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.

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