The Sunday Times, January 1980
David Attenborough has done an awful lot to make copulation respectable during the past quarter of a century. For years now he has been showing us film of all manner of creatures great and small caught in that most intimate of acts, and never a whisper of complaint has there been. As long as you leave sex to the birds, bees and fleas you can’t go wrong – on television.
“Yes, they’re always at it in my programmes, aren’t they?” he says, and then roars with laughter. “I order it in my shopping list now. I write down in my script ‘frogs enter shot, copulate and then exit under leaf,’ and then blow me, six months later some cameraman from Brazil sends me just what I wanted.”
He thinks the millipedes are amongst the most fascinating copulators. “They are a group of animals who have come out of the water relatively recently and aren’t yet used to living on land. When they were in the water it was easy for them because they just had to squirt the various stuff into the water and leave nature to do the rest. But now there’s a terrible business where they’re trying to find their sexual openings.
“A male millipede has his sex pouch on his 11th ring and he takes out the sperm with a feeler-like hand. He then has to bung it all into the female’s genital opening which occurs on her fifth ring, and you can see him counting looking for the opening – one-two-three-four-five. And if he misses he’s got to start all over again. Oh, it’s absolutely fascinating … what … I should say!”
But do they enjoy it?
He laughs again: “The expression on a millipede’s face is not all that easy to construe.”
Attenborough is probably Britain’s best known teacher. His Life On Earth series was watched by 15 million viewers to BBC2 and was sold to “most other countries,” while the book of the series was by far the most successful title of last year with over 850,000 copies sold, and is still top of The Sunday Times best sellers. Was he flattered by this, I asked?
“Yes and no. If you put something of the astonishment of a hummingbird on to the screen with any degree of honesty then you just have to be on to a winner. It is my good fortune that my voice links all of these fascinating things. And it is equally my good fortune that because I was once the head of BBC2 I seem to trail a cloak of papal infallibility about me. People think I must be right when I want to do something because I once told them I liked one of their programmes or something like that.”
He is a man of intense, happy enthusiasm. His home, which is in a quiet Richmond road, is littered with souvenirs from his worldwide expeditions, masks, faces, primitive sculptures, shields, pots and seemingly everywhere female goddesses. Everything he shows is produced with a leap and a bound across the room and then a burst of “Look at this … what … I’ll say!” rather like a schoolboy requesting admiration of his newest cricket bat.
“See these … shark’s teeth … dug them out of a rock in Malta once when we were on holiday with the children. Holidays have to be expeditions, don’t they? Seventy five million years old. What!” (Or was it 250 million years old?) “Or this … fossilised trilobite … perfect, isn’t it? Or this? Shark’s tooth fashioned into a brooch as a fertility symbol for Victorian ladies. A hundred years old. Got it for ten bob in the King’s Road.”
Although he was originally trained as a zoologist and geologist, Attenborough’s expeditions have led him inevitably into the fields of anthropology and archaeology, and for the next two months he can be seen once again as a tele-teacher narrating an eight-part series of films on the art and religions of South East Asia in Michael Macintyre’s series Spirit of Asia.
“You’re right when you say that everything I have seen has been humbling, but I don’t think it has necessarily given me a sense of the religious,” he says. “In fact I’m not even sure what you mean by the term ‘religious experience.’ I’m certainly not a conventional Christian. I suppose I’m an agnostic. One of the philosophical aspects which I find most difficult to take is that the world is man’s oyster. I find that quite foreign.
“It seems to me to be acceptable to say that man is part of the world, but the world doesn’t belong to man. It is certain that I am related to the crocodile, but that doesn’t mean that I can blow his guts out without thought or care so that I can make a nice handbag. That’s an intolerable thought.
“And while since we are part of the world, it is quite justifiable for us to use cowhide to cover a sofa, it wouldn’t be at all justifiable to cover that sofa in hide of a very rare species of whale, for instance.”
For the future he has half formed plans of a trip to the Himalayas to make a film similar to Life on Earth … “but cutting the cake in a different way.” One thing he never wants to do again is run a network.
“I did BBC2 for eight years and at the end I said ‘never again.’ Do you know meetings would go on for full days at a time, and I would find myself thinking ‘what on earth am I doing here?’ It was wonderful to be given the opportunity of starting a new network where ratings weren’t the only thing that mattered. But there are too many other things I want to do with my life.”
