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David Hendy
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David Hendy
The only is to close the book
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Matt Elton
Today, 8th May marks the 100th birthday of leading British documentary maker and natural historian David Attenborough. His TV credits, which span eight decades, include 1979's pioneering Life on Earth, 1993's Life in the Freezer and last year's Kingdom. But what's the longer history of wildlife broadcasting? What first inspired Attenborough to report back from the frontlines of the natural world? And how has he shaped our understanding of the climate crisis. I caught up with media and cultural historian David Hendy to find out. David, thank you so much for being with us today on the History Extra podcast. We are talking in May 2026 to mark 100 years since the birth of David Attenborough, who's a name that many people listening to this podcast will know. He's one of the sort of giants of 20th and 21st century broadcasting here in the UK. So we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the contributions he's made, both in terms of the TV medium, but also to our understanding of the world more generally. Before we get into all of. I thought we should explore what documentaries on wildlife and on the natural world were like in the decades before he made this massive contribution. Can you, to start with, tell us about some of the pioneering efforts that were made in the early days of broadcasting to chart the world around us?
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David Hendy
Yeah, I mean, if we go really right back to the beginning of the BBC in the 1920s, there is sporadic attempts to interest the listener as it was then before television in animals, but really almost as sort of occasional entertainment rather than a sort of science or education. So the earliest examples we get of Wildlife on the BBC are probably in programs like Children's Hour. So, for instance, in November 1924, they had what was listed as zoo noises. So it was animal noises from the zoo. You had the famous aunties and uncles who presented Children's Hour, and one of them, Uncle Jeff, had a dog called George who would do a regular grand howl, as it was called. The other early example of Wildlife on the BBC was the famous example of the cellist Beatrice Harrison, who would do her duets with the nightingale. And that started in May 1924. Television comes along in the 1930s. Now, the BBC started its regular service in 1936, but it was running some experimental television services before that. So between 1932 and 1934, for instance, you have experimental television programmes from the basement studios of the brand new Broadcasting House. And they were mostly variety shows, but they always seemed to include circus animals who were brought in, or exotic pets, for instance, so there'd be a boa constrictor or an alligator. One of the famous animals that appeared was Sally the Seal, who arrived at the BBC on an open top Daimler and was shown on screen blowing into a saxophone and wiggling her flippers. So none of this was particularly serious. When television started properly in 1936, you had lots of sort of magazine programs and variety shows and so on. And Actually, the very first edition of perhaps the most popular program before the war, Picture Page had a Siamese cat called Prestwick Pertana as one of its guests. They even at one stage had eight live crocodiles in the studio, which involved the construction of a special water tank for warm water. So there were always animals there. But what we're talking about essentially in these early days is animals as entertainment, really. And people would come onto the TV set and they'd talk a little bit about them, but they were kind of anthropomorphised very often or they were performing very often. So you wouldn't necessarily, at this stage in those sort of first, particularly those first two decades, the 20s and the 30s, you wouldn't really think of it as natural history programming in the way that we think of with David Attenborough.
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Matt Elton
And as I mentioned, David was born in 1926, around the same sort of time as some of these pioneering efforts. What do we know about his early life and family and the ways in which it shaped his later career and interests?
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David Hendy
So David was the middle son of three boys and born into a comfortable middle class home, but it was socially liberal, it was politically progressive, it was Fabian in spirit, if you like. His father was a university academic. His mother had been very involved in the suffragette movement as a campaigner for social causes, a justice of the peace, involved in setting up the Marriage Guidance Council and so on. So it was a household where there was a almost evangelical belief in public service. You were expected to make a difference to the world in some way. And this was a family that, for instance, during the Second World War, took in two young Jewish refugees who came to Britain as part of the Kindertransport program. So that was the kind of family background. Then, of course, David went on to Cambridge to study natural sciences. So that is very much his sort of academic training. And he then did some national service in the Navy. And it's interesting that at that stage you could tell from how he writes in his autobiography, he fancied that national service in the Navy would allow him to travel. That's what he really wanted to do. Actually, he spent his national service in the Navy stuck on a mothballed aircraft carrier on the Firth of Forth. So he didn't get the travel that he wanted, but that national service was just long enough for him to forget about the idea of carrying on with postgraduate research and perhaps the pathway towards an academic career, a PhD and so on. And actually afterwards, what he did was he went into publishing, no particular vocation he was a junior editorial assistant for an educational publisher and he says this about it in his autobiography. He says, it's not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life. So in his early 20s he was wanting to travel, he was wanting to make a difference in the public world, he was wanting to kind of explain he probably had a kind of yearning to teach in some sort of way. And educational publishing, he realised, was not going to give him any of that.
