David Attenborough has travelled the globe countless times
to film the living world in all its wonder. A-ha.
In a career that spans the age of television itself, he has pioneered new filming technologies,
produced some of the most iconic moments in broadcasting,
and inspired a generation.
The blue whale!
Now, in his 80s, he's on the road again, travelling across
continents and oceans to shoot the latest instalment in his epic account of life on earth.
This is a film about the life and evolution of a very rare species,
caught on camera in HIS natural habitat.
David is making an extraordinary journey around the world
to film his latest landmark series, the story of the origin of life.
David Attenborough's First Life is the series that will fulfil
his ambition to document and film all the stages of life on earth.
Over the last 30-odd years I've been filming
the range and variety of animals and plants that live on the world today.
What has been missing is the very beginning of the story.
We've always started at chapter two.
So, I just want to go back and show where this whole thing started.
When I was a boy, that was regarded as totally unknown.
There was no evidence of how life started and today there's evidence.
The first piece of evidence was unearthed just 100 miles north of David's London home.
This is the Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire.
As a schoolboy, I grew up near here.
This was where, in the 1930s, David first developed a passion for the natural world and fossils.
This is the beginning of the journey for David.
This is where, as a young boy,
he looked and found fossils that got him fired up
and it really started his career.
It's 70-odd years since David was walking these woods
and cycling around them and now, we're back here.
When I was a boy, growing up in the Midlands, in Leicester,
the rocks and limestone we found in the east of the county were full of the most magical things.
You hit a stone and it suddenly fell open and there was this amazing coil shell - beautiful and extraordinary,
and nobody had seen that for 150 million years, except you.
So, I thought it was very romantic and exciting.
It appealed to the small boy's instinct of collecting things
that, to be honest, I don't think I've really lost, but I certainly had it then.
I was a passionate fossil collector.
But I never came to look for them in this part of Charnwood and then a boy
from my very own school, just a few years after I left it, made an astounding discovery.
I can't remember where I heard about the discovery of a Charnia,
but I certainly kicked myself and I thought "I could have been part of history.
"I could have discovered that.
"Why didn't I bother to look?"
And this is it.
It's called and is known around the world as Charnia,
after the forest in which it was discovered.
David is as passionate about fossils today as he
was as a boy, an interest that was nurtured by his academic parents.
He was the middle of three sons, born to Mary and Frederick.
The family lived in a house in the grounds of what is now Leicester University,
just half a mile down the road
from the museum where he is filming now.
Yes, there we are.
That was University - well, it was, as the press were quick to point, out a lunatic asylum.
It was taken over by the University College, you see.
And we lived in that which was the superintendent's house, College House.
There was the big park, Victoria Park.
There's my father.
He was principal of the University College in the 1930s
and there he is, looking younger than me,
though he didn't have any hair. But not since he was about 28, I think.
David has two brothers - John and Richard, with Richard growing up
to become an actor and Oscar-winning director.
So what was the inspiration that drove the boys to such success?
Perhaps it was their sense of adventure, as they explored
the building that was once a psychiatric hospital.
There were great areas of it that were still in the condition of them being a Victorian lunatic asylum,
and that included padded cells.
We, as boys, used to wander around there,
getting in in various ways, which I suppose we shouldn't have done.
My elder brother Richard took me into this padded cell and shut the door.
That was horrible because inside it was all quilted and where the door shut there was no handle on the door.
So you couldn't even see where the door was
and you knew that you could scream to your heart's content, or as loud as you wished,
and nobody could possibly hear you.
That was not a pleasant sensation.
I must remind him of it some time!
David went to Cambridge to read natural sciences and that enabled him
to indulge his growing fascination with the natural world.
It's a passion that still drives him on today.
David's journey to discover the origins of all life is going to take him around the entire planet,
encompassing four different continents and 40,000 miles.
First stop, Morocco, in North Africa.
We're here for trilobites.
Trilobites are the most extraordinary, wonderful fossils.
Here are some of the wonderfully prepared specimens.
Happily, and very, very fortunately, the world's greatest expert on trilobites -
or certainly one of the first three - Richard Fortey, an old friend of mine,
is here to show us around, so we should be in for a very privileged time.
I think they are just about as good
as you can get with preparation.
They look stunning.
Trilobites are principal characters in the story of the first life on earth.
They were one of the most successful kinds of animal in history.
There are 50,000 species that we know of, and probably many more undiscovered.
They were the first animals to see a fully-formed picture,
using lenses in their eyes, made of rock.
In their heyday, they dominated the globe for 250 million years.
