HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HAPPY 100 to the great Sir David Attenborough

Frozen Planet

Four years in the making, the BBC’s landmark series reveals polar life as we may never see it again. David Attenborough, at 85, talks about his first visit to the North Pole, the death of his wife and what gets him up at 4am 

The Uncommon Silver-Crested Warbler is singing with full-throated ease. His plumage may be unexceptional but this is a rare old bird indeed, for the deep, melodious voice belongs to Sir David Attenborough, whose body is sprawled over a sofa in the insalubrious bowels of BBC Television Centre – far from the wild habitats that are his natural feeding ground.

He has a ridiculously unlined, soft-featured face. His clothes – a short-sleeved shirt, trousers and lace-up shoes with thick socks – seem a little carelessly, and therefore reassuringly, assembled. But such is his huge infectious laugh, and ever-present sense of mischief – I’ve never experienced such a giggly interview before – that in my mind’s eye our favourite knight could be a naughty schoolboy, wearing baggy shorts and oldfashioned Start-rite sandals.

How can he look this good at his age, I ask. He must have led a disgracefully blameless life. “Yes, oh, you are so right! You have at last grasped my quiddity – you have found the essence of my well-brought-up self.”

This joshing was apropos of me asking Attenborough about the layered meanings behind the opening lines of his latest awe-inspiring, seven-part series, Frozen Planet, which takes him to the North Pole for the first time, followed by the South Pole, for only the second time in his career.

He talks to camera about coming to the last true wilderness “to witness its wonders perhaps for the last time”. When I say that we assume that he’s partly referring to the unlikelihood of him returning to the Poles at his age, he is genuinely astonished: “Oh! That wasn’t supposed to be about me… no, it wasn’t anything to do with me. It was about humanity and, in a much more practical sense, this is a huge effort for the BBC – four years – big sums of money. And are they ever going to do that again? And then, of course, there is the future of the Poles themselves.”

Watching a preview of the first and last programmes, in preparation for meeting the great man, means you analyse the way they’re put together more carefully than if you were just experiencing the joy of letting them wash over you. So you take note of the way the music, by film composer George Fenton, works so brilliantly.

The amazing sight of the progress of water under Greenland’s vast Store Glacier “like blood through a cold-hearted monster… a monster that is stirring” and then the eruption, like icy lava, as it crashes into the sea. The synchronised moves of killer whales rounding on a solitary seal, as though choreographed by a murderous Busby Berkeley. “The stuff we cut out is awful,” Attenborough says. “We’re not in the business of making fairy stories but, equally, we’re not in the business of pornographic gore.”

It is a team effort, to be sure (involving the same crew who made Planet Earth), and the star of the show is, of course, the natural world itself, very closely followed by the comforting presence, as narrator with occasional on-screen shots, of Attenborough. But the message of the series – because the accelerated global warming at the Poles has such grave implications for us all – is far from comforting.

Attenborough insists that it’s the pictures that will underline the gravity of the situation – his words are merely complementary. Words, he says, can ruin a programme: “If I go back and look at stuff I did 15 or 20 years ago, almost invariably I think to myself that there are too many words.

“As a film-maker, I would regard the ideal programme as pictures without any commentary at all… in which you can explain everything with pictures. You can’t do it, of course. But as a director and producer – which is how I’ve spent most of my life – I have never, ever had a commentary and then said, ‘I will fit pictures to it.’ So you make the pictures first and then you carpenter the words. You fashion it in to make sure the verb hits the action.”

Now, if he’s lucky, he says – as he is with Alastair Fothergill, executive producer of Frozen Planet – the director puts the film together and Attenborough may see a rough cut, before it’s edited down to a one-hour version. Only then will a script be written for him – and he’ll spend several days working on it: “Shaving this, removing that… you know, ‘It’s a touch on the cliché, darling.’ ”

The final line in the last programme, On Thin Ice – “an environmental special” authored and presented by Attenborough, after having demonstrated how some animals are already adapting to climate change (Adélie penguins moving south, Gentu penguins taking their place), our presenter asks: “Can we respond now to what is happening to the frozen planet?” That “now” has a certain urgency to it – so just how urgent does he feel our response to climate change must be? “As urgent as it can get,” he says. “This is a mouse trying to move a mountain… It has to exert every sinew to try and shift this huge boulder.