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Matt Elton
It's really interesting, this sort of formative section of his career and he's a figure who is largely now known by his association with the BBC and you've mentioned that a bit already. At what point did his longstanding connection with the BBC first begin in earnest? And in what capacity was that?
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David Hendy
In 1950 he was 24 years old, working in publishing, not necessarily very happily, and he saw an ad in the Times for the job of a BBC Radio talks producer. He applied for it and didn't even get an interview. But what he did get was a phone call which he wasn't expecting from someone called Mary Adams. Mary Adams worked in BBC television. She was previously a geneticist in Oxford, so with scientific background, but she was running a department of television talks in BBC television and she phoned him up and said, look, I know you didn't get the job in radio, but we think you might fit in here in television. And David Attenborough explained very politely on the telephone that he didn't actually know much about television, he didn't even have a television set at home. He said he'd once watched a TV play at his in law's house and that was roughly the extent of what he knew. But in any case, Mary Adams clearly saw something in him and he was offered the chance to join a three month training course, no guarantee of a job at the end of it. And that, that was in 1952. He was also given a chance while he was doing the training to do some interviewing on screen. So he stepped into a sort of celebrity chat show, I suppose it was really Joan Gilbert's Weekend Diary, it was called, and he was interviewing an Olympic long distance runner. It was his first time ever in front of the cameras on TV and he. She obviously didn't really particularly enjoy doing that. And afterwards Mary Adams basically decided that he wasn't going to be a presenter at any point in the future. His teeth were too big, was her judgment. But she did think that he had potential as a producer. So as far as she was concerned and as far as David Attenborough was concerned in the 1950s, his future was working behind the scenes in television. And he did actually get a permanent job, even though there was no guarantee of that. At the end of the training course, he became a talks assistant and then an assistant producer in the television talks department. And it was an interesting department for him to be in because it was full of people who had no particular background, you know, in light entertainment, it would be people with a background in the entertainment industry, or vaudeville or something like that. In drama, it would be people with a background in theatre, television talks. He found himself joining a group of people that included, for instance, a research physicist, a journalist, a filmmaker, a painter, a historian, an art critic, even an expert on Icelandic sagas. So it was an eclectic group of people that he was joining. And his job really there in talks was to kind of do almost anything that fell into the category of non fiction. His actual first production that he was responsible for fully was actually a 10 minute program about the discovery of the coelacanth, you know, that rare fish which has been described as a living fossil. So, in fact, in the end, his first production was actually Natural History. But he would have to do a whole range of programmes. Talks, politics, current affairs quizzes, travel programmes. He even at one stage produced a short ball about a fishmonger, believe it or not.
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Matt Elton
That's incredible, that detail. I mean, it's an interesting quirk of this story because I'm talking to you today from Bristol and Bristol's famous for its natural history unit, which I think I'm right in saying was founded in 1957. But I also think I'm right in saying that David Attenborough didn't initially work for that department at all. Is that right?
