David Attenborough - "The World is a Wonderful Place"

 
Are you a physicist?” enquires Sir David Attenborough, quizzing me in that spectacular sonorous voice.

Oh dear. Somehow, with a stumbling explanation of the Higgs boson, I seem to have tricked Britain’s greatest natural history broadcaster into thinking I’m a fellow scientist.

No, I blush, merely an enthusiastic amateur. “Ah,” he twinkles, sizing me up in one, “I imagine you’ve got Brian Cox pinned on your wall.”

How did he know? In a way, I hazard, Cox is a sort of physics version of you. Just as you had us riveted with the lyre bird’s mimicry and gorillas’ social behaviour, he’s got the public into the Big Bang, the end of the universe and subatomic particles.

“Oh, he’s much cleverer than I am,” insists Attenborough. “He is! Physicists – I stand with my jaw slacking at the imagination that goes into particle physics. It’s just extraordinary. What I do is very easy compared with what he does.”

So familiar that he sometimes seems like an exceptionally worldly grandfather, Attenborough can afford to be modest. His achievements – the comprehensive and influential Life series, recent triumphs such as The Blue Planet, his pioneering work as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC TV in the ’60s and ’70s when he brought in colour TV and gave us Match of the Day and Monty Python – speak for themselves.

Marking his 60th year at the BBC in 2012, he still visibly swells with pride in the corporation, and he’s not nearly finished.

This is the guy who, just a few months ago at the age of 85, stood at the North Pole for the first time, and stroked a polar bear. That sedated beast was oblivious to its celebrity encounter, but later some cubs did jump up and bite him.

Last year’s remarkable series, Frozen Planet, proved yet again that the BBC can still make the best wildlife programmes in the world – the look on the face of the poor seal as the killer whales’ teamwork flipped it from the safety of a block of ice created an instant outpouring of sympathy on social media. No one on Facebook needed to mention which programme had them in tears, so universal was the sentiment.

Attenborough fears that the era in which such shows can find a budget to be made may be on the way out. “Frozen Planet was four years in the making, 40 different cameramen. It’s a big, big deal,” he says. “As television audiences inevitably shrink, because of the multiplicity of channels, the money available for these things becomes less, and harder to get.”

The BBC can still do this, but in a climate where the organisation seems to have few friends in public life, somebody is always looking for a stick to beat them with. When it was revealed some shots of baby polar bears were taken in a zoo rather than out on the ice floes, the media was quick to accuse the BBC of misleading viewers – despite the fact that the only reason they knew about the shots was that it was written on the show’s own website.

BBC director-general Mark Thompson went so far as to accuse tabloid mischief-makers of using the incident to get retaliation over the Leveson inquiry.

Against this frosty backdrop of confrontation, justification and retaliation, Attenborough’s been on breakfast telly and in countless newspapers defending himself and his team in the days preceding our chat. As a result, the PRs wrangling over the interview have implausibly banned me from mentioning either polar bears or the BBC to him. They hover at the other end of the room with notepads in hand, as though this venerable presenter would need back-up. He doesn’t, but he does look a bit tired, the parting in his pure white hair not quite as ruler-straight as usual, the sports jacket over pale blue shirt a bit creased.

He’s been talking to hacks for hours and though he politely rises on dodgy knees and slightly bowed legs to shake my hand in welcome, there’s only a good-natured roll of the eyes when I ask how his day’s been.

“The BBC is the greatest broadcaster in the world,” he says, as we both ignore the ban on its mention. “It’s got lots of imperfections; it’s got up times and down times, but it is the only really true public service broadcaster in the world. Television is the most powerful medium we have and it ought to be in the service of the public. It can do more than just make money.”

Only the pull to keep making programmes about life on Earth was strong enough to make Attenborough resign from his previous high office at the BBC, and he remains appealingly awestruck by the natural world.

There have been sacrifices made along the way for this amazing career, though. He was in New Zealand filming The Life of Birds when his wife, Jane, collapsed with a brain haemorrhage in 1997. She slipped into a coma and he rushed back to be by her side, only just making it in time to feel one more squeeze of recognition when he held her hand. She died the next day. They’d been married for 47 years and he’s rarely spoken about the loss, though he does admit to feeling lonely without her.

He remains close to his two kids – since Jane died, his daughter comes round frequently to “muck me out” and make his dinners, as he can barely boil an egg. Yet the peripatetic lifestyle led him to be away from them for longer than he would have liked when they were young. “Yes, I wish that I’d seen more of my children when they were small,” he says, quietly, “but on the other hand I was able to bring them monkeys as pets at home.”

Wow! I had been going to say that he must have had some good stories for them – but monkeys are much better than stories. “Yes. We had a little colony of bush babies,” he laughs, before checking that I know that bush babies are the tiny nocturnal primates with the huge eyes. “They had a special room and they bedded in a hollow tree. They carry their little babies in their mouths.”

It was nothing so grand as bush babies in the front room that first turned Attenborough on to nature. He merely saw an earthworm and became “fascinated by these other things that share life with us”.

The sensation is something he believes all kids start to feel when they’re about three or four, but it’s easily lost. Nowadays, the main culprits in dulling their wonderment are computers, he says. “If you do lose it, you’ve lost a very precious thing. It’s a joy in life.”

Attenborough also takes a firm stance against email. “I don’t use email – not at all. I have friends and I know that they spend the first hour and a half of every day going through these crappy things,” he says. “If people want to get in touch, there’s the post. What’s wrong with that?

“The other thing that drives me nuts about emails is that they have priority over human beings. They think that you’ve got to answer them before you deal with your children. People say, well, we sent you an email, why didn’t you reply within 20 seconds? Because I’m busy doing something else, is the answer.”

Few people have a better “something else” to be getting up to than Attenborough, but halfway through his ninth decade, we have to admit that he won’t always be here to explain the life cycle of a caterpillar or the mating habits of a bird of paradise. Who, then, does he think will come after?

“I don’t know that there necessarily will be anybody,” he says, after a moment’s contemplation. “You can make perfectly good natural history films without people. In fact, the best natural history films don’t have presenters in them at all.”

Not many of us are as ready as the man himself to dismiss what Attenborough has done as a mere historical quirk – his career only came about, he says, because the BBC imported the idea of a presenter from live TV to films – but in nature documentaries, at least, there seem to be few people capable of filling his shoes. When he’s no longer about, we may have lost that for ever.

Attenborough says that he has often found himself thinking about God as he has gotten older. He remains agnostic, though, and noncommittal about life after death, says only: “I don’t know, I’ve got no evidence. There may well be one. If so, what am I to do about it?”

His elder brother, the Oscar-winning director Lord Richard Attenborough, has been confined to a wheelchair since an accident in his London home in December 2008 and has announced an end to his almost 70-year film career. However, the younger Attenborough has recently been re-enthused by the possibilities of 3D TV.

Having had a 3D documentary on Sky about penguins over the festive period, he is already planning another about the Galapagos Islands for late 2012. Just as he jumped on the new technology for colour TV back in the ’60s, Attenborough is a keen proponent of donning the 3D specs – “it just makes things realer”.

He plans on keeping going for as long as his dodgy knees will carry him, then. After decades of wandering across continents, he still harbours an ambition to visit the harsh terrain of the Gobi desert and dig up fossils.

“I’d rather look at things than not look at things,” he explains, succinctly. “The world is a wonderful place and there are wonderful things going on in it. There’s an infinite amount of pleasure to be got from the natural world.”