Humans have been around for just two.
What's that ridge there?
That is rock still in.
That is the system we use.
He very carefully left these for us to see the process in development, you see.
You're an artist. Thanks very much.
You really are. Thank you very, very much.
Before filming begins tomorrow,
David has a chance to pick out the best specimens for the programme.
He's also on the lookout for a few pieces to add to his private collection.
What sort of price are we thinking about?
I have reserved all for a long time, for you, more than three months.
Thank you again very much.
You are welcome any time, no problem. Thank you.
If I was Mr Moneybags, I would have bought the Ordovician ones, the new ones, on the spot.
Which was the one that really blew you away, David?
That was 15K.
The fossils David has just seen are the best there are.
But other trilobites are widely prepared and sold in the towns and villages of this part of Morocco.
But, to an expert eye, there is something about some of these fossils that doesn't quite add up.
It's a nice little specimen.
Well, I've never seen a trident bearer with a great long flared
median prong on its stripe, so either it's true, in which case it's weird,
or it's been, let's say nature been helped along a little bit.
If it's fake, it's carefully done.
I've seen lots of different ones in my time.
I've never seen that before.
Or maybe it's pathological.
A diseased trilobite.
We don't want one of them, not round these parts!
You don't want anybody catching anything.
A-ha. Thank you.
Thank you. This one?
This one I like but it's too much.
Give me 1,000 dirham, it's a good price. It's a good price.
750?
No. 1,000.
800? 800? 90.
850?
90 dirham.
850?
90.
It's very sad.
How much? OK. OK.
OK? Yes.
Shake on it. 850?
OK.
Thank you very much.
At 850 Moroccan dirham, David's got a bargain - that's roughly £70.
20, 200, 400, 600, 800 and 50.
With the shopping spree over, work begins.
David is filming at a local museum
where there's a collection of some of the strangest
and largest trilobites in existence.
Action.
The shape of these eyes can in themselves tell us a great deal about the way the animal lived.
Some of these - we're talking...
thousands of pounds of some of these things,
if not tens of
thousands of pounds,
of something that's completely unknown to science and spectacular to boot.
There is a sort of a standard rule about this, that when you see a really lovely thing -
and you're silly enough to say that's a really lovely thing -
the person concerned said, "Of course, private collection".
I have some for sale, but that one is my collection.
I think every time you ask whether it's a private collection or not,
it goes up by another multiple, you see. This one is my collection.
Are the other ones curled up?
Are they as beautifully prepared as that?
Nice.
What sort of money?
OK. Until I show it to you, I can't tell you.
David Attenborough is a name that is synonymous with television.
First Life will be his 50th series as a presenter.
But surprising as it seems, his long career in TV began quite by chance.
I saw an advertisement in The Times for a sound radio job which I applied for and didn't even get an interview,
but a week or so afterwards,
I got a letter from someone who said they'd got this new thing called television, would I be interested?
Then they said they would pay me £1,000 to go on the training course.
That was three times what I was being paid at the time in the publishers so I thought I would give it a go.
Television in the '50s was brand-new, with the BBC
providing the first public service programmes in Europe.
David had never seen a television programme before,
but nevertheless began work as a trainee at Alexandra Palace.
I was apprenticed to a producer who was regarded as a very experienced man
because he'd been there for three months and he had already produced one programme, you know,
so he knew where everything was, so I joined him and we worked on a quiz called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.
David's obsession with mysterious objects of the past was put to good use behind the scenes.
Lovely, isn't it? A very...
It was his job to source artefacts to be identified by a panel of esteemed academics.
..and there, what my Hungarian colleagues would call...
David's academic background and his analytical mind
gave him an affinity with scholars and scientists that endures to this day.
I've known David for rather a long time
and we certainly share certain aspects of humour.
Somebody should make a proper feature movie,
about trilobites called Thoracic Park!
This horse is unfit for heavy work.
One of the great privileges is having an expert like Richard Fortey, who is a world authority on these...
particular animals and who knows this locality very well.
Richard is now stomping around on the horizon.
It will be very interesting - I bet you he comes back and he'll say,
you know, there was a nice one and he shows you this, that and the other.
What do you think of the chances of this being a piece of worked jasper?
In other words, you think this is a spear point?
I think it is. I think it's got a broken tip and probably was thrown away, or discarded, do you think?
I do. It's jolly old because it's got this polish on it, wind polish.
Yes. I think also that that is probably a xerophytic horsetail, which I didn't know existed.
I was just going to borrow your lens to have a look to see if it has got the characteristic joints.
