college/ss2013/1_Web Mining/SS12/Sachen Chris/Exercise04/Dataset/All/10622.data

culture
tvandradio
8090747
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# David Attenborough: in the beginning

##  For his new TV series, First Life, Sir David Attenborough returns to the
subject that first fired his imagination as a boy: fossils

![Sir David Attenborough at his home in Richmond, Surrey][1]

Sir David Attenborough at his home in Richmond, Surrey Photo: Chris Brooks

By Rebecca Tyrrel 9:00AM BST 29 Oct 2010

[Comments][2]

My son, Louis, 13, is a passionate fossil-hunter, and Sir David Attenborough's
new television series, First Life, is about fossils. Fossils were
Attenborough's first love and, just as Louis now has a shed at the top of the
garden in Dorset where he houses his collection, Attenborough had a boyhood
museum of his own. So it seems entirely wrong for me to interview this
inspirational figure without at least attempting to smuggle the boy in for an
audience.

Louis and his rucksack full of fossils come with me just as far as the garden
gate, and alone I make my way up the path to Attenborough's minty-green-
coloured villa in Richmond, south-west London. Bait in the form of a
plesiosaur vertebra rests in the palm of my hand. Susan Attenborough, Sir
David's daughter, who seems single-handedly to run the behind-the-scenes
Attenborough machine, answers the door. Sir David is heading towards me at the
same time, running downstairs with a lightness of foot that might be
surprising in any other man of 84.

'What have you got there?' he asks with that familiar curiosity. I tell him
exactly what it is, adding that the actual finder of this fossil is waiting
hopefully outside. 'Bring him in,' he says, and from a smooth, milky-coffee-
coloured leather sofa (part of a three-piece suite) in a pale sitting-room
with French windows and tribal artefacts on the walls, I watch the
intergenerational fossil-fest unfold.

Susan brings me water while her father - patiently, enthusiastically and
occasionally, I sense, somewhat competitively in the presence of that
plesiosaur vertebra - attends to Louis, who looks suitably startled to be here
with the man he has worshipped since he was three.

'This one is an ichthyosaur,' Attenborough says, fetching one of his own
specimens, having been clearly impressed by Louis' lower jaw of cretaceous
crocodile, 'and these here are gastralia.' He runs his fingers along the
underside of the ichthyosaur. 'They strengthen the underside of their stomachs
with thin bones. There's a rib and I can show you another one.' He picks up a
specimen from a shelf behind the sofa and says to Louis, 'I bet you don't know
what it is.'

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'Is it coprolite?'

'Quite correct. And this one?'

Louis isn't so sure. 'Ah, well,' Attenborough consoles. 'It's a shark tooth.'

As a young boy, in the countryside around the family home in Leicestershire
(his father being the principal of Leicester University), Attenborough hunted
for fossils, bird's eggs (which in those days you were allowed to collect) and
myriad other little beasts that he could take home and keep in jars. The
nearby Charnwood Forest was full not only of trees and birds and scuttling
creatures but also of 600-million-year-old rocks believed to be among the most
ancient on the planet. They were Precambrian, and scientists thought they were
too old to contain any fossils. But they were wrong.

In 1957 the incredibly significant Charnia masoni species was discovered at
Charnwood - sadly not by the young Attenborough. Rather it was Roger Mason,
another enthusiastic fellow from the same school as Attenborough, Wyggeston
Grammar. While Mason went on to great things himself, and is now a professor
at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, that may seem something of a
hollow victory given the fame and universal adoration that Attenborough went
on to achieve.

Now it is the celebrated Sir David who returns to Charnwood Forest with a
production crew for First Life and, without a hint of rancour, tells us about
the Charnia that he would so loved to have discovered: 'Because of it,' he
says, 'people began to look in other rocks of such great age around the world.
And lo and behold they discovered a whole range of fossils that enabled us now
to put together in extraordinary detail the first chapters in the history of
life.'