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David Hendy
Yes. David Attenborough said at one stage that he felt spiritually as if he was part of the natural history unit. And his big epic wildlife series that he's famous, famous for, were very much in collaboration with the Natural History unit. But no, he was in television talks, a very different department based in London. It was a department that did do some wildlife programmes. And perhaps the example that comes to mind, nothing to do with the natural history program, something that was done with television talks. And David Attenborough was Zoo Quest, for instance, which was a series that ran from 1954 and it involved a senior keeper from London Zoo who would head off with David Attenborough and go to somewhere like New guinea or Madagascar. First program actually involved going to Sierra Leone and they'd sort of go hunting in the undergrowth for some Sort of rare animal, a snake or a bird or a monkey or whatever, and then bring that animal back to the studio, having tracked it down. And the series Zoo Quest would include a series of short films that were shot on location so viewers could see the animal being court and see the animal in its own natural habitat. And then there would be a live chat in the studio with the zookeeper, which was meant to be informative. I mean, it was sometimes a little bit chaotic because, you know, to work with an animal live in the studio was an unpredictable thing. It also conveyed the sort of impression of some sort of Victorian style animal capturing expedition. But, you know, there were some innovative techniques that were involved even then. David Attenborough was trying to get the BBC to use 16mm cameras, for instance. The standard at the time, which the BBC film people ferociously defended, was 35mm, because that was the gold standard. He rightly made the point that 16mm was going to be lighter and more portable and you needed that if you were filming in the undergrowth or the jungle. So there was a way in which David Attenborough was feeling his way into wildlife programs in London, even before the natural history unit is evolving in Bristol.
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Matt Elton
And after he took some time away from the BBC, he returned full time in 1965, in what might to some listeners, I suppose, be a surprising capacity, in that he became controller of BBC2, which was the BBC's new TV channel that had launched the previous year. Can you talk us through his role in this and in evolving that channel?
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David Hendy
I mean, I think it's very interesting that, you know, David Attenborough is, in some sense, he's a biologist, he's a zoologist, but he is also a broadcaster. And he's someone who actually is really immersed in and interested in, and respects the craft of television as much as he respects science. And so I think in many ways, if you understand that and understand his involvement in a whole range of television, him becoming controller of BBC2, a kind of managerial impresario position, is less surprising. And he arrives at a really, really important time for the BBC. The BBC is getting more license fee money coming in in the 1960s. You've got a new director general, Hugh Carlton Green, who's sort of interested in blowing away the cobwebs and making programming more interesting and sometimes more shocking and more controversial and so on. And he's encouraging program makers to take risks. And when the BBC is awarded the second channel, BBC2, it comes at a moment of buoyancy and optimism. The new television centre has only recently opened. And Bill Cotton, one of the other great impresarios of the BBC at the time, said, this new opulent television centre made us all walk just that little bit taller. Now, BBC2 launches in 1964 and the BBC has slightly over promised the public and the press the sort of riches that would be on offer. And in fact, in the end, there just weren't enough television programmes in the pipeline to be able to fulfil that promise. So BBC2 had a bit of a rough launch in 1964, and when its first controller, Michael Peacock, was replaced, and David Attborough comes in in 1965, he said that it was the perfect moment to take over as controller of BBC2. He said there was nowhere for it to go but up and he was effectively given a blank sheet. One of his colleagues in television, Joanna Spicer, said that he created BBC2 in his own image. And his own image, as far as the BBC was concerned, was kind of something of a Renaissance man, as a polymath, if you like. Yes, he had a scientific background, but he was also quite knowledgeable and interested in music, he was interested in the arts and so on. And what David Attenborough said was that as controller of BBC2, one of the measures of success was, as he put it, the width of the spectrum that the programs covered. So he was interested in that breadth and that variety. So, yes, under him, you had archaeology programs, series like Chronicle were introduced that had a global approach. You had Horizon as a general science program. In drama, you had the classics, Tolstoy, George Eliot and so on. Classical music, you had Stravinsky conducting his own Firebird at the Royal Festival Hall. And at the other end of the spectrum, if you like, you had the old grey whistle test with rock music. So variety and breadth was very much what he was interested in. The other thing that was a key development under Attenborough as controller of BBC2, was the introduction of colour. Now, it didn't really, really come in properly until it was actually the Wimbledon tennis tournament in 1967, when it really kind of came in. But the process of turning black and white into colour had become something of a kind of tortuous mystery for BBC engineers, and they were trying to work it out. David Attenborough, as well as being controller of BBC2, sat on the working group that tried to work out how colour was going to be introduced. And the kind of solution was found in introducing it on BBC2, which used a 625 line system, as opposed to, say, BBC1, which used a 405 line system. So actually what that meant was that if program makers wanted to do programmes in colour, and many of them did, it was very exciting, the prospect of doing that. They would have to do it for BBC2. So all of a sudden, as controller of BBC2, he was finding lots of creative program makers making lots of offers of exciting new series and so on for him on BBC2. And it was liberating as well to be a second channel, because he knew that BBC1 did all the heavy lifting when it came to the ratings battle with ITV. And BBC2 was liberated, if you like, from needing those really, really big audience figures. And the audience was smaller, but it was also judged to be more committed. David Attenborough said this actually, which I think is really, really interesting. He said, a million on BBC2 is worth 4 million on ITV or BBC1. So the audience might be smaller, but it's an audience that has deliberately chosen to spend time with a program or a series. So even though he wasn't in the field, he wasn't in the jungle of the Savannah or whatever, this was a period where I think he was enjoying being a broadcasting impresario, if you like,
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Matt Elton
and by the sounds of it, trying out new things and having the freedom to experiment and push the medium forward. Do we get a sense of what the impact of BBC2 was? Even though, as you said, it had a smaller but more committed audience?
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David Hendy
As commissioner, he was capable of coming up with some big series that I think helped establish BBC2 as an important part of the kind of media ecology within Britain. So I suppose the big examples that come straight to mind is 1969 civilization a personal View, presented by Kenneth Clark, which was conceived partly as a showcase for colour, but also conceived by David Attenborough from sort of his own background. He described how when he was growing up, he would buy magazines that came as part works, a series of 12 or 13, like for instance, H.G. wells, who'd done a history series of magazines, this weekly installment that would build up to something that really counted for something, something that was accessible but authoritative. And Civilization established that sort of opus, big format series that established the format for at least a decade and a half. And after Civilization, there was the Ascent of Man. And that's got an interesting genesis as well, because it starts off with a complaint from one of David Attenborough's colleagues, Aubrey Singer, who runs sort of Science and Features in BBC Television. And he looked at Civilization and he said, well, how can you have a series called Civilization that doesn't actually deal with science. So he demanded a new series that would showcase science and he had a presenter in mind, Jacob Brunofsky, another polymath, and David Attenborough agreed, and he helped secure Jacob Branofsky by inviting him to a screening of Civilization, which Branofsky responded to by saying, where is the science? So it worked. So these big series helped establish BBC2 as the kind of the home of not just the quirky and the marginal and the peripheral, but of big, ambitious series that established television as accessible but serious as well. And there were some guiding principles, I think, throughout this time at BBC2. He said that it was about finding new approaches and neglected subjects, but also nothing, he said in the schedule should be mindless. So under David Attenborough you've got the sense in which BBC2 is it's not just interesting, it's not just quirky or unusual, it is actually ambitious. There is quality there as well as variety.
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- [28:27]
Matt Elton
I'd like to stay with the idea you mentioned just then about there being various things that helped set in place what was needed to make what I think is one of the most foundational programs we'll talk about, which was 1979's Life on Earth. What else had to happen? What other developments were there that allowed such a groundbreaking series to be made?
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David Hendy
I mean, there are lots of sort of scientific and technical developments that we'll come onto, but I think actually the starting point that actually sometimes gets forgotten about Life on Earth is that actually it was revolutionary. Most in terms of its idealism, it's actually kind of conception in terms of its ambitiousness. Instead of it being 13 episodes, each of which had A separate theme or separate subject. It's coherent over 13 episodes. It's shaped by David Attenborough's argument. You know, it's got a narrative structure, it's got a story arc across 13 episodes. It is, as David Attenborough described at the time, it's the story of evolution. So I think that's one of the things that is innovative about it, to establish. And he had to argue for this amongst colleagues to sell the idea of the program, to say, look, actually, no, this is an argument. And when he wrote the initial script for it, he wrote it as if nothing would be impossible. So he would follow the argument, and then everything that happened afterwards had to respond to that argument that he developed. If he mentioned a certain animal in a certain place, there had to be a film crew that would have to go and film that. And immediately it starts to develop into something which is going to span multiple locations. It's going to be extraordinarily expensive and ambitious and complicated to produce. So that means there's a whole new set of techniques and production routines that have to be invented. How do you deal with multiple film crews? How do you get film crews around to different locations? How do you get the presenter to different locations? So that involves recruiting and training up a whole series of separate film crews. This has to be something that can only be done when international travel is easier. So the growth of airlines and easy travel and cheaper travel and so on is also something that makes life on Earth possible in a way that even 10 or 20 years before that wouldn't have been possible. And then, of course, you've got the technical challenges. Now, if the series is essentially the story of evolution, you're probably not going to get to the big animals, you know, the big cats and the giant lizards and the things that people actually are used to watching on tv. You're not going to get to them until maybe even halfway through the series. There's a lot of evolution that has to happen and be talked about before that. So then you've got the challenge of. Of a series about wildlife, where you're going to confront the mass television audience with several episodes, which are about microorganisms, sea snails, shrimps, hoverflies. And that, of course, is a huge challenge. So there's a lot of work that's being done on how do you film these creatures in close up, These tiny, tiny creatures. And, you know, there are new sets that need to be built, tanks, new lighting techniques, new camera lenses and so on. And this involves not just the natural history unit, but the BBC, working with groups like Oxford Scientific Films, who really, really develop new techniques of backlighting and filming, so that the first few episodes of Life on Earth are kind of quite stunning in a way that perhaps viewers didn't necessarily expect. Instead of actually seeing a herd of wildebeest, what they're seeing is tiny sea creatures beautifully illuminated, illuminated in close up. And that in itself becomes an extraordinary revelation. So there's a series of things that need to be done to make this possible organisationally, editorially and technically.
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Matt Elton
Do you know what the reaction to the series was at the time?
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David Hendy
There was very, very positive reaction from critics. And, you know, for instance, someone like Clive James, who was the Observer's television critic at the time, raves about the series. So that critical response is pretty impressive straight before the series has finished. I recall, for instance, Clive James saying that actually, in many ways, watching some of those first episodes was like experiencing vertigo. And that sense in which you are witnessing something which is extraordinary, it's new, it's clever, it's illuminating. And he also, Clive James, paid tribute to David Attenborough himself as someone who seemed to have that kind of ability to convey complex ideas very, very simply and seemingly spontaneously in a sort of authoritative but unassuming kind of way, which was part of his developing Persona as a wildlife presenter.
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Matt Elton
And it was over the coming decades that Attenborough became known as one of the foremost figures in this medium in making this kind of programming. What are just some of the highlights of the documentaries that he made over those coming decade?
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David Hendy
I mean, we've almost lost count of the series that he made, but just to pick out a few, there is a sort of logic to how they develop. So, for instance, the next big series that he did after Life on Earth, Living Planet, was actually moving the focus away from animals and towards the environment. One description of it was, you know, fewer frogs, more deserts. And it starts to kind of convey that idea that there is an interconnectedness between animals and their environment, which is an important part of our understanding. Series like the Trials Of Life, then moves the focus onto animal behavior. So it's interested, for instance, in mating rituals or how animals rear their young or how they feed, how they organize and so on. Then you've got 1993 Life in the Freezer, and that's a series that shows that even in the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica, you've got an abundant, if slightly perilous, ecosystem that can survive. As the series moves on, the importance of the ecosystem, I think, comes through very Very strongly. And there are some seminal moments in these series. So life in the Freezer, for instance. There's a moment that I think at the public found both epic and slightly disturbing, where there's a very hungry, nine foot long leopard seal that we see lying in wait just as a young penguin slips into the water for its first ever swim. And we see the leopard seal pounce on this penguin with deadly effect. So there's very little sentimentalism in some of these series. And, you know, there are some extraordinary sort of sequences that captured the public imagination as well as the moving quite rigorously through a series of kind of natural history themes.