I've got the characteristic joints!
Certainly falling to bits, the way they always do.
David's appetite for knowledge is insatiable.
And in the 1950s, that hunger drove him to come up with a programme idea
that would provide the perfect opportunity to travel and film in the remotest parts of the world.
I had a friend in London Zoo and he and I cooked up an idea
that the London Zoo should send out a collecting expedition,
which of course we wouldn't conceivably do now, but in those days it was possible.
And the idea would be that I would accompany this chap,
who was an expert on snakes, and I would see him pouncing on a snake and then from that film sequence,
we would go to him in the studio live with the same snake and he be able to talk about the details.
That was the basis, called Zoo Quest.
The series didn't quite turn out as planned for David the producer.
Jack Lester was the man from the zoo and he acquired a tropical disease,
he collapsed after the first show
and the head of my department, or the head of television said, "Oh look, if Jack Lester can't do it,
"the show's got to go on - the only other person there who could do is Attenborough.
"Tell him he has to leave the producer's gallery and go down on the floor and do it."
We spent the first part of our trip in Paraguay...
From those first moments in front of the camera,
David has had plenty of time to hone his distinctive presenting style.
His 50-year career in television spans the life of the industry itself.
The First Life shoot has moved to Australia
and this morning he's performing the same ritual
he has gone through hundreds of times before.
What is the piece in your head now?
Very good question.
You've got to convey something, some fact, you've got to get it right.
In 1946, geologist Reg Sprigg found fossils here in the Ediacara Hills...
Once having got it right in your mind, you then try and put it into words.
..Which, until that moment...
had been, until... no...
And the first words that come out of my lips at any rate are jumbled, and confused, and...
circumlocutory, and fumbling for exactitude.
It was the discovery of, in the Charnwood Forest,
the creature in what was undoubtedly pre-cambrian...
And then you decide that that will distil into the following sentences.
That is the gist. OK.
Very difficult to think about it when someone is fumbling in your genitals!
It's sort of tricky.
It was a discovery in 1957...
I have to walk up and down and say it to myself and hope I'll be able to say it to the camera.
In 1946, an Australian geologist, Reg Sprigg, working here in the Ediacara Hills of South Australia...
David's trademark delivery has endeared him to millions and the producers of Zoo Quest
saw that talent grow. He was given the job of presenter on a permanent basis.
I explained to the men as best I could that I had come to their
valley to try and get some of the birds of paradise alive.
But they explained to me in gestures that they shot the birds with bows and arrows.
Making a documentary isn't all about talking to camera.
David understands better than anyone else that some sequences are a necessary chore.
We're going to do some tracking shots,
vehicle to vehicle tracking shots.
We're going to have Pete in the back of this vehicle, leading vehicle,
shooting backwards and we've got David and Jim in this vehicle...
It's one of the rewards that you get, the real joys of driving up there and then they say,
would you drive back, and then they say, we think we'd like it a little faster
and then they say, we were wrong.
It was better a little bit slower, so would you go back again? So it's actually not the pits of filming,
the pits of filming is when you have to walk through the forest looking interested.
And not only interested, but eagle-eyed.
You say, "Where will this experienced traveller
"suddenly spot the... My goodness, there it is!"
That's hard doing.
There are variations - you can give them the John Wayne, which
is tight-buttocked like that - that is one of my specialities!
I'm not allowed to do it much these days. I have to be a bit more slouched and relaxed, you know.
But of course intelligent, which is the tricky bit.
That was lovely.
I loved it, when he asked us to do it again slightly faster, what a thrill!
We only had your enjoyment in mind!
David is filming with a team of palaeontologists in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia,
unearthing fossils that describe how early animals evolved.
How and why did animals first begin to move?
There is a great thrill
of being alongside these people who know what they're doing
and know what they're looking for and know how to look for it.
And of course, you naively think it would be wonderful
to turn over a rock and say, "Ah! It's a new species!"
Well, looking for fossils is not like that, except that it actually happened.
That's just contributed about...
Have a look! Have a look!
And there it was, and Jim took a brush and brushed it away.
And bless me, he said, I don't know, I don't know.
Look at that. That is what I would just...
It's the weirdest one I've ever seen.
I've never seen one with that...
It's the relief...
It has to be a footprint.
And we're still waiting as to hear whether in fact that was the discovery moment of a new species.
I think it probably was.
The mud on the sea floor can tell us a great deal
about these animals and not just what they look like, but how they behaved.
