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David Attenborough is 100. His legacy may be very different than you think
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- [00:07]
A
For millions of people, David Attenborough was the man who introduced us to the wonders of the natural world, which were often hidden from the naked eye.
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B
This magnificent creature preparing to lay her eggs is the largest of all turtles, a leatherback.
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A
But with Attenborough turning 100 on Friday, some are rethinking his legacy and realising that his biggest achievement might have been missed entirely. I'm Samantha Sellinger Morris, and you're listening to the Morning edition from the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Today, environment editor Nick o' Malley and former BBC arts director John T. Claypole on how the world's most famous naturalist changed our culture. It's May 6th.
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C
Welcome, Nick and Jonty, to the podcast.
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B
Thank you.
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D
Hi, Nick.
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C
I'm gonna start with you because I think in your latest feature, you upend what most of us think of when we think of David Attenborough's influence on all of us. So let's start off with why do we think of him as Mr. Nature? Like, are there certain famous moments that come to mind?
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B
Well, we should think of David Attenborough as Mr. Nature. He brought nature to us all. And he's not only an avid naturalist and a man who passionately bought us nature, he was first a media executive. And as a media executive, he commissioned far more than nature programming. So he had this insight into what he believed would work in modern mass media. And he was very good at his job beyond being this naturalist that we all know.
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C
Okay, Jonty, so I want to turn to you so you can take us through this. You know, like what Nick was saying. We think of him as Mr. Nature. There's, you know, famous clips of him, of course, you know, cavorting with gorilla in Rwanda. You know, he's the one who introduced us to, you know, bizarre flora and fauna from Namibia and where else? But you tell me, Jonty, what is his biggest contribution, do you think, in terms of his influence? Like, what is it really?
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D
Well, I worked for the BBC for 18 years, and I worked in arts programming, arts documentaries. And so, funnily enough, while for many people, Attenborough is, as we've been saying, Mr. Nature, certainly in my world of arts documentary making, his reputation and profile and legacy was just as significant there as it was for nature programming. He was the commissioner when he was controller of BBC2, which was the BBC's channel of intelligent programming, and still is, when he was a controller, he commissioned the most famous and ambitious arts documentary series of all time, called Civilization, which was hosted by Kenneth Clark, the art historian. Looking at those great works of Western man. And remembering all that he's achieved in philosophy, poetry, science, lawmaking, it does seem hard to believe that European civilization can ever vanish. And yet, you know, it has happened once. But the idea of it was very much Attenborough's who brought it to Clark and asked him to do it. So for anyone making arts television programs as I was, it was Attenborough again, was the kind of towering, godlike figure hanging over everything. And it sort of brings me to the broader point that Nick's raised that, you know, Attenborough's contribution to television, to the media, was bigger than the nature programming. I think that in the 1960s, when he was controller of BBC2, his vision was for the idea that television could be an educational but also entertaining presence in people's living rooms, that you could come home and you could watch programs that would both educate and inform and entertain you. And he had a personal interest in the natural history programs and presented many of those. But as a commissioner and as a program, he was just as interested in, in cultural programming, in satire, in comedy, in music. And so his cultural contribution, as Nick is saying, sort of goes beyond nature itself to the idea of intelligent programming inside of people's living rooms, immediately accessible to everyone.
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C
Well, Nick, I wanted to ask you about that because in your feature you say that, you know, Civilization and some of the other cultural documentaries that Attenborough was sort of, you know, the man behind them. You said it proved that Attenborough's sense that if complicated ideas were presented well, they would prove as transfixing for a mass audience as they were within Britain's grand institutions, within the confines of public schools, ancient universities and learned societies. So I guess was it his intention to educate the masses? And just how niche were these programs that he pitched? Like, what sort of stuff was he showing to the masses that maybe they weren't getting before?
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B
I think it was absolutely intentional. And civilization is long form. It's. It's what, 13 episodes, Jonty, I think about its topic is Civilization. It's. It's a very Eurocentric or Western centric view of the world. Obviously it's an artifact of its time, but it, but it began a thousand thousands of years ago and ended at World War I. The story of the evolution of civilization, of architecture and art and philosophy. So of course they're big ideas. And then he, he, he created this and he proved that it worked, which not only open the door to life on earth. Again, a long, ambitious, very beautiful explanation, explication of the evolution of life on the planet, white stalks. If you wanted to pick one bird as a representative of all the birds in the world, you could do worse than pick the white stalk. It's a marvelous flyer, but it also opened the door for this whole series of what we would call blockbuster. What I think I've read the BBC referred to as sledgehammer documentaries. So I grew up watching. Apart from those two series, I grew up watching the Shock of the New. And that was where an Australian audience heard Robert Hughes, an Australian art historian, tell the story of modern art.