As we watch, Attenborough leads us alongside dramatic images of glaciers,
through the Ice Age, 750 million years ago, otherwise known as Snowball Earth,
pointing out that life was nearly extinguished before it had begun. He travels
from Charnwood to an ice field in British Columbia where apparently nothing
lives but, on closer inspection, discoloration on the surface of the ice
proves it is 'wildly alive… we owe our existence to those ice-dwelling
extremophiles… they hung on for 100 million years…' Eerie pictures describe a
post-snowball surge in volcanic activity that resulted in nutrient-rich
meltwater flooding into the oceans, providing a bonanza for photo­synthesising
microbes that bloomed across the globe and started to stick together. And so
that small but significant Charnia evolved.

It looks like a plant - a fern - but it was one of the very first life forms
that could be called animal on this planet. So, those doubting scientists in
1957, know-alls Attenborough calls them, started looking elsewhere for other
Charnia; cue footage of Sir David at Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, lying
down, as he so often does when he gets up close to a creature, be it living
and fluffy or long-dead and fossilised, leaning on his elbow, showing us a
magnificent, 6ft-long frond.

In the early cut of First Life that I watched, Attenborough walks with an
apparently achy-legged gait across an expanse of the Burgess Shale in the
Canadian Rockies. As the camera pans out, a green portable loo appears in
frame. Computers will erase this before the final cut, but it encapsulates the
remoteness and discomfort our man remains so willing to endure for his
passion.

Making a series about fossils, about the fossil that started it all in the
forest he fossil-hunted in as a boy, must have felt like going home, literally
to his childhood stamping ground and symbolically to the birthplace of, well,
life itself. When I put this to Attenborough he sinks deeper into his chair
and proceeds to go off at a tangent, telling me that First Life is a programme
that couldn't have been made even 20 years ago. 'The discoveries it deals with
are really quite recent. If you have read your paper this morning, you will
have seen that there is an account of the discovery of early sponge spicules.'

In telling me this, and I do feel slightly reprimanded for not having read it
myself, he is emphasising how very up-to-date this latest programme of his is.
Later, reading the newspaper report he is talking about, I can find little in
it that isn't covered in First Life. Still, seeing it published in the paper,
Attenborough tells me, prompted him to spend the few minutes before this
interview looking at and altering the final First Life script. 'You see we no
longer have to put things in the conditional tense. We can now say "was"
rather than "may have been". Now we actually know.'

Any further attempt I make to get Attenborough to admit to any kind of
emotional connection between his boyhood passion and this latest programme
produces a long, blinking stare, so I will instead use on old quote: 'As a
small boy I lived in Leicestershire, where there are fossils from 150 million
years ago, and they were beautiful and mysterious. When you know how it got
there, you know that yours are the first eyes to see it, and it's thrilling -
I still feel the same.'

Anthony Geffen, the CEO and executive producer of Atlantic Productions who has
worked closely with Attenborough for 18 months making First Life, says Sir
David's passion for fossils manifests itself in 'gobsmacking' knowledge. 'We
would go to all corners of the planet, and we would find one very obscure
expert in one very obscure area and David would pretty much know every aspect.
The scientists were truly amazed.'

And Attenborough still fossil-hunts. 'There we were in Australia,' Geffen
says, 'with a piece of Precambrian rock he had never seen before, and he would
be roaring up that hill to spend the whole day looking for more.'

For all this boyishness, however, the respect Attenborough commands and the
many decades down which he has commanded it makes him an almost uniquely
daunting figure. He reminds me of the 'unusually handsome tortoises' he
encountered in Madagascar in the 1950s, fearsome in

their size yet endearing for their age and patience. He also reminds me of the
Queen. Like her, Attenborough is a living, breathing archive of national life.
Long fossilised himself in the country's affections, he is an almost
unchanging fixture, a permanent source of reverence in an increasingly
undeferential society. Like the Queen he has endured grief (the death of his
wife in 1997) with quiet dignity, and like her he is an adored public figure
who is unknowable. He and the Queen were born 17 days apart in 1926, and their
lives have collided now and then. For seven years, in his role as a BBC
executive, he produced the Queen's Christmas message. She gave him a CBE, a
knighthood, a CVO and an OM, in that order. She is not, as far as we know,
thinking of retirement. Neither, needless to say, is he.

It was in 1952, a year before the Queen's coronation, that Attenborough joined
the BBC, armed with a Cambridge degree in natural sciences. Among his first
projects were wildlife programmes, so he was soon romping off to New Guinea
for the immensely successful, long-running programme Zoo Quest. 'I was a
producer at the time,' he says, 'and I needed snakes and lizards and things
for the programmes. In those days we would borrow them from London Zoo and of
course they looked like freaks on the doormat we used to put them on, in those
bright studio lights. So I said, "Why can't we make films in the jungle?" Jack
Lester [the curator of the reptile house at London Zoo] and I cooked up this
idea that the zoo should make expeditions to collect the animals and I would
film Jack as he wandered around the forest, and then we would bring the
animals back to the studio.'

Zoo Quest ran for nine years and in the making of it Attenborough travelled to
Madagascar, Para-guay and Indonesia, was the first to return with footage of a
Komodo dragon and in the process became a household name.

Owing to the death of Jack Lester at the age of 47 from a tropical disease,
Attenborough became the presenter - he was doing it all even then, 55 years
ago. As Geffen says, remembering the recent making of First Life, 'In the
field he would turn to me and ask, "Anthony, how does this fit into the story,
where are we going to put this?" and you remember you are working with David
Attenborough the filmmaker. And then we would get David Attenborough the head
of programmes asking, "Are we going to get this programme finished on time?"
Nobody can really get their heads around the 3-D film and the CGI we are
working with now, but David has. He walked into the CGI room and understood
it, and his face lit up. He was like a small kid who had just connected.'

It was because of the CGI possibilities that Attenborough, who is so used to
interacting with live animals, first mentioned the idea of a fossil programme
to Geffen two years ago. In First Life he apparently suspends disbelief
sufficiently to share a screen with an animal that became extinct many
millions of years ago but absolutely looks as if it has come back to life. 'He
had always wanted to complete the full animal journey,' Geffen says, 'but
didn't because firstly the science wasn't available to track the animal's
progress and secondly it was only when we got together that he realised we
could create the CGI. Watching him I could see from his reactions that there
were times when he did think it was real.'

There can be few people who know more about making television than
Attenborough, who was appointed director of programmes at the BBC in 1969 but
not before becoming controller of BBC2. In 1972 he was up for the director
general's job. There is a chapter in his autobiography, Life on Air, which was
first published in 2002 and updated this year, headed 'The Threat of the
Desk'. It involves a vision of himself steering something called the
Management Methods Committee when he could have been hanging out with gorillas
in Rwanda, picking leeches off his legs. So off he went and made programmes,
most memorably the nine series of Life, beginning in 1979 with Life on Earth
and ending in 2008 with Life in Cold Blood.

He is a BBC stalwart, generally loyal and true. He has criticised the
corporation in the past, but in response to my suggestion that the BBC had
perhaps lost some of its backbone of late he says, 'Oh, I wouldn't go that
far. And remember it has to be all things to all men.' Another long, blinking
stare but this time with a hint of a wry smile.

Louis, who has been fossil-hunting in the flower-beds, an apparently futile
occupation, has returned to us inside and, after a long silence, suddenly
says, 'Is it exciting when you find a new species?'

'Oh, well,' Attenborough replies, 'cast a stick over a bush and you are sure
to see a few new species, the hard thing is to find a man who can identify
them as new.'

Did he ever bring animals home?

'Oh, yes,' he replies, explaining that he routinely returned to suburban west
London with 'gibbons, lung fish, hanging parrots from Borneo, chameleons,
pythons…'

Only the fossils he collected on his travels remain. There are no new pets.
While having tremendous respect for all creatures, he apparently gets as much
pleasure from explaining and describing a stone-cold anomalocaris fossil as he
does when elaborating on the habits, habitation and reproductive methods of a
living, breathing animal.

Why doesn't he live in the country, where he could go fossil-finding or animal
watching every day? 'What!' he explodes. 'Why would I want to say goodbye to
music, theatre, galleries, civilisation?' Attenborough is no greetings-card
sentimentalist, and I remember his clinical description in his memoirs of a
childhood dog as 'mute but pattable'. He is a pragmatist and at heart a
townie. He can appreciate the beauty of a hoarfrost in milky winter sunlight
in his front garden while at the same time getting his fix of culture on a
day-to-day basis. He is an aesthete.

During his time as a BBC executive he worked with Henry Moore, Picasso and
Benjamin Britten. When was the last time he went to a classical music concert?
'Yesterday,' he says. 'I heard…' He reels off a list of names including John
Eliot Gardner, Bach and Haydn. I ask about the art on his walls and he
swiftly, almost dismissively, mentions the artists John Craxton and David
Inshaw.

But when he talks natural history he displays tremendous gusto. His arms
flail, his legs cross and uncross dramatically. I ask him more about Zoo
Quest, when he and Jack Lester went in search of the bald-headed rock crow,
Picathartes gymnocephalus, and, as described in the autobiography, after only
four broadcasts a London bus driver asked, ' 'ere Dave, are you going to catch
that Picafartees gymno-bloody-cephalus or aren't you?'

When I mention that coincidentally I know Lester's daughter and have met her
son and grandson, Matthew, he leaps to his feet like an 11-year-old, and picks
up a stamped, addressed envelope. 'What a small world,' he yelps. 'Matthew
wrote to me last week and I just wrote back yesterday. Still got to post it.'
Perhaps young Matthew gets preferential treatment - Attenborough receives
40-50 letters a day - but it was because of Lester that Attenborough first
became a presenter. 'The BBC said when he died, "Well, that is terrible, but
you are the only other person who was out there so you had better present the
programmes."'

He stops. More blinking. There is a pause, but he is certainly not going to
get sentimental about the passing of a colleague 54 years ago. He has even
managed to sound pragmatic about the death of his wife from a brain
haemorrhage in 1997 while at the same time implicitly conveying his
desperation at losing her. In his book he writes, 'The focus of my life, the
anchor had gone… Now, I was lost.' But today he quickly moves on: 'There was a
lot of work that I had to do - and I was grateful that this was so.'

He talks proudly of his son, Robert, a senior lecturer in bio-anthropology in
Australia; and Susan, a former headmistress, clearly dotes on him, but a
polite detachment on these subjects surrounds him like a protective cloak.
Geffen says, 'There is a point you reach where, if he trusts you, you cross a
barrier. In doing that you become a little part of his world, joining him in a
kind of lock-down.'

There was a time when David Attenborough was accused of not appearing
passionate enough about the planet, keeping his own counsel for a long time on
global warming before responding by saying that he didn't want to comment
until there was 'overwhelming scientific evidence'. Today he tells me with
mock indignation that he has been operating as a conservationist since the
1950s.

'I was president of the World Wildlife Fund, I am patron of the British
Dragonfly Society. But a presenter has to be dispassionate.'

More recently, he has dropped that 'dis', speaking out primarily about
population. He is the patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a charity
researching and raising awareness of the impact of population growth on the
environment. Roger Martin, its chairman, says that Attenborough is becoming
bolder in his pronouncements the more worried he becomes. 'He recognises, as
do all scientists, that our environmental problems become harder and
ultimately impossible to solve if our numbers keep growing, because the planet
is finite,' Martin says.

The slightly stark slogan of the Optimum Pop­ulation Trust is 'Stop at Two',
and again we return to the pragmatism of the trust's patron: 'There are three
times as many people on earth as there were when I started making programmes,'
Attenborough says, and he describes the growth in human numbers and its impact
on our fellow creatures and ultimately the planet as 'frightening'. Martin
describes Attenborough's impact as patron as 'magnificent… because he is so
widely trusted. He has decency, authority and wisdom and he sees the big
picture, which, frankly, rather few people do.'

It is impossible to deny any of that. Louis and I are rather speechless when
we leave. To us and, I think, millions of others, he is every bit as
remarkable at 84 as those extremophiles in the ice field as they clung on to
Snowball Earth for 100 million years - a blink of an eye for Sir David
Attenborough's beloved planet.

_**'David Attenborough's First Life' is on BBC2 from November 5. **_

_**The book 'David Attenborough's First Life' (HarperCollins, £25) is
available for £23 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515;
[books.telegraph.co.uk][7]) **_

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