One appears on the telly and everybody thinks you're an expert,
but I had, last Christmas, some new neighbours came over
and I'd ever met them before but the lady said,
Oh just the person I want to meet because little Julian is so excited about natural history, thrilled,
"He'll be thrilled to meet you and he's got some questions for you," and I thought oh, dear, oh, dear.
Come along, Julian, ask Sir David the questions. Julian said, "How long is the komodo dragon?"
Big relief. I said, "Well, as a matter of fact,
"Julian, I can tell you the answer to that. I said, I've been to Komodo three times.
"And I've actually measured them and they can grow to 12 feet long."
And he said, "Wrong!"
He'd been reading too much Guinness Book of Records.
This is a side-necked turtle.
Over six series of Zoo Quest, komodo dragons were just one of the
many species David encountered, collecting animals for London Zoo.
They couldn't take them all so David stepped in -
his home became a menagerie with his wife and children helping with the upkeep of the animals.
We had a pair of lemurs at home and some lovely birds called blue-crowned hanging parakeets,
which we brought back from Borneo, and chameleons. We had a breeding colony of bush babies.
They had an unfortunate habit of peeing on their hands
and then rubbing their hands together and patting everything around to make them smell good.
Friends coming to dinner would arrive and open the door and you
could see them dilate their nostrils and think,
That's not mulligatawny soup, what are we going to have for dinner tonight?
I regret to say it was bush baby urine so, after a bit, my dear wife thought this
was not compatible with domestic hospitality and one thing and the other so we got rid of them.
David, of course, is famous for his love of animals.
To help tell the story of the first life on earth,
he's in a rainforest in north-west Australia filming living fossils,
animals with evolutionary links to the past.
David, we're going to be on close-ups on the animal,
but it might help us if you deliver your line anyway.
I think for me the highlight was in the rainforest when David was
there with this little velvet worm on his hand and his connection with animals just really came through,
you could see he adored this little creature, this weird worm crawling on his arm.
Action, David.
And this is what I was looking for.
This extraordinary and enchanting little creature, sometimes called a velvet worm...
He just, you know, he gave it personality and he was in awe of this thing.
Just to see that was such an enlightening thing, sitting in the middle of a rainforest
with fireflies popping off all around you,
you have to pinch yourself because it had a dream-like quality to it.
It has one further attribute which Ayesha could not have had.
It has tiny little holes all along its flanks which enable it
to breathe air,
so this is one of the first creatures
that moved on to land
540 million years ago.
Nice one. Yes.
Yes, it's the ring tailed gecko. What's your favourite gecko?
The tokay gecko.
It goes to-kay, to-kay.
And in Indonesia most people are terrified of it and they said one bite, certain death.
And I caught one once and I said, Look, they're absolutely harmless, you see, and I pointed my finger,
Nothing to be afraid of, and the gecko went like this,
and I said, nothing to be frightened of, it's not poisonous at all.
But I couldn't get it off.
I put it on to a tap, I pulled it, it just hung on and hung on and it was on for...
After about five minutes, you get quite bored with it, and it was quite upsetting, it was a very long time.
I didn't come clever dick again for quite some time.
Ten minutes, maybe!
Action. Cue David.
As the oxygen levels rose, so eventually they reached
a level when it was possible for air-breathing animals to live.
Crikey.
As they say in Australia, got the bastard!
They only come in ones, do they? Limited edition. Two wafers.
I think one of the great things
about working with David
is that he fits in with the team around him
and is interested in everybody in the team.
Being part of a team is one of the pleasures.
It takes some time to become a team, you can't just slot
in like that because it depends upon knowing the personalities
of the people you're involved with.
I suppose in one way if you going on long journeys together with people, you ought to be,
to do a job, you ought to be sufficiently professional to be able to get on with anybody.
And if you find that the way they comb their hair or
something is irritating, then you learn to suppress that irritation.
But one of the ways, once you begin to sort that out,
you do begin to develop jokes between you.
To illustrate the evolution of backboned animals,
David is on his way to a zoo to film a white rhino.
He'll be delivering his lines just inches from the two tonne animal,
so even David must be briefed on safety.
HORN BLARES
Well, you can hand feed him if you are happy to do that,
otherwise you can just pop that leaves in over the log.
There's no danger of him giving me a nip with his front teeth?
He won't be able to nip you. He won't do that.
Obviously, as you know, the lips are very muscly.
Accustomed as I am to rhinoceros feeding,
the problem is a trivial one, really.
Just you might lose in your hand at the wrist, that's all, you know? Nothing to worry about, really!
