one. That was fantastic.
You know, I've grown up to believe
that that little fossil in the
Charnwood Forest that long,
just one of them, was one of the most
precious fossils in the world,
and they are walking over them!
Dozens of them! Well, hundreds of
them, literally hundreds of them.
It's a good place for David to
indulge his passion for photography.
Aren't we right in thinking that
the photograph on the front of
Life On Earth was one of yours?
You are absolutely correct,
absolutely correct.
I heard this terrible noise in
my ear as I lay on a camp bed...
Not on a camp bed, I lay on the
ground in Panama, like somebody
hitting an anvil with a mallet and
I turned round and there was this...
I went click
and it was a frog
and it was the front cover of
Life On Earth. Look at that.
You see how this boy's got
talent in his fingers, he
just doesn't know about!
THE CREW LAUGH
What on Earth's that?
You panicked and pressed
the button by accident!
HE LAUGHS
Filming moves across Canada
to the Rocky Mountains.
The next location is a remote fossil
quarry some 2,000 metres above sea
level, and getting there isn't easy.
David and the crew will need to fly
part of the way
and then hike for
half an hour up a steep icy path.
I'm going to give you a quick safety
briefing here on the helicopter.
This one is done up, it
doesn't hang out like that.
You put your headset on.
You don't have to press any buttons
to talk, it's just voice-activated.
I just wish I could remember
any of these instructions.
I mean, it's like with the
air hostesses on jets, I
can't remember a thing!
Well, if you look above you,
there are some clouds in the sky.
Those are getting thicker,
which means you can't fly,
so we've got to get up there and see
if we can land,
find the spot for the piece and then
get out before it all closes over.
The original and best.
Thank you, sir, I do appreciate it.
Thank you. Anybody who bought one of
my books deserves to have it signed.
You can't say that, I'm still here!
Every day is a highlight for me.
Of course it is, Martin, thank
you very much. This one is
the best of far, definitely.
What was wrong with yesterday?
Well, we weren't filming, David.
Oh, yeah, you're quite right.
David may be an octogenarian,
but his determination is
just as it ever was.
We have planned
this in so many ways.
We've discussed having
helicopters airlifting him up in
a sort of sling underneath.
We've had the possibility of a sedan
chair to come up here, but actually
David's perfectly fine
and perfectly willing, so all our
anxieties are evaporating away,
really.
I may be some time.
The struggle will be worth it.
Near the summit, David will find one
of the richest fossil locations
in the world, the Burgess Shales.
Here, they're found
all over the place.
They're called trilobites. That's
the head, there's the middle bit.
'David is so interested in things.
He's fascinated by everybody.'
If there's a table of people,
he'll say, "Who is
that and what do they do?"
He's fascinated by that.
David reads endlessly.
I mean, on the plane he read two
books coming out from England.
He absorbs. His study is full
of books that he's reading.
He's up to date with science. He's
reading the latest science papers.
This is a man who, I think, will go
on and on because I think he's so
fascinated by the world,
as long as he can walk,
as long as he can move around,
he'll be interacting with it.
Filming at the top of a mountain
is not without hazards, as
the weather closes in.
Unfortunately, the cloud's come down.
We have got a helicopter here.
The pilot also wants to go home.
We wouldn't mind not spending a night
on the mountain, so I guess we won't
be able to stay here for too long,
but at the moment the mist is down.
We're going to have to get into the
chopper, sit there ready to go and if
it lifts and if you can see the lake
at the bottom then, with any luck,
we might put our heads on a pillow
tonight in the warmth. Here's hoping!
There's plenty to keep David busy
while he waits for the weather to
clear. There are fossils everywhere.
OK, fellas, he says
it's time we left.
There you go. Thanks a lot.
No problem, eh? Really great.
How was it, David? Terrible!
Do you mind being taken up to these
far flung, inhospitable places?
No, that's why I'm here!
I don't mind! It's what I came for!
Back in the Seventies,
David's passion for exploring
far flung places was the catalyst
for his resignation from
management at the BBC.
The success of his commissions
only served to remind
the desk-bound Attenborough of
the life he was missing.
I was fretting a bit and concluding
that the rest of my life was
not to be spent behind a desk.
I couldn't bear it.
And so I managed to resign after
eight years of administration.
And the first thing I did on having
resigned was the head of the Natural
History Unit came to see me and said,
"Look, don't you think it
would be a great idea if
"we did a 12-part series about the
natural world and would you do it?"
"Oh," I said, "What a good idea!"
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.
Life on Earth was the series that
would define David as the world's
greatest natural history presenter.
It gave him the opportunity to go to
the places he'd always dreamed of
and to see the animals he'd always
wanted to see.
But much more than that,
it revolutionised the viewers'
perspective of the
small world in which they lived.
It was only in the mid-Seventies that
you had really such a comprehensive
airline service around the world,
such a reliable airline service
around the world, that you could
go pretty well anywhere, which
meant that in the programmes we
could hop from the Barrier Reef
to the Sahara just like that,
if you wanted to do so, in a shot.
And then, about 20 or 30 years ago,
people realised that they'd been
looking in the wrong rocks and in the
wrong way. These are the right rocks.
It had a sort of liberating effect
that somehow,
and this was just after the
moon shots of course, that somehow
for the first time we were getting
a vision of the natural world,
of the globe, of the Earth,
with the zoosphere, with the animals
and plants that clothed it all.
For the first time you were getting
a comprehensive view of that
and people felt that quite clearly.
So it seems really very unfair
that man should have
chosen the gorilla
to symbolise all that
is aggressive and violent
when that's the
one thing that the gorilla
is not, and that we are.
The reason we had gone to gorillas
was in order to illustrate a point
I was making about the evolutionary
significance of climbing
primates, of climbing mammals,
who had to grasp branches.
And to grasp a branch you need to
be able to
put your thumb and your
forefinger together like that.
So on the day in question, I crawled
off and prepared to go on about
the thumb and the forefinger.
And as I was about to say that
I suddenly felt a weight
on my feet and there was a baby
gorilla undoing my shoelaces!
Well, it didn't seem to be the
right moment to be talking
about the thumb and forefinger
and while I was concluding on
that, a hand came down on my head
and there was the adult female!
And she opened my mouth, put her
hand, a huge great hand
and stuck a finger in my mouth
and I couldn't talk about the thumb
and forefinger even then!
By this time I was in a
sort of delirium, really.
I mean, it just seemed paradisal.
I mean, absolutely extraordinary.
Took my breath away.
It did cause a huge sensation that
here is a presenter
looking at the camera,
when suddenly a gorilla comes
out of the bush and sits on him!
I mean, it's quite odd!
Back in the UK, David is in the back
room of Edinburgh's National Museum
filming a fossil of a huge animal
that lived 420 million years ago.
A deadly sea scorpion, one of the
largest predators of its time.
Gosh!
Well, this is a magnificent example
of just how big an animal can grow
if it has an external skeleton.
Yeah, my friend Richard Fortey, he's
got a few stories about what goes
on in the back rooms of museums!
Yeah, I mean, they are
strange, arcane places.
I've seen a very old
film projector there,
a Kalee film projector, the like of
which must have shown Buster Keaton
and things like that I would think.
35mm. I started filming on 35mm back
in the Fifties,
so I don't feel as astounded at that,
but I now find
that people coming into our business
are astonished to see 16mm film.
"Amazing, film! Good Lord!"
I mean, you can actually look at it!
And they're used to videotape.
So the world changes.
Yielding place to new.
And God
fulfils himself in many ways lest one
good custom should corrupt the world.
We're in Crail in Fife and when
I came here on the recce it was
a beautiful sunny day,
fantastically picturesque.
Mother Nature is a difficult beast
to tame
and I can't do anything
about how she's going to be.
She's obviously in a bad mood today.
How do you feel, David? >
I just regret I haven't
brought my chest wig!
It's just the sort of
weather you need one.
Are you sure you need your blazer?
It makes you look a little
uncomfortable.
What? Are you sure you want your
blazer on? My blazer!
It's not a blazer.
OK, your jacket from M&S! M&S!
M&S!
This is rather good, isn't it?
That's a good hat. I mean,
now, be honest.
No, that's a good hat.
The scarf's very classy.
You can wear the glasses.
They're meant for these conditions,
aren't they? They're titanium.
They are titanium. Well, the problem
is they're better on than off.
Keep them on until we do the
piece, otherwise you might walk
in the water or something!
They haven't got screen wipers,
have they?
Do you like coming to Scotland,
apart from the weather?
I served in the Navy here,
hardened up,
toughened up by life in the
Forces up on the Firth of Forth.
It was like this all the time!
CREW LAUGH
Yeah?
Action!
And on the expanses of sand that
stretch between those huge trees,
sand that's now become this
sandstone rock, there are tracks.
Are you RSPB?
No, we are dissertation. We're
from St Andrew's University, so...
What are you looking for, birds?
The redshanks.
Redshanks. How nice.
Are their numbers doing well?
Yeah, they're fine.
Doing well. Yeah.
Well, you're shanks get pretty
red in this weather, I'll tell you!
It was desperately cold, I must
say, and blowing a gale, but
kind friends lent me gear.
Thank you very much, David.
No, thank you. Not at all.
Was it your underwear?
No, it wasn't my underwear.
It was my outerwear.
Your outerwear. Oh, well, that's not
quite so intimate, so I'm not going
to thank you quite so intimately.
No shared bodily warmth!
David has always been
at the forefront of new
filming technologies.
His programmes have pioneered
miniature cameras, infrared,
super slow-motion, time-lapse
and aerial photography.
The arrival of colour brought a huge
advance as far as making natural
history programmes were concerned.
You could now show the
splendour of bird displays.
You could talk about how insects
would see different colours
in different plants
and you could
see what you were talking about.
The next big change, I suppose,
was the arrival of hypersensitive
cameras and infrared cameras.
We maintained a fiction that
really lions were idle creatures
that spent most of the time lying
around in the sunshine and
just occasionally hunted.
The truth of course is quite
different and that was lions
are lying around
during the day because they hunted
during the night.
But with hypersensitive
cameras we were able to show
that for the first time.
Then sensitive cameras enabled you to
put the film through the camera at a
much greater speed which meant that,
in effect,
you could slow things down,
so that changed, so you could
show how animals ran, for example.
On top of that, the next change
came the other way round, in that
by use of computers and so on,
we could slow down the speed at which
the frames passed through the camera
and at the same time move the camera
and get pictures of, for example,
a speeded up activity when you
showed it of plants developing.
That produced a great change.
And then suddenly, computer-generated
imaging came along
and to an improved degree, instead of
the rather crude and clumsy things
that had been seen in the past.
Making First Life, David is at
the cutting edge once again
as palaeontology and
technology join forces
to bring the earliest animals
on Earth back to life for the first
time in half a billion years.
OK, David, here's
the head of the unit.
Seeing these animals
living and breathing
is something David has
dreamt of since he was a boy.
Oh, that's terrific!
My old friend, anomalocaris!
Like you've never seen it before.
Hi! Oh, it's terrific!
The really
thrilling thing for me
is that by using a computer graphic
and imaging,
you can take these tiny little marks
and with total justification,
scientific backing, you can make
that animal really come to life,
come out of the rock and move.
That's knock out stuff, you know?
I mean, that is knock out, isn't it?
Look at that!
How could you not believe in that?
Just thrilling, actually.
Just thrilling.
I've been given this model and
I put some bones inside of it.
There weren't any bones!
It's just the... But for your point
you've got to have bones.
Yeah, it's the only way the computer
can understand what to move where.
I was going to say, next time
you go for a lobster supper...!
Now I know perfectly well
that you can see a shot of,
say, a shrimp and a coral reef and
another one rather different shrimp
comes round the
corner and you are very hard put
to know which is the real one.
Once you've finished this stage
you can make it do anything.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
You can make it go right, left and
upside down. Exactly, yeah, yeah.
And just direct it. Yeah.
It sounds
like a television presenter, really!
It's pretty exciting looking at
a piece of rock, turning it over
and seeing the image of an animal
there, but to see that come to life
in this vivid, vivid way
is more than
you can possibly hope for, really.
It actually helps the scientist,
too, because when you see the thing
you suddenly realise that
certain things are possible.
You realise that it couldn't possibly
have done that, it must
have done the other.
David is on his way to
the Great Barrier Reef.
He's going to a remote island 50
miles off the coast of Australia
where he'll be filming the most
primitive animals there are.
How nice.
The comfiest seat in the house!
If you hold it to the left it'll
give you up to 30 degrees.
And they tell me you're going out
to do a documentary on sponges.
On sponges. Well, we're not doing
an entire documentary on sponges.
That could be a bit of a... You know?
Because sponges don't do a lot!
Sponges are just clumps
of simple animal cells
that have stuck together.
It's at this point that the
basic patterns of animal
form are established.
Animals developed legs
and arms and television shows!
CREW LAUGH
There's another very
important sequence to film
on the Great Barrier Reef.
Three miles from Heron
Island there's a vast sandbar.
It's to be used for the
opening scene in First Life.
But to get the shot,
David must
be left on the sandbar alone in
40 degree heat with no shade.
The team must work fast.
Within hours the tide will come in
flooding the sandbar
and stranding David.
It's no mean feat for
a man in his eighties.
Am I prepared? I've got all kinds
of electronic gear up by backside!
I'm on a fantastic journey to
look for the origins of life.
David seems to have this
unbelievable amount of energy.
I don't think I'll have
anything like the energy
that he has when I'm 83.
In a way, one of the things that
drives David on on these things,
long after most people would
have retired,
is not just the quest for
more things, which, of course,
will always drive someone who's
interested in the natural world, but
also he actually enjoys getting back
with a team of people like the old
times on some of his great series,
and having that fun and drinking
the occasional bottle of red wine
and being in these amazing places.
I don't think David is ever...
I mean, I can't imagine
him ever retiring.
I have to confess, I'm
fascinated by armadillos.
As far as I'm concerned, they
are some of the nicest and most
curious animals in the world.
I'm standing on the brink
of one of the most densely
populated parts of the sea.
I am on the edge of a
coral reef at low tide.
And top of the menu
right now is salmon!
This programme means
a lot to me, actually.
And, rather surprisingly, I didn't
realise how much it meant to me
until I started doing it,
because I have spent over the last
25, 30 years
making a series of programmes about
different groups of animals
as they have emerged
through evolution
and I've never made anything
about the very beginning of life.
Doing this programme not only
makes a lovely programme to
make that whole series correct
and complete, but, happily, takes me
to the places to see where they are.
And it's actually very moving,
really, you know, to see suddenly
a magnificent sheet of fossils,
innumerable, complex fossils
which were alive right at the very
beginning of life on this planet
500 million years ago.
So this series, to a degree, which
are really didn't fully appreciate
until I started working on it,
really completes the set.
Some creatures managed
to crawl up onto the land.
But all of us alive today owe
our very existence to them.
Well, in a curious way, in the end,
the end of my last sort of making
series like this, is my beginning.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd