If you want to get an idea of how much the making of natural history documentaries has progressed since the 1950s, take a look on the BBC website at a couple of clips from Zoo Quest, the first series on which David Attenborough worked as a presenter.
One, especially, stands out. In it, a young Attenborough (it was 1956, so he would have been 30) is tasked with catching a 3.5m Burmese python, because – bizarre as it may seem today – the object of Zoo Quest was to take animals alive and bring them back to Britain. Well, the clue is in the name.
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“It looked enormous,” Attenborough tells the viewer, “and from its size and markings, I was quite sure it was a python and therefore non-poisonous, which was something of a relief.”
With no obvious reluctance (he must have been positive it was a python), he climbs a short distance up the tree where it can be seen and hacks down a branch. Then, rather inexpertly, he throws a sack over the python’s head before grabbing it and handing the snake to a local man who is clearly more confident and expert at this business. Now try to imagine Planet Earth II filming something similar.
As Attenborough describes it in his autobiography, Life on Air, Zoo Quest came about largely thanks to some rather Machiavellian scheming between himself and London Zoo’s curator of reptiles, Jack Lester. They had just finished making a studio-based programme about animal behaviour and were looking for another project when they hit on the idea of an animal-collecting expedition. In those days, zoos did that sort of thing.
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They decided that Jack would tell his bosses that the BBC was interested in covering an expedition, while Attenborough would tell his that he had discovered such a trip was going ahead and that he “might get permission to accompany it”.
Whatever the slight deception, the bottom line was that both parties said yes, and Attenborough, Jack Lester and a young cameraman called Charles Lagus found themselves leaving for Sierra Leone in September 1954.
Attenborough’s first experience of programme-making in the field seems to have gone surprisingly well, even though attempts to film in rainforests and get footage of bats in caves both failed dismally. But they did capture chameleons, spitting cobras and black mambas, and even managed to find the semi-mythical white-necked rockfowl (Picathartes gymnocephalus), an extraordinary crow-sized bird coloured in stark black, white and yellow blocks and possessing a prominent bald patch at the back of its head.
Footage shows Picathartes hopping onto its nest and that’s about it, but the story clearly struck a chord with the public. The six-part series built up the tension – in a trope still followed in natural-history films today – by toying with viewers as to whether this rare creature would be seen at all. Driving through central London one day, Attenborough was accosted by a bus driver. “Hello Dave,” he said. “Well are we, or are we not, going to find Pica-bloody-fartes?”
After that, zoo quest became a regular in the BBC schedules, and Attenborough was able to organise further expeditions to Guyana in South America and Indonesia – most notably to the island of Komodo to film its famous dragons. Further trips to New Guinea, Paraguay, Madagascar and Australia followed before, in 1965, he became controller of BBC Two and gave up full-time film-making.
Perhaps realising that, long term, his career would not be in administration, Attenborough cleverly negotiated an agreement that, every 18 months or so, he would be allowed to retrieve the safari shorts from the wardrobe and go off with a film crew in search of something wild to bring to the attention of the British public.
