Ask Sir David Attenborough transcript
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| This event took place Sunday 9th February 2003 |
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Sir David Attenborough
One of the most famous faces on British television joined us to talk about his latest BBC ONE series The Life of Mammals, his future projects, and some of his most memorable moments from his Life on Air.
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iPresenter_Spencer: Hello, and welcome to today’s Live Chat with Sir David
Attenborough. I'm Spencer Kelly, and our guest today is one of the most distinguished
broadcasters on the planet. His Life on Air began 50 years ago, and his latest amazing
series The Life of Mammals has literally just finished on BBC ONE. Please welcome Sir David
Attenborough.
Question_from Steve, Stockton: What's your all-time favourite animal?
Sir_David_Attenborough: Well to be honest, Steve, I don't really have one. I suppose
I would say it's the last one I was filming in any detail. But if I had to pick one, it's a
very arbitrary choice. I'd say the birds of paradise. There are 42 different species of
them. They live in very remote places, and they're extraordinarily beautiful. Quite a lot
of them are not known; certainly their courtship dances are not known. Their courtship
dances are simply mind-blowing. You cannot believe the variety of capers that they get up
to! One of them uses a trampoline, he does a trampoline dance! Another one has long quills
out of the back of his tail; he turns round and flicks the female across the face! Another
one is bald, many hang upside down, and they dance and make noises like electronic going
wrong. They're just unbelievable things and every time you see them you see something new,
so that's great. Next time you ask it will be different... sewer rats next!
Question_from Margie: As you've travelled lots, where would you ultimately like to
live?
Sir_David_Attenborough: Here, in London, if that's allowed! Jungles are great, but
they're lonely, and I do like people as well as animals. For me, the nicest places are where
you can combine the natural world and the human world. One of the loveliest places to do
that, actually, is in the Mediterranean. If I wasn't living in London, which I do, I'd like
to live somewhere on the Mediterranean, where the climate's just marginally better
than here, and lovely warm sunshine, and all that wine... That'll do me!
Question_from Jake, Stockton: What did it feel like to work with the meercats - did
they bite you?
Sir_David_Attenborough: No, they didn't bite. Well, you have to be careful with any
of these things, I mean, most things can bite. But these particular meercats have been
studied for nearly 30 years. Human beings have been sitting there, beside their holes,
watching them for nearly 30 years, so they're very accustomed to seeing human beings. So if
you get up before they get up, in the early dawn, and you're sitting there, they come out
ready for breakfast, looking around. The next thing they have to do is to look around and
see if there's a snake, or some other danger around. The best way to find that out is to get
as high as you can, and if you've got a chap sitting there, they will climb up and sit on
your shoulder. Because they're totally comfortable. Although these meercats are fully
wild, they're accustomed to human beings.
Question_from farnon: Are you going to continue the series on into the insect
world?
Sir_David_Attenborough: Yes, very much so. But I've hardly finished this lot! In a
couple of weeks' time I go to Australia, for example, where the Mammals series is about to
start. Making big series like these has quite a long backwash, but I'm already doing the
research and writing the scripts for a new series, which for the moment I've called Life in
the Undergrowth. It's not only about insects, it's about millipedes, scorpions, spiders and
really oddball things that nobody's ever heard of. Like peripatus, and false scorpions,
which are fabuloso creatures, I mean really amazing. We have got the technology now to film
them in greater detail and better quality than we've ever had. It should be mind-blowing.
What we do is keep an eye on the way the technology is going, and manage to feed off it. I
have to say, although it may be regrettable, that most of the technology we see comes from
other fields of human endeavour. The optical probes which we use come from surgery, they put
them down into people's stomachs. The low light cameras which were used to a very great
deal in the Mammals series were the side effects of military technology. So was the thermal
camera which we used to film bats in a cave. They would detect a cigarette at about a
hundred yards, I think. And they are used by the military to see whether there are people
hanging around.
Question_from Shamim: The persistence hunting footage was superb today - why not do
an anthropological study of the interaction of man and nature for your next series?
Sir_David_Attenborough: In fact, I have in the past done quite a lot of
anthropological filming, but I agree it was a long time ago, maybe 25 years ago. But I very
much want to do this new invertebrate series with insects. Because then the survey of the
natural world that we've been doing for the past 20 years, which started with a series
called Life On Earth, will as it were start to join up. I mean, it is the big gap in
natural history filming, which has been really neglected because it's technically very
difficult. But now we can do it, and I want to do it.
Question_from Steveievee: Are you in any danger when you are so close to the
orang-utans, and do you have any "safety measures"?
Sir_David_Attenborough: Well, the BBC has a safety officer, you see, so I have to
look you straight in the eye and say "there's no danger of any kind, at any moment"! I have
to say that every now and then I'm frightened, but that's because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool
coward! I think, to be absolutely truthful, the time I have been most frightened in the
past is under water. I reckon that human beings weren't made to be down there, and I'm not
really a very good scuba diver. I can dive, but if things go wrong, and you run out of
air... I find that very very alarming. I've met sharks, but not huge man-eaters, and they
didn't take much notice of me. But it's not that so much, it's just the knowledge that
you're down there, and you're deep, and if something goes wrong it's going to be a long time
before you can get back up.
Question_from mike: How do you think we should control the current world population
in order to preserve our environment?
Sir_David_Attenborough: Only by convincing people that it's not necessary, or indeed
a good idea, to have an unlimited number of children. You can't do it by rule, you can't do
it by law, you can't tell people "thou shalt not have more than 2.6 children", or whatever
it is. Which of course has been tried, and I'm not suggesting that whatsoever. But what I
am suggesting is that the human race should be aware of the consequentials of increasing
populations. And elect, as indeed people in this country have already done, to maintain a
population at about the same level as we have now. And the happy thing is, of course, that
the better off that population becomes, the more likely they are to take that line and that
attitude.
Question_from hickers: What would be the most comical event you could name throughout
the series?
Sir_David_Attenborough: Well, I don't know, quite a lot of funny things happen every
now and again. I remember very well in a cave in Borneo, there was a huge dune of bat
droppings, about 70 or 80 ft high, a great tip of them. And the director, (good blokes,
directors, as we all know), said "get up there with the cameraman, and when you get to the
top, say something interesting." So I climb up this pile of dung, get on the top, and by
that time I was very close to the roof of this huge cave. And so you've got hundreds of
thousands of these bats, and as the cameraman turned on his lights, all these bats took off
and started flying round my head in a huge whirlpool, a maelstrom. The noise was
extraordinary from the rustling of their wings. The cameraman said "Say something!", so I
said "Now you would think that if you were here with all these bats that they would get
stuck in your hair, which is ridiculous because they have this wonderful sonar system of
sound navigation." And the cameraman said "Great, cut!", and a bat went Prroing!, straight
into my face!
Question_from Sophie: You’ve been to most places on the planet, would you like to go
into space?
Sir_David_Attenborough: If I did, not for long, please! Out there.. well, you
aren't out there are you? You're just looking at what's out there, because you have to be
in your own environment with the right air pressure and the right oxygen and all the rest of
it, so you're living in this man-made world. And what gives me the greatest of pleasure in
life is looking at these other things that you share the world with... orchids and
hummingbirds and coral fish. And there's nothing like that in space. So, I'm happy to live
down here, myself!
iPresenter_Spencer: And now here's a clip of the closest David has got to being in
space.
Sir_David_Attenborough: That was absolutely terrific. It was shot in something that
they happily call "the Vomit Comet", which they use for training astronauts. And what it
does is it flies up in parabola, very carefully plotted. And you know how it is on a funfair
switchback thing, when you get to the top you feel as though your stomach is coming right
out of you. That is a similar effect, but this is done at much greater speed, so that the
aircraft is diving and you're being left up in space. And because it's done so accurately,
the pilot can tell you, to within a half a second or less, when you're going to do it. So
we talk to the pilots, and we arrange for a signal, and I knew how long the bits that I
wanted to say were. And if I said it at the right time, on the cue from him, suddenly this
effect would take place and I would rise in the air on the right word. So the most
extraordinary thing would happen, and I would rise. We got it in about two or three trips.
But it went on forever, actually, because once they get up there and start doing this, they
were doing it in our case to conduct some experiments about seasick pills. One of the things
about seasick pills, you're not just doing it once, but again and again and again. And they
did it 36 times! The first time you think, am I going to be sick, but you're not. The
second time you think, well, this is rather interesting! The third time you think, hey I'm
beginning to enjoy this! The fourth time they started filming, the fifth time they got it
right, and by the time you get to 23 or 24, you go "bleaurggggh!"
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"There's a cameraman, a soundman and a scientist, and of course you have a great time, sitting around a camp fire. Sometimes you even have a little sip of something....!"
- Sir David on making The Life of Mammals >>
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