The lips are very muscular,
so you might lose a finger or two,
but nothing really to worry about, you know, I'm told!
I was driving through Kenya once.
The chap I was with was a very knowledgeable biologist and an expert on elephants.
Suddenly he said, "Did you hear that pitter-patter?"
And I said, "No, what?" He said, "Well, we were charged by a rhino."
I said, "We were?" "Yes", he said, "but it was a dummy charge."
There was another pitter-patter, but this time it didn't fade away.
This time, wallop, hit the back end of the Land Rover
and actually lifted it up and shook it.
And I remember seeing his hands on the wheel
showing white at the knuckles as the thing came a second time.
Crash! Bang! And it shook.
And then he backed off, and I said, "Hell of a dummy charge that, Roy."
He said, "Don't joke!" He came in the third time, wrecked the back wheel,
ripped up the tyre
and by the time he'd finished, the car was undrivable.
David can't go anywhere without being recognised by someone. His popularity spans the generations.
Please keep it up. It's the only stuff on telly worth watching!
And this level of fame is something he's had to get used to.
By the mid-Sixties, David Attenborough had become a household name.
Mr David Attenborough, here. Bless his heart.
Then, still in his thirties, an unexpected opportunity came his way.
The BBC needed young blood to run their brand-new channel, BBC Two.
I remember deliberately saying to myself, "Now, you've got to make up
"your mind, Attenborough, are you a television man or are you some kind of scientist?"
I decided at that time that I was really at heart a television man.
Therefore, if I was a television man,
there could not be a more interesting job in television than that one that was being offered to me.
We shall continue to look for the new stars, the experimental stars.
As Controller of BBC Two, David introduced a new wave of programming
that would stand the test of time.
He also pioneered a whole new era of television as the BBC raced
to make Britain the first nation in Europe to broadcast in colour.
Then, of course, we discovered that in fact Germany
was preparing to going into colour and this,
you must remember, this was in the Sixties
and so there was still a sort of feeling about Germany, you know?
We'd just won the war, after all, and I was thinking,
"Come on, the BBC should be the first in colour in Europe."
And it suddenly dawned on me we could use colour cameras in Wimbledon
and with just four or five colour cameras, which is all I think we had,
we could get hours and hours and hours of colour television.
We would launch as soon as we could do at least
50% of the programmes in colour and Wimbledon allowed us to do that.
And what is more, it allowed us to get on the air before Germany did!
David's challenge was to promote the virtues of colour TV.
He came up with a new concept,
a series of big budget programmes designed to showcase colour in all its glory.
The first of this new genre of landmark programmes,
known then as Sledgehammers, was an arts programme called Civilisation.
It was going to be the finest things that Western Europeans had produced
artistically from the beginning of the 5th, 6th century onwards,
which simply had a phenomenal success.
BBC Two was riding high,
so we commissioned Ascent Of Man there and then.
Ascent Of Man was the model for science television.
If I'm to take the ascent of man back to its beginnings...
It set a trend for the epic programming for which David is now synonymous.
And epic programmes need epic shots.
So somebody needs to be up on the hill who can give David the cue.
'Standing by for a take. Yes, Kirsty.'
For here you can see fossils
of the very first animals that evolved on this planet.
'That was good for us.'
This location is a key place in the story of the first life.
The rocks here are covered in 600-million-year old fossils from the same family
as the one found in Leicestershire where David grew up.
OK, David, it you could gesture towards this one.
We're going to do a pull focus to this one. That was fantastic.
You know, I've grown up to believe that that little fossil in the Charnwood Forest that long,
just one of them, was one of the most precious fossils in the world, and they are walking over them!
Dozens of them! Well, hundreds of them, literally hundreds of them.
It's a good place for David to indulge his passion for photography.
Aren't we right in thinking that the photograph on the front of Life On Earth was one of yours?
You are absolutely correct, absolutely correct.
I heard this terrible noise in my ear as I lay on a camp bed...
Not on a camp bed, I lay on the ground in Panama, like somebody
hitting an anvil with a mallet and I turned round and there was this... I went click
and it was a frog
and it was the front cover of Life On Earth. Look at that.
You see how this boy's got talent in his fingers, he just doesn't know about!
THE CREW LAUGH
What on Earth's that?
You panicked and pressed the button by accident!
HE LAUGHS
Filming moves across Canada to the Rocky Mountains.
The next location is a remote fossil quarry some 2,000 metres above sea level, and getting there isn't easy.
David and the crew will need to fly part of the way
and then hike for half an hour up a steep icy path.