- [36:04]
Matt Elton
And it's worth pausing here to just think about that a bit more, isn't it? Because these are programmes, these are documentaries that had an enormous impact on the public, as you've described there. What do you think is the skill that they have in being able to connect so readily with the wider.
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David Hendy
There is a sense in the programs as a whole that we're not just being kind of casually entertained, that there is an argument, that there is a narrative, there is a theme. So therefore we can be captivated and entertained by extraordinary filming. And you're seeing the kind of things that, you know, you'd never be able to see in real life from around the world. So the set piece filming is extraordinary, and that is part of their impact on the public. But at the same time, what we're getting is that serves the purpose of an argument of a greater understanding about animals and their relationship with the environment that allows us to start to understand them on their own terms. There's a sort of dignity that is awarded to the wildlife through these programs. And then, of course, there is David Attenborough himself, who is sensitive, central to the appeal of these programs. And part of the reason is that he's got a sort of presentational sort of style that I think perhaps appeals to many television viewers. He's someone that we know and trust, knows about the subject. He's not an imported celebrity who's merely doing a voiceover. But also he comes across in many ways as having certain qualities that appeal. He's understated, he's willing to get messy. You know, we see him sort of scrambling through the undergrowth, we see him getting covered in bat guano. And nothing diminishes his enthusiasm when he comes face to face with animals. So, for instance, that incredibly famous scene in Life on Earth where he's being surrounded by gorillas, he's on a mountainside in Rwanda. And the original idea Was that he's just there to explain the evolution of the opposable thumb while there are gorillas in the distant background. But then he suddenly looks down and he sees two baby gorillas playing with the laces on his shoes. And before he knows it, there's a large adult female gorilla patting him on the head. And he sort of finds this extraordinary ability to not be freaked out by it. More than that I'm going to quote actually, because I think this is actually really interesting. The camera runs and we see him and he says afterwards he says it was paradise. It was such a privileged delight to spend time with those gorillas. And he ad libs and he said this while his life is in the hands of this adult female gorilla. He said, there is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know. And the gorilla is still caressing him at this point. And he says it seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolize everything that is aggressive and violent when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not and that we are. And that was an ad libbed comment that really contributed to the sort of specialness of that scene. And it said something important about not just observing animal behaviour, but having a respect for the kind of the variety of animal behaviour and understanding animals on their own terms.
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Matt Elton
Over the years, it seems that his ability to become more explicitly campaigning has increased. Do you think that's fair to say? And how important do you think that work is?
- [40:12]
David Hendy
I think it is true he has become more explicit about environmental causes and particularly climate breakdown. He did at one stage admit that he was initially skeptical, skeptical about the role that humanity had on climate change. And he sort of puts down his change of mind to a particular point in 2004 when he listened to a lecture that convinced him that climate breakdown was largely man made. I think the other thing that in some sense has always held him back just a little bit is that as a television professional, I think he embraces the idea that we one shows rather than tells. That great traditional documentary sort of saying is don't lecture people, just show and then people will learn. So I think to some extent the television maker in him has restrained him from being too explicit about it. But if you look at the arc of his career, particularly over the last 20 years or so, there's no doubt that he has become more and more explicit, explicit, more and more personally concerned about the effect of climate breakdown and human destruction. So you can start to see it in planet Earth and Blue Planet. And then, of course, there are some series that he's done that are very explicit. Saving Planet Earth. I mean, the title itself, his series, not for the BBC but for Netflix, Our Planet, was much more explicit about human destruction of the environment. The Living Planet, the very last episode in that series, was entirely focused on the human destruction of the environment. So I think it has become more explicit. I think one of the things that I would say is that there is value to those series where it wasn't explicit, but it was only implicit because one of the things that came through constantly, even in those early series that didn't directly address environmental issues was the interconnecting of wildlife and environment so that if an environment changes, then a whole ecosystem is threatened. I think that comes through very, very strongly, even when it's not an explicit discussion of climate breakdown. The other thing that I think is worth remembering with David Attenborough is that even though he's become much more explicit about the threat of climate breakdown and about human destruction of the environment, deep sea fishing and dragging of oce beds and so on, he, perhaps because of his upbringing, has always felt that there's an optimistic side to the story, that human destruction is counterbalanced by human ingenuity. And, you know, it's not impossible that human ingenuity might get us out of the mess that we're in.