So it’s no good saying, ‘Well, it would be quite nice if we shifted the boulder’ – you’ve got to use all your energies and say, ‘Look, this is really important.’”

Is he convinced global warming is man-made? “In one sense, it is irrelevant [in that, whatever the causes, we cannot ignore what is happening]. But I have no doubt that it is man-made.”

He was convinced of this after attending a conference in Liège about ten years ago, when the president of the American Academy of Science – a climatologist and expert on the chemistry of the upper atmosphere – presented a paper that demonstrated the connection between population growth, industrialisation and the way the chemical consistency of the constituents of the atmosphere had changed, “and although you have to be careful about statistical limitations, there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever”. Does he feel that the naysayers, such as Christopher Booker and Nigel Lawson, are like creationists, in a way, closing their eyes to scientific evidence because of their beliefs? “I think that probably is so and I think it suits them to be that way – I mean, it would be a much easier life if it were not the case. You wouldn’t need to bother about a lot of things. I would love to convince myself otherwise.”

So for them, it is a convenient un-truth? Another gratifying whoop of laughter: “Oh yes, that’s very good! Got the reference.” Has he seen Al Gore’s famous climate change documentary? “No, I saw him. He came and did that lecture here, at the BBC.” 

I interviewed Gore some years ago and found him not nearly as wooden and earnest as his image. “Well, I don’t know… I mean, he comes in like a wardrobe, doesn’t he? Huge and as though he moves on wheels.”

Is he hopeful or despairing about the future of the planet? “I’m on the pessimistic side. I don’t think there’s any question that things are going to get worse. I’m not suggesting that Homo Sapiens will be exterminated by its own hand within the next 100 years – but I am suggesting that the conditions for the burgeoning human population on this planet will mean that conditions for individual human beings will get worse.”

Since 2009, Attenborough has been a patron of Population Matters, a UK charity advocating sustainable human populations – and he has often said, as he says to me, that in countries where women are in control of their lives, population growth is in decline.

He’s talked about how we must support governments who take the environment seriously, so is he disappointed by President Obama’s lack of progress? “Yuh – but no one can do enough. Whatever you do is not enough. But you’ve got to do something.”

Does he recycle? “I certainly do. I get a rocket from my daughter if I don’t!” His daughter, Susan, is unmarried and although she has her own house, spends most of her time with her father in their Richmond home. (She grew up here with her brother, Robert, an anthropologist who has two children and lives in Australia.)

How does Attenborough react to those who say that recycling is a well-intentioned but pointless response to the enormity of the problem. “I think it’s a supercilious, condescending, anti-social and undemocratic thing to say. I could equally say, ‘What does my vote matter?’ You have to do what you can do. You can’t say, ‘I don’t give a damn – and it doesn’t make any difference if I save this milk bottle or turn off that light.’ ”

Is it possible, as the Arctic ice continues to melt and countries vie to stake their claims, as is already happening, that war may one day break out over who has the rights to exploit the natural resources there? “It’s possible.” Does he fear that possibility? “The Antarctic is an example for optimism,” he says. “We have an agreement there, which hasn’t been broken, but if uranium were there, let’s say, what would happen then?

“You think that all sorts of things are so against common sense and humanity that they would never happen and then… you know… Iraq.” So was he very against our intervention in Iraq? “Yes.”

The last time I saw David Attenborough was at an exhibition of the potter Lucie Rie’s work, with Hans Coper, at the Barbican in London. He was with a female companion and although I tried not to stare, I noticed how comfortable they looked together, pointing out this or that exquisite piece to one another. “That would have been my wife,” he says, when I mention it. “Modern ceramics were our joint pleasure. Jane was an amateur potter and our table lamp, when we were first married, was one of Lucie’s.” His voice is suddenly very quiet, as though wounded.