I'm going to give you a quick safety briefing here on the helicopter.
This one is done up, it doesn't hang out like that. You put your headset on.
You don't have to press any buttons to talk, it's just voice-activated.
I just wish I could remember any of these instructions.
I mean, it's like with the air hostesses on jets, I can't remember a thing!
Well, if you look above you, there are some clouds in the sky.
Those are getting thicker, which means you can't fly,
so we've got to get up there and see if we can land,
find the spot for the piece and then get out before it all closes over.
The original and best. Thank you, sir, I do appreciate it.
Thank you. Anybody who bought one of my books deserves to have it signed.
You can't say that, I'm still here!
Every day is a highlight for me.
Of course it is, Martin, thank you very much. This one is the best of far, definitely.
What was wrong with yesterday?
Well, we weren't filming, David. Oh, yeah, you're quite right.
David may be an octogenarian, but his determination is just as it ever was.
We have planned this in so many ways.
We've discussed having helicopters airlifting him up in a sort of sling underneath.
We've had the possibility of a sedan chair to come up here, but actually David's perfectly fine
and perfectly willing, so all our anxieties are evaporating away, really.
I may be some time.
The struggle will be worth it.
Near the summit, David will find one of the richest fossil locations
in the world, the Burgess Shales.
Here, they're found all over the place.
They're called trilobites. That's the head, there's the middle bit.
'David is so interested in things. He's fascinated by everybody.'
If there's a table of people, he'll say, "Who is that and what do they do?"
He's fascinated by that. David reads endlessly.
I mean, on the plane he read two books coming out from England.
He absorbs. His study is full of books that he's reading.
He's up to date with science. He's reading the latest science papers.
This is a man who, I think, will go on and on because I think he's so fascinated by the world,
as long as he can walk,
as long as he can move around, he'll be interacting with it.
Filming at the top of a mountain is not without hazards, as the weather closes in.
Unfortunately, the cloud's come down.
We have got a helicopter here.
The pilot also wants to go home.
We wouldn't mind not spending a night on the mountain, so I guess we won't
be able to stay here for too long, but at the moment the mist is down.
We're going to have to get into the chopper, sit there ready to go and if it lifts and if you can see the lake
at the bottom then, with any luck,
we might put our heads on a pillow tonight in the warmth. Here's hoping!
There's plenty to keep David busy while he waits for the weather to clear. There are fossils everywhere.
OK, fellas, he says it's time we left.
There you go. Thanks a lot.
No problem, eh? Really great.
How was it, David? Terrible!
Do you mind being taken up to these far flung, inhospitable places?
No, that's why I'm here!
I don't mind! It's what I came for!
Back in the Seventies, David's passion for exploring
far flung places was the catalyst for his resignation from management at the BBC.
The success of his commissions only served to remind
the desk-bound Attenborough of the life he was missing.
I was fretting a bit and concluding that the rest of my life was not to be spent behind a desk.
I couldn't bear it.
And so I managed to resign after eight years of administration.
And the first thing I did on having resigned was the head of the Natural History Unit came to see me and said,
"Look, don't you think it would be a great idea if
"we did a 12-part series about the natural world and would you do it?"
"Oh," I said, "What a good idea!"
There are some four million
different kinds of animals and plants in the world,
four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.
This is the story of how a few of them came to be as they are.
Life on Earth was the series that would define David as the world's greatest natural history presenter.
It gave him the opportunity to go to the places he'd always dreamed of
and to see the animals he'd always wanted to see.
But much more than that,
it revolutionised the viewers' perspective of the small world in which they lived.
It was only in the mid-Seventies that you had really such a comprehensive airline service around the world,
such a reliable airline service around the world, that you could
go pretty well anywhere, which meant that in the programmes we
could hop from the Barrier Reef to the Sahara just like that,
if you wanted to do so, in a shot.
And then, about 20 or 30 years ago, people realised that they'd been
looking in the wrong rocks and in the wrong way. These are the right rocks.
It had a sort of liberating effect that somehow,
and this was just after the moon shots of course, that somehow
for the first time we were getting a vision of the natural world, of the globe, of the Earth,
with the zoosphere, with the animals and plants that clothed it all.
For the first time you were getting a comprehensive view of that
and people felt that quite clearly.
So it seems really very unfair
that man should have chosen the gorilla
to symbolise all that is aggressive and violent
when that's the one thing that the gorilla is not, and that we are.
The reason we had gone to gorillas was in order to illustrate a point
I was making about the evolutionary significance of climbing primates, of climbing mammals,
who had to grasp branches.
And to grasp a branch you need to be able to
put your thumb and your forefinger together like that.
So on the day in question, I crawled off and prepared to go on about the thumb and the forefinger.
And as I was about to say that I suddenly felt a weight
on my feet and there was a baby gorilla undoing my shoelaces!
Well, it didn't seem to be the right moment to be talking about the thumb and forefinger
and while I was concluding on that, a hand came down on my head and there was the adult female!
And she opened my mouth, put her hand, a huge great hand
and stuck a finger in my mouth
and I couldn't talk about the thumb and forefinger even then!
By this time I was in a sort of delirium, really.
I mean, it just seemed paradisal.
I mean, absolutely extraordinary. Took my breath away.
It did cause a huge sensation that here is a presenter
looking at the camera, when suddenly a gorilla comes out of the bush and sits on him!
I mean, it's quite odd!
Back in the UK, David is in the back room of Edinburgh's National Museum
filming a fossil of a huge animal that lived 420 million years ago.
A deadly sea scorpion, one of the largest predators of its time.
Gosh!
Well, this is a magnificent example
of just how big an animal can grow if it has an external skeleton.
Yeah, my friend Richard Fortey, he's got a few stories about what goes on in the back rooms of museums!
Yeah, I mean, they are strange, arcane places.
I've seen a very old film projector there,
a Kalee film projector, the like of which must have shown Buster Keaton and things like that I would think.
35mm. I started filming on 35mm back in the Fifties,
so I don't feel as astounded at that,
but I now find that people coming into our business are astonished to see 16mm film.
"Amazing, film! Good Lord!"
I mean, you can actually look at it!
And they're used to videotape.
So the world changes.
Yielding place to new.
And God fulfils himself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
We're in Crail in Fife and when I came here on the recce it was
a beautiful sunny day, fantastically picturesque.
Mother Nature is a difficult beast to tame
and I can't do anything about how she's going to be.
She's obviously in a bad mood today.
How do you feel, David? >
I just regret I haven't brought my chest wig!
It's just the sort of weather you need one.
Are you sure you need your blazer?
It makes you look a little uncomfortable.
What? Are you sure you want your blazer on? My blazer! It's not a blazer.
OK, your jacket from M&S! M&S!
M&S!
This is rather good, isn't it? That's a good hat. I mean, now, be honest.
No, that's a good hat.
The scarf's very classy. You can wear the glasses.
They're meant for these conditions, aren't they? They're titanium.
They are titanium. Well, the problem is they're better on than off.
Keep them on until we do the piece, otherwise you might walk in the water or something!
They haven't got screen wipers, have they?
Do you like coming to Scotland, apart from the weather?
I served in the Navy here, hardened up,
toughened up by life in the Forces up on the Firth of Forth.
It was like this all the time!
CREW LAUGH Yeah?
Action!
And on the expanses of sand that stretch between those huge trees,
sand that's now become this sandstone rock, there are tracks.
Are you RSPB?
No, we are dissertation. We're from St Andrew's University, so...
What are you looking for, birds?
The redshanks. Redshanks. How nice.
Are their numbers doing well?
Yeah, they're fine.
Doing well. Yeah.
Well, you're shanks get pretty red in this weather, I'll tell you!
It was desperately cold, I must say, and blowing a gale, but kind friends lent me gear.
Thank you very much, David.
No, thank you. Not at all.
Was it your underwear? No, it wasn't my underwear.
It was my outerwear.
Your outerwear. Oh, well, that's not quite so intimate, so I'm not going to thank you quite so intimately.
No shared bodily warmth!
David has always been at the forefront of new filming technologies.
His programmes have pioneered miniature cameras, infrared,
super slow-motion, time-lapse and aerial photography.
The arrival of colour brought a huge advance as far as making natural history programmes were concerned.
You could now show the splendour of bird displays.
You could talk about how insects would see different colours in different plants
and you could see what you were talking about.
The next big change, I suppose, was the arrival of hypersensitive cameras and infrared cameras.
We maintained a fiction that really lions were idle creatures
that spent most of the time lying around in the sunshine and just occasionally hunted.
The truth of course is quite different and that was lions are lying around
during the day because they hunted during the night.
But with hypersensitive cameras we were able to show that for the first time.
Then sensitive cameras enabled you to put the film through the camera at a much greater speed which meant that,
in effect, you could slow things down,
so that changed, so you could show how animals ran, for example.
On top of that, the next change came the other way round, in that by use of computers and so on,
we could slow down the speed at which the frames passed through the camera and at the same time move the camera
and get pictures of, for example, a speeded up activity when you showed it of plants developing.
That produced a great change.
And then suddenly, computer-generated imaging came along
and to an improved degree, instead of the rather crude and clumsy things that had been seen in the past.
Making First Life, David is at the cutting edge once again
as palaeontology and technology join forces
to bring the earliest animals on Earth back to life for the first time in half a billion years.
OK, David, here's the head of the unit.
Seeing these animals living and breathing
is something David has dreamt of since he was a boy.
Oh, that's terrific!
My old friend, anomalocaris!
Like you've never seen it before.
Hi! Oh, it's terrific!
The really thrilling thing for me
is that by using a computer graphic and imaging,
you can take these tiny little marks and with total justification,
scientific backing, you can make that animal really come to life, come out of the rock and move.
That's knock out stuff, you know?
I mean, that is knock out, isn't it?
Look at that! How could you not believe in that?
Just thrilling, actually.
Just thrilling.
I've been given this model and I put some bones inside of it.
There weren't any bones!
It's just the... But for your point you've got to have bones.
Yeah, it's the only way the computer can understand what to move where.
I was going to say, next time you go for a lobster supper...!
Now I know perfectly well
that you can see a shot of,
say, a shrimp and a coral reef and another one rather different shrimp
comes round the corner and you are very hard put to know which is the real one.
Once you've finished this stage you can make it do anything. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
You can make it go right, left and upside down. Exactly, yeah, yeah.
And just direct it. Yeah.
It sounds like a television presenter, really!
It's pretty exciting looking at a piece of rock, turning it over and seeing the image of an animal
there, but to see that come to life in this vivid, vivid way
is more than you can possibly hope for, really.
It actually helps the scientist, too, because when you see the thing
you suddenly realise that certain things are possible.
You realise that it couldn't possibly have done that, it must have done the other.
David is on his way to the Great Barrier Reef.
He's going to a remote island 50 miles off the coast of Australia
where he'll be filming the most primitive animals there are.
How nice.
The comfiest seat in the house! If you hold it to the left it'll give you up to 30 degrees.
And they tell me you're going out to do a documentary on sponges.
On sponges. Well, we're not doing an entire documentary on sponges.
That could be a bit of a... You know? Because sponges don't do a lot!
Sponges are just clumps of simple animal cells that have stuck together.
It's at this point that the basic patterns of animal form are established.
Animals developed legs
and arms and television shows! CREW LAUGH
There's another very important sequence to film on the Great Barrier Reef.
Three miles from Heron Island there's a vast sandbar.
It's to be used for the opening scene in First Life.
But to get the shot,
David must be left on the sandbar alone in 40 degree heat with no shade.
The team must work fast.
Within hours the tide will come in flooding the sandbar
and stranding David.
It's no mean feat for a man in his eighties.
Am I prepared? I've got all kinds of electronic gear up by backside!
I'm on a fantastic journey to look for the origins of life.
David seems to have this unbelievable amount of energy.
I don't think I'll have anything like the energy that he has when I'm 83.
In a way, one of the things that drives David on on these things,
long after most people would have retired,
is not just the quest for more things, which, of course, will always drive someone who's
interested in the natural world, but also he actually enjoys getting back
with a team of people like the old times on some of his great series, and having that fun and drinking
the occasional bottle of red wine and being in these amazing places.
I don't think David is ever...
I mean, I can't imagine him ever retiring.
I have to confess, I'm fascinated by armadillos.
As far as I'm concerned, they are some of the nicest and most curious animals in the world.
I'm standing on the brink of one of the most densely populated parts of the sea.
I am on the edge of a coral reef at low tide.
And top of the menu right now is salmon!
This programme means a lot to me, actually.
And, rather surprisingly, I didn't realise how much it meant to me
until I started doing it,
because I have spent over the last 25, 30 years
making a series of programmes about different groups of animals
as they have emerged through evolution
and I've never made anything about the very beginning of life.
Doing this programme not only makes a lovely programme to make that whole series correct
and complete, but, happily, takes me to the places to see where they are.
And it's actually very moving, really, you know, to see suddenly a magnificent sheet of fossils,
innumerable, complex fossils
which were alive right at the very beginning of life on this planet 500 million years ago.
So this series, to a degree, which are really didn't fully appreciate
until I started working on it, really completes the set.
Some creatures managed to crawl up onto the land.
But all of us alive today owe our very existence to them.
Well, in a curious way, in the end,
the end of my last sort of making series like this, is my beginning.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk