Attenborough on Attenborough at 100: zoologist or television man?

In 1990, Peter Greenaway and his collaborator, the visual artist Tom Phillips, adapted the first eight cantos of Dante’s Inferno for television. The result was a four-part miniseries for Channel 4, using layers of inset video illustrations as Dante (Bob Peck) narrates his descent to Hell. A TV Dante makes precious few concessions to the aesthetic or narrative conventions of mainstream television, save for the inclusion of visual footnotes delivered by the “authorities”: real life contemporary experts providing talking-head explanations of Dante’s words.

First among these authorities was none other than David Attenborough, who 36 years ago was already the consummate authority on animal life and behaviour. With a cheerful expression and characteristic soothing voice, he describes the origin and symbolism of a leopard, seen in the same frame skulking menacingly behind him. These visual citations embedded within A TV Dante neatly summate the two equal prongs of Attenborough’s life and work: natural history and broadcast communication.

The BFI National Archive has copies of A TV Dante, recorded off-air when it was first shown. While it is perhaps one of the most distinctive statements of his authority, the archive shows that Attenborough has always been generous in sharing and reflecting on his own experience. One example, recently digitised, is an interview with Attenborough from 1967 for a Central Office of Information telemagazine strand London Line, intended for overseas distribution.

While Greenaway billed Attenborough as an authority in the 1990s, the COI (Central Office of Information) in the 1960s considered Attenborough to be one of “The Enthusiasts”: six public figures with stories to tell about nerdish diligence. Host Howard Williams described such boffins as “people who are really keen on their jobs.” Interviewer Michael Smee solicited declarations from the self-described “television man” at the then-peak of his career as a broadcast executive, just a few years into his tenure as controller of BBC2.

With startling vigour Attenborough positioned himself as a communicator first and foremost: “I get an enormous kick and excitement from communicating enthusiasm.” From the vantage point of his centenary, it is tickling to hear him describe himself as a veteran of broadcasting in his early forties with just 15 years’ experience of the BBC.

Yet this interview does point to his later pioneering work as an executive and programme maker. You can hear his reverence and respect for all “minority interests” that BBC2 programmes were created to serve, from motoring to jazz. Perhaps the most controversial thing Attenborough has said, at least for viewers in the North, is the opinion that “rugby league is a minority interest in this country.”

Attenborough spoke of the audience for BBC2 “not as a mass, not as a statistic, but as individual human beings”, while at the same time refuting the opinion of that audience being small or too specialist. In the years following this interview, he commissioned totemic examples of seemingly niche programming on a grand scale, including Civilisation (1969) and The Ascent of Man (1973). In the 1970s he made his own programmes with the same grandeur beginning with Life on Earth (1979).

With the Life series came Attenborough’s return to being primarily a maker and presenter of natural history programmes, and his expertise was marked with a knighthood in 1985. However, in the archive are traces of his enduring importance to the broadcasting industry as well as natural history. One such example is his appearance in Look Here, a daytime programme on commenting on matters relating to television. In 1980 Attenborough appeared on Look Here to express his view on the independence of the then-proposed Fourth Channel (later Channel Four).

Did you know that Attenborough produced several instances of the Queen’s Christmas Day message? The BFI has prints of the 1988 message donated from the BBC as well as off-air recordings, notable for a postscript acknowledging the Lockerbie air crash and other alarming events that occurred after the message had been filmed. The off-air recording confirms that viewers at home would not necessarily have known about Attenborough’s involvement as he was not credited onscreen.

Less obscure, perhaps, are the no fewer than three times David Attenborough appeared on the Good Morning Britain sofa for TV-am. One such interview, from 1986 with Nick Owen, treads over another important milestone of Attenborough’s work at the helm of BBC2: the introduction of colour broadcasting, beginning with the televising of a match at Wimbledon using a handful of colour cameras. Attenborough talks gamely of the technological challenges of using such scant amount of equipment, and explains the unlikely solution of creating hours of snooker. “Anybody who says you see far too much snooker on television and the chap who invented it ought to be shot, I’m afraid they’d have to aim at me.”

Attenborough returned to the Good Morning Britain sofa less than a year later as a special treat for TV-am’s weather presenter Wincey Willis’s last day (Willis was a famous animal lover). While he was invited as “Britain’s best loved naturalist”, again the interview found its way back to his history at the BBC. “It was all live”, he explained, “it’s like this programme, only with birds flying all over the place.” Ever mindful of the ‘history’ in natural history, he didn’t hesitate to caveat that these chaotic early animal magazine shows “were among the most popular programmes going”.

There was some irony in Attenborough describing how bewildered animals would be taken from the zoo to a television studio in the 1950s, only to be sat later in the programme next to Wincey Willis, Lady Rosamund Fisher and three monkeys from her estate which operated as Kilverstone Wildlife Park. Yet as always Attenborough was warm and generous and matched the spirit of the broadcast, as evidenced by his tie patterned with hedgehogs.

Whether explaining life as a top television executive for the COI, recounting his exploits for bleary-eyed breakfast TV viewers, or contextualising literary works for Peter Greenaway, Attenborough has always been an authority, an enthusiast and a television man through and through. Happy birthday, Sir David.

All works cited in this piece are available to view in the BFI’s Mediatheque.