It was only later, when I looked up the date of the exhibition, that I saw it was in 1997, the year Jane died of a brain haemorrhage. They had met at university (Attenborough read natural sciences at Clare, Cambridge and later, social anthropology at the LSE) and were married for almost 50 years. It must have been incredibly tough for him coming home from his first challenging trip, after her death, without Jane to greet him. Has it got easier? “Life changes…‘easier’ is not the word,” he says. “You accommodate things… you deal with things. I’m quite used to solitude in the wilds but, no, an empty house is not what I enjoy. But my daughter’s there.”

If Attenborough’s only legacy to us were his wonderful programmes about the natural world – and they really are full of wonder – this would be riches enough, but we have so much more to thank him for. As controller of BBC2 in the 60s, he commissioned such landmark programmes, illustrating the huge range of his interests, as Civilization, The Ascent of Man, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Old Grey Whistle Test.

The man has hinterland in spades. Music, for instance, is an abiding passion. As a boy, growing up on the campus of Leicester University, where his father, Frederick, was principal, he used to play Beethoven’s fourhanded symphonies, with his mother, Mary.

Frederick had been a choral scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. “That’s how he got himself to Cambridge, from being the son of a village shopkeeper in the Midlands. “And I was a chorister and I even [he flutters his eyelashes mock-winsomely] sang a solo.” Whereupon Attenborough needs little encouragement to break into “Give to me the life I love” from Vaughan Williams’ Vagabond. He relaxes (rarely) by reading, listening to music (Handel operas, at the moment) and playing his Bechstein piano, dating back to the 1930s, “which I bought on the never never”.

When I ask him what is his consolation in life, he says – without missing a beat – “the natural world”. Because you can lose yourself in it? “Probably. And everybody does – or most people do. In moments of grief – deep grief – the only consolation you can find is in the natural world. People write to me and tell me this. People of great distinction (I won’t name names) have written and said, ‘When so-and-so died, the only thing that made life tolerable was to watch programmes on plants and animals.’ And I thought, ‘That’s true for me, yes.’ Because we are part of it and part of a big, enduring thing.”

Some time ago, he bought an old pub adjoining his home on Richmond Hill and is building a massive side extension to house a library, as well as expanding his garden. Is this why he is still working so hard? “It’s perfectly true that I have to pay for it somehow, but that is not why I work hard. It seems to me to be absolutely awful to be getting up in the morning and nobody wanting you to do anything. You have to have someone who goes [slaps one hand against the other vigorously and bellows], ‘WHY ISN’T BLOODY ATTENBOROUGH THERE?’ – and then you have a reason to get up at four o’clock in the morning because you know you’re wanted.

But just to be filling in the time, like playing golf (which I’ve never done in my life), is not what I’m about. “The trouble is that an awful lot of us don’t have the opportunity – either because we’re physically incapable or because society has reckoned that nobody wants people doing any more at your age, and you can’t get the job… I mean, I am blissfully blessed that people want me to do something, so why should I say no?”

Ten days after our interview, Attenborough is off to Borneo – where he’s been every five years since his first visit 50 years ago. It’s one of three retrospective programmes to mark his 60th anniversary of joining the BBC.

“People were saying, ‘How are you going to mark your 60th year?’ and I didn’t fancy a dinner where people get up and make speeches, which are televised, so I said, ‘We needn’t bother. Let’s go out and make programmes.’ ”

He remains close to his two brothers, Richard (the actor/director) and John, who was a car nut and former managing director of Alfa Romeo. Both brothers, sadly, are not in good health. “Dick’s not well,” says Attenborough, “but then he is 87.” So says the kid brother, who’s about to sleep rough in a tent, in some godforsaken jungle, at the age of – incredible as it seems – 85.

“I don’t fear death,” he says, when I ask him, “but I fear suffering, of course, who wouldn’t? You hope when the moment comes that it won’t last long and it won’t be a trial and tribulation to those you hold dear. But I know perfectly well that I’m not immortal.” Attenborough hates being called a national treasure but, having met him, it’s even harder not to treasure him.