- [43:09]
Matt Elton
And for more on how history might be able to tackle the climate crisis from historian Peter Frankopan and broadcaster Chris Packham, you can listen to a conversation that I did back in 2024. I've included a link to that in the description for this episode. But returning to David Attenborough, David, do you think that it's his humanism that's one of the key traits that has made him so popular for such a long time? And are there others that we should put alongside it?
- [43:36]
David Hendy
Part of his success is a coincidence of sort of time and place. I think, you know, his professional life has coincided with several decades in which television flourishes as a mass media medium. And in Britain, you have the BBC and you have the Natural History Unit. And David Attenborough said about the BBC, he said, one of the things that distinguishes this country and makes me want to live here. So he believes that the programs that he made, some of those big early series, could only have been made in Britain by the BBC and the Natural History Unit. That investment in quality, the interest in range, the commitment to the length of time it takes to make these series, I mean, life on Earth and so on, took Three years of solid filming and travel and so on. So I think that part of his success and his longevity is down to the fact that he's been lucky in one sense to live and work at a time when both the BBC and television have been flourishing in this country and have committed to the idea of investing in quality programs. But I think there is something about the man himself as well. Gene Seton, who's the official historian of the BBC, described him as a public service animal and that there is something inherently British about his manner, his unassuming manner. He wears his knowledge and his expertise lightly, doesn't mind if things go wrong. Particularly there's sort of understated spontaneity about him that allows him to deliver and share knowledge in a way that is not at all patrician or handed down from the heights. So in many ways, he's very different to, for instance, someone like Kenneth Clark presenting civilization, that patrician approach. There's a sort of boyish enthusiasm that he also manages to convey in some way. So there's something about the man and his manner. We trust his expertise, but there's also something about the institutional support and his understanding of what makes good television. He's a naturalist. He knows about animals, but he also knows about what works on television.
- [46:06]
Matt Elton
And finally, how do you think he has changed our relationship and our understanding of the natural world over the decades he's been working?
- [46:14]
David Hendy
It's always very, very tricky to assess the impact of something like television on public understanding of anything, really. I think all I would say is it's very difficult to believe that he hasn't helped us to understand the natural world in a better way. And I think there are certain elements to that. What I mean by that is that I think that if you go back to. To the earliest wildlife programs before David Attenborough, they tended to be sentimental. They tended to think of animals as performers. We tended to anthropomorphise animals and find them amusing, and so on. David Attenborough has consistently given us animals on their own terms so that we understand them as they are. I think he's also consistently helped us to learn about the interconnectedness of animals, the way in which they relate to each other, that if one species or animal sort of suffers or disappears, then a whole ecosystem is affected. Similarly, if an environment changes, the rains don't fall, there is a drought, then a whole ecosystem is affected. And I think the other thing is that I think he's helped us to understand that the smallest and perhaps sometimes the ugliest animals are just as interesting as the bigger, more glamorous animals. Yeah, we were always interested in lions and tigers and elephants and so on. But he has helped us to get interested in plants. You know, the series that he did about the life of plants and extraordinary time lapse photography topography brought those plants alive in a way that made us appreciate the previously overlooked and underappreciated aspects of wildlife and the living world. So I think he has democratized, if you like, our understanding of the natural world.
- [48:19]
Matt Elton
That was David Hendy in conversation with me, Matt Elton. David is the author of numerous books, books including 2022's the BBC A People's History, published by Profile.
- [48:42]
David Hendy
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- [48:54]
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