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D
The key word of the new century was modernity. Modernity meant believing in technology and not
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B
craft, in human perfectibility, not original sin, and above all, in a ceaseless consumption
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D
of things and the images of things.
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B
If you were a Parisian alive, that elevated him not only in Europe, but in the United States, he became very famous for that. And I think that was Attenborough's chief success. He said, we can bring these really sophisticated, complicated long stories to people. We can elevate them, we can educate them and entertain them. In my conversation with Jonty, we. He used the word, or he explained to me that in the BBC they used the word middlebrow, which I think we might have thought of as a pejorative, but. But I don't think it was there. Is that the case?
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D
Yeah, the vision for public service broadcasting when the BBC started in the 1920s, doing, obviously just radio at the start, but middlebrow as a concept was a word created to apply to what the BBC wanted to do it. It wanted to be neither highbrow nor low brow, but accessible and middlebrow. So accessible intell. So, yes, when I was in the BBC, middlebrow was not a word of insult, it was a compliment. Hey, you made a middlebrow program.
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C
That's so interesting there. I thought I was being defensive for decades, thinking I've been slagged off by the British.
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B
No, you're never entirely sure if that's the case, though, to be fair.
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C
I mean, you are never entirely sure. And so, Jonty, I wanted to ask you because it's interesting, we talked about Life on Earth, which of course is Attenborough's masterpiece. And I think some of the episodes maybe cost about a million dollars or something, to a million pounds each. And it was like close ups of frogs spitting and like incredible vision. And you mentioned the Shock of the New, which was that 1980 documentary with Robert Hughes. But then he also commissioned a series, Song Hunter, which saw the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax tracking down traditional folk musicians across Britain and Ireland in order to preserve that culture that was being lost. So, Jonty, I'm just curious, from the British perspective, like, how big a deal was, was it that Attenborough and therefore the BBC were educating the masses in this way? Was this a huge departure from the way it used to be thought that middle classes, the sort of material that would have been appropriate for them, was this just a massive departure?
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D
So the mission of the BBC when it was founded in the 1920s was inform, educate and entertain. And I mean, I think now you wouldn't necessarily choose those words. There's a slightly sort of patriarchal, sort of handing down element to it. But actually, in sort of practical terms, that idea of what we're making is content that isn't just to entertain. It should also educate and inform. And the educational or in information, content we're making should also be entertaining. Was a very powerful combination of words. I think Attenborough's genius wasn't in formulating the mission of the BBC. It was, I think, in articulating it better than almost any other individual had done in the BBC's history. What he did with BBC2 and those programs sort of became a benchmark that every future controller referred back to. You know, in those couple of years when he was running BBC2 in the late 60s, having his own interest in nature programs, commissioning civilization, he also commissioned Monty Python. He commissioned the greatest satirical comedy of all time. You know, he understood that television could be, you know, particularly as color came in, it could be spectacular, it could be accessible. And so it's the way he interpreted it, I think, that is so significant.
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B
Don't forget, he also made tennis balls yellow.
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C
Yeah, that's right. You said. You said. Tell us about this, Nick.
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B
Well, he. Well, as Jonty was saying, he was very aware of the possibilities of colour. Tennis was being broadcast on colour. Balls were normally white at Wimbledon. They couldn't be seen crossing the line, apparently. I've read that it was his idea. Well, if they're yellow, you can see them when they cross the line.
- [10:52]
C
And Jonty, now we have to mention, of course, that you were a BBC arts director and you engaged with David Attenborough because we've mentioned civilizations and you were tasked with, I guess, what we'll call a revisitation of civilization. So tell us about that. And, yeah, the conversations you had with David Attenborough about that.
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D
Yeah. So to cut a long story short, around 2014, a new director general came into the BBC, a man called Tony hall, who'd been CEO of the Royal Opera House. And in a very early interview with a member of the press, a journalist, he said that as a child growing up in Liverpool, from quite a working class background, he had watched Civilization, Kenneth Clark Civilization as commissioned by David Attenborough on tv and it had changed his life. And he said, that's the sort of program we ought to be doing. And somehow over the course of this interview he ended up saying, and we're going to make a new version of Civilization. So having sort of committed us as an organization to make this, Tony tasked me and two other colleagues to actually make this thing. So we went into a state of deep anxiety, like, oh my God. I mean, it's like being asked to remake Citizen Kane or something. You're just like, oh my God, how are we possibly going to do this? So we ended up making a very ambitious nine part series. We called it Civilizations. And it was going to have a non western as well as a western focus, a global focus. But as we came close to launching the series in 2017, by that moment it had been talked to death in the media. Journalists sharpening their knives for years. And I knew if we were going to get this thing off the ground, I needed to get David Attenborough's you know, seal of approval, his, his imprimatur. And so Attenborough didn't do email, but he's famously. And we haven't said, you know, one of the great joys of Attenborough is that all through his career he remained incredibly accessible. He was famously the only celebrity in Britain who had his phone number in the yellow pages in the phone directory. So he didn't do email. I had to write to his address and said, look, this is what we're doing. You may have seen something about it. I would love to come and talk to you about it and find out what you think. And he wrote back and said, yes, come for tea. So I went to his house in Richmond, I told him what we were doing and trying to do and he said, that all sounds very good. And so after this two hours, I said, David, we're having our launch at the British Library in a few months time. Would you come to the launch and just say a few words to give your approval to the endeavor? And he said yes. So from that point on, I knew we were going to be all right. We had David on our side and he came to the launch and he stood up at the start and said, I think it's wonderful the BBC is doing this and I tell you in that moment in the auditorium with about 100 journalists sitting there, waiting to watch the first clips, waiting to tear it apart. Once David told them it was a good thing, you could feel the venom being sucked out of the room in that moment, because nobody's gonna mess with David Attenborough.
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C
That's so interesting, and I love your anecdote there about how he was the only celebrity in Britain who had their number in the Yellow Pages, and therefore he'd receive all these phone calls from people. I wonder if that's almost like a personal embodiment of this sort of democratic view that he had of both British people or people broadly and what his role was. And so I wanted to ask you, like, what are the main stories, I guess, that David told in the original civilization that you think people really hadn't known about before? And then what did you include in your 2017 program Civilizations that, you know, Attenborough hadn't included or that you're particularly proud of?
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D
Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that he gave Kenneth Clark the briefs. I mean, David Attenborough, he was a high concept, concept man in this situation. He had his lunch with Kenneth Clark, and he. He basically said, I'm wondering if you'll do a series. We've got this new technology, it's called color. And it seems to me there's a chance just to show the great creations of art and architecture in people's rooms. So that. So that. And. And. And this idea that we could bring the world, the world of great art into people's rooms in glorious Technicolor. I'd like you to do it, Kenneth, because, you know, you're one of the great art historians, and I think we should call it civilization. And that was sort of it. And what happened then was Kenneth Clark went off and made the series. He. He did. What Kenneth Clark did was that he realized that at that time it was going to be too difficult for him to try and do a kind of global history. He decided to focus on Western Europe, essentially, and tell the story of Western Europe from when the Romans, from when the Roman Empire collapsed, when what he said was almost all of European civilization was lost to the barbarians. So the first episode was called Skin of Our Teeth. It was how Rome collapsed and we managed to hang on to civilization by the skin of our teeth. It's a European story from about 500 A.D. through to the kind of 1960s. So when we did our series, we just thought, look, Obviously in the 21st century, this is a chance to Take a global view and actually it's easier to travel now. So we made a series that looked at the art and architecture of civilizations and societies from right across the world. That was the sort of main difference. It was the global purview.
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B
After the break, there are a handful of significant voices in the climate movement who say that having created this awesomely effective tool for communicating the beauty but also the significance and the fragility of our natural world, he then failed to use it to illustrate the two crises that have challenged the natural world. The first being.
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C
Now, we would be remiss, I guess, if we didn't mention what was something of a black mark that you feature in your feature, Nick, which is the criticism that David Attenborough has faced for a very long time with regards to what his role has or hasn't been when it comes to climate change. So, Nick, can you just run us across, why have people been so critical of David Attenborough?
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B
There are a handful of significant voices in the climate movement who say that having created this awesomely effective tool for communicating the beauty but also the significance and the fragility of our natural world, he then failed to use it to illustrate the two crises that have challenged the natural world. The first being just the sheer destruction of the natural world through our resource extraction, through the expansion of our towns and cities and our gathering of energy, and that has led to an extinction crisis. And then secondly, and more recently, the climate crisis. They say that having built this enormous audience, having built godlike's not fair, but having built this staggering reputation and won the trust of people across the world, he then should have deployed it faster and harder to defend the natural world. George Monbiot, who is a famous environmentalist and a writer for the Guardian, he said that it was a betrayal. Now, there are those. Not everyone agrees, obviously. I've spoke at length for this story with Tim Flannery, who has known attenborough himself for 40 years, having run into him at Sydney Airport famously, and introduced himself and then become friends. And he makes the case that in simply illustrating the natural world, the pristine natural environment to us, he made it possible for us to conceive of it and therefore an imperative to defend it. He didn't need to, by this argument. He didn't need to come out and articulate, we must save this. He. He made it imperative. He demonstrated its inherent value. I spoke with Bob Carr, I didn't mention this in the story, and, and Bob Carr, he didn't go that far, but he did say that in bringing the natural world into our rooms. You know, in showing people what a complicated web of life a rainforest was, he made it far easier for environmentalists then to go and bang on the door of people like Bom Carr and say, we need to protect this, because half the argument had already been won. People knew, people culturally knew in their blood what a rainforest was and why it was valuable. So there has been that debate over years. I would say though, that his. Well, I know he's got a new series out on Netflix at the moment, which I have not yet seen, but last year his last film came out called Ocean and I went to its Australian launch at the Cremorn Orpheum here, weirdly enough, for a nature documentary made by a 99 year old, there were queues out the door. It looked like a red carpet event for a blockbuster. And in that, he made this very fierce defense of the oceans against really damaging industrial fishing. And after that came out, George Monbiot wrote, this is the documentary I've been waiting for all my professional life.
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C
Interesting. And also you make the point in your piece that those who have been sort of slammed in the documentary, that they didn't sort of clap back, did they? Because it's David Attenborough.
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B
Well, no, going back to the point that Jonty was making about the venom leeching from the room that day in at the British Museum library, you can't really. It is a very difficult thing to do to challenge a man like David Attenborough. His voice is so trusted that no matter how powerful you are, it makes more sense really just to zip it and step back. And. And there are people when I, you know, I discussed this criticism with quite a few people who have worked with David over the years or worked in the environment over the years. And I think Scully was another person who made that point, that it was, in his view, not an accident that Attenborough didn't engage in political debate because he wanted to protect that voice. He wanted to elevate himself above the political fray. Now, I can't know if that's true. I haven't spoken with David, but it is clear that in making his voice above reproach, it has in more recent years, he has used it as an very effectively in defense of the natural world.
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C
Right. Well, I guess just to wrap up then, I wanted to ask you both about something, Nick, that you wrote because you said that we're living in an age of cynicism, but Attenborough has become the face of unvarnished enthusiasm. So I want to put it to you both. Do we need him now more than ever to perhaps be inspired to turn to wonder at our culture, at our natural world, instead of, say, pitting each other against each other?
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B
And yeah, I would say absolutely, yes. I, I think, and I think that is what draws people to him, that, that as, as I said earlier, it is performative in that it is done deliberately. But his passion is real. His passion for the things that he finds beautiful to have inherent value. And his passion in describing them and bringing them to us is so real that I, I do, I think it's a rare, a rare tonic in this current atomized cultural moment. I think we need more Houthim. I think I would love to see other voices seek to communicate the way he does.
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D
A lot of people criticize Attenborough for not coming out, guns are blazing on the climate crisis earlier than he did. He knew about it for decades. What I would say is that when he did, in the late teens, around 2018, 2019, began to do those stories in the programs he was making, you know, the fish in the oceans that were dying on, on, on plastic. The impact of those moments, I believe, had far more impact on a shift in popular perception and awareness of the climate crisis than anything else up until that moment. So although he's criticized for not doing it sooner, what I think is so extraordinary about Attenborough is that he speaks to a vast, vast audience. He is trusted by what used to be called middle England and I think middle Australia, as an authority on the natural world, on the world in general, in the way that very few people are. That meant that he was not, he didn't want to be perceived as an activist. He waited, I believe, strategically, for the right moment to push that message, and he turned the dial. Now, I think what we need more than ever, as Nick saying, are people who, who have that trust. You know, we are in an age of deep polarization where everybody's, you know, getting their news from partial, partial sources. There is no sort of truth anymore. We talk about being in a post truth age. I think Attenborough is one of the few figures who cut through that, and that is why there is not only a reverence for him, but, you know, as he's turning 100, a kind of nostalgia for something that is going to be gone before too long as well. And who's going to replace that? Who's going to replace that? Be the figure who is a force for good, who everyone across the political divide trusts. I mean, think about it. He is somebody who, whether you're you know, sort of far left or alt right. He brings you joy and you may criticize the way he's gone about certain things, but ultimately he is trusted. And who else is there like that at the moment?
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C
Well, thank you so much, both of you for the discussion.
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A
I really appreciate your time.
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B
Thank you.
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D
Thanks so much.
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A
In other news today, mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has urged the federal government to stop micromanaging Australia's energy transition and use the upheaval caused by conflict in the Middle east and its political capital to accelerate the electrification of the economy. The fight to vanquish malaria has led an Australian scientist to discover an infertility gene and understand the mystery of male infertility better. And a generous tax break for high end electric vehicles will be wound back from next year as the federal government swings the axe on cost blowouts ahead of a pivotal budget to be handed down next week. You can read more at theage.com au or smh.com Today's episode was produced by Chee Wong. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills, and our podcasts are overseen by Lisa Muxworthy and Tom McKendrick. If you like our show, follow the MORNING Edition and leave a review for us on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening.