Inside the new must-watch David Attenborough documentary as the icon turns 100

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Bullets flew past David Attenborough’s head as furious soldiers flagged down his minibus. “The road was blocked,” he would later write in his diary. “There was no escape”. It was January 1978 and the 51-year-old was filming Life on Earth, the series that would seal his reputation as Britain’s greatest natural history programme-maker.

The presenter and his crew had come from the Virunga mountain range in Rwanda, heading for Kigali and the plane back to London. They were carrying gold – the footage of Attenborough interacting with gorillas that would become one of the most famous scenes ever broadcast on television. And now it was all at risk.

The Rwandan soldiers suspected that the BBC crew were, in collaboration with conservationist Dian Fossey, making a film critical of the Rwandan authorities’ failure to protect the mountain gorillas. The crew was driven to the local police headquarters and interrogated. After a night of hotel arrest, Attenborough and episode director John Sparks were taken to an army compound.

Sparks wondered if they were going to be shot. “They were taken out and pretty much put up against the wall,” says Victoria Bobin, director of Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure. Then, as the situation threatened to unravel, they were released.

Just how close they came, as Attenborough puts it, “to losing everything”, is one of the revelations in Bobin’s documentary, which marks Attenborough’s 100th birthday by going back half a century to the broadcaster’s greatest television triumph. The 13-part 1979 BBC series, made with Warner Brothers, was an ambitious attempt to explain the development of life on our planet. Filming took three years and had the team crossing the globe as Attenborough attempted to cover “every aspect of animal behaviour” in over 100 locations.

The result was truly event television; the brilliant graphic design of the opening credits and Edward Williams’s fanfare opening sound-track was followed by astonishing scenes of animals. The nation was hooked. It was said that the pubs were quieter on transmission nights and episodes attracted over 15 million viewers. A further 500 million people would watch around the world.

To make the new documentary, Bobin took Attenborough to a small cinema, played a selection of episodes from the original series, pointed a camera at him and asked the great man to remember, a process aided by his impeccably kept diaries. “He has phenomenal recall,” says Bobin. “And he’s a lot of fun to be with, still excited about things at nearly 100. It’s easy to forget his age, because his passion for programme making is undimmed.”

As Attenborough approaches his century, that passion is still at work in television, most recently in Secret Garden, where he brought his questing intelligence to the patch outside our back doors. “He is in remarkably good health,” says Mike Salisbury, who was an assistant producer on Life on Earth and went on to produce, amongst other series, The Life of Birds and The Life of Mammals.

“I think the thing that worries him most is losing the power of his mind, because he has an incredible memory and is an incredibly good writer; he is a profound thinker about culture and conservation and the future of the world. But his mind is as sharp as ever.”

As well as Life on Earth itself, the new documentary employs footage of Attenborough’s earlier career, exploring the backstory of how the series came about. Attenborough had achieved some fame in the 1950s as the presenter of Zoo Quest, a programme that (unthinkably now) went on expeditions to find animals for London Zoo. But it was sheer chance that he came to be seen on our TV screens.

“Unfortunately, immediately after the very first programme, Jack [Lester, curator of reptiles at London Zoo] became ill,” Attenborough recalls in the documentary. “But it was in the Radio Times and the boss of television, said, ‘Well, Attenborough, you’re the only other person who was there, so you go and do it’. So, I had to appear because nobody else could that job.”

Attenborough’s derring-do (he ran after anteaters and caught baby alligators in his jacket), clean-cut looks and enthusiasm chimed with the times, and Zoo Quest became immensely popular.

By the mid-1960s he had retreated behind a desk as a dynamic controller of BBC Two. But all the time, he “longed to return to filming wildlife” and continued to plan a series showing how evolution had happened. First as BBC Two controller and then as director of programmes across the BBC, he was considering the technology that telling the story would require.

In 1967, Attenborough oversaw the arrival of colour television in the UK with coverage of tennis at Wimbledon. Then, in 1969, he launched Pot Black and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. For the first time, snooker balls and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were seen in something like their true hues. What if he could do the same with leopards and jellyfish?

In the early 1970s Attenborough was in line for the job of director-general. He claims he would have been a poor DG: “I don’t have political skills. I don’t have political sensitivities. I may know about birds of paradise,” he tells Bobin, “but I certainly don’t know about prime ministers.” In 1973 he resigned as director of programmes and convinced the corporation to okay Life on Earth, with him as writer and presenter.

The budget was more than £1 million and when the team started filming they were using the most advanced cameras, film stock and lenses. Today, the series seems like a message from a long-gone analogue world. There were no mobile phones to connect the crew. It was shot on reels of film that were sent back to a lab in the UK and then to the Natural History Unit in Bristol before they could be sure they had the scene they needed.

There were other dangers. At one point in the mountain gorilla episode, director John Sparks thought an adult female was going to pull Attenborough’s head off. Going down into Arizona’s Grand Canyon, Attenborough had a violent allergic reaction to the donkey he was riding and his eyes closed up. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, their hotel was commandeered by an Iraqi tank division. Yet the team never doubted Attenborough.

“When people’s heads are drooping, it’s cold and awful, and we’re not getting anywhere, or the plane’s engines are broken and we can’t take off, he was really good at making a joke about it,” says Salisbury. “He’s a marvellous person to boost morale when you’re down. I’ve never heard David say, ‘This is awful. I don’t want any more of this.’ He would always find something positive out of a situation.”

When the Life on Earth crew arrived in the Comoros Islands off the east coast of Africa, the left-wing government had just been overthrown by French mercenaries, who shot the president. Permissions to foreign television crews were cancelled, but Attenborough persuaded officials to let them film.

Apart from the gorilla scene, the series featured several never-before-seen moments, including a lion hunt, a male frog spawning a youngster out of its mouth and, in the Comoros, a living coelacanth fish. Yet Life on Earth didn’t begin with gorillas or lions hunting in Tanzania – rather, the first episode was concerned with primitive algae. “I think that was very confident of them,” says executive producer of the new documentary Mike Davis. “One American co-producer at the time said, ‘An episode about green slime, are you crazy? How do you hook an audience across 13 hours?’ Today’s commissioners probably wouldn’t be brave enough with the audience’s attention span.”

Certain things have been a constant with Attenborough: his desire to bring knowledge to a wider audience, his belief in the power of television and, although he probably wouldn’t admit it, no small amount of courage. It took guts to face the angry soldiers, and to sit with gorillas. Though, fantastically, much of the encounter – which was intended to illustrate the evolutionary importance of oppositional thumb and forefinger – wasn’t caught on film.

“I was just about to start talking about the oppositional thumb and forefinger,” says Attenborough. “When I felt a hand come on top of my head. It was the adult female, she twisted my head, looked straight into my eyes and put a finger in my mouth.” Attenborough crawled back to director John Sparks and said, “Did we get much? And he said, ‘Well, we got a bit. I was waiting for you. I didn’t want to run out of film while you were explaining about the thumb and the forefinger’.”

It turned out to be more than enough. Attenborough’s corpus of natural history programmes – Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, The Life of Birds, The Life of Mammals and the rest – indeed, our conception of what a nature documentary should be, all began in the Rwandan forest. Attenborough now says, “It was one of the most privileged moments of my life.” As we mark his 100th birthday, it’s one of ours as well.

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Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is on Sunday 3 May at 8pm on BBC One

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