In January 1978, high up in Rwanda’s Virunga Mountains, a small filming crew had just captured an unprecedented interaction between young mountain gorillas and a bemused David Attenborough.
It would later become one of the most memorable sequences in TV history – though they didn’t know that yet. But soon after, it seemed that they were about to lose it all.
“The first sign of trouble is a soldier who tries to flag us down. And when the driver ignores him and drives past, he loads his rifle and shoots in the air,” David Attenborough later wrote in his diary.
More bullets whizz past and a roadblock is set up. “We can’t escape.”
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The filming crew in question were working on Life on Earth: the most ambitious natural history series that had ever been attempted, led by a recently freelance Attenborough after stepping away from his managerial job at the BBC.
The crew had already spent the best part of two years travelling around the world in a journey of Odyssean proportions. They would eventually spend three years on the road, travelling to 40 countries and filming over 600 species.
It was a huge gamble for both the BBC and David Attenborough – after all, colour TV had only just started to enter the UK’s living rooms. Would a mainstream, primetime audience be interested in a 13-hour series that charted the evolution of life as we know it?
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The short answer is yes. Watched by over 500 million people, Life on Earth launched Attenborough’s career as one of the most successful and influential wildlife broadcasters of our time. Pubs were famously quiet when it aired.
Now a BBC documentary, Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure, takes us behind-the-scenes, featuring exclusive interviews with the original crew, as well as reflections from David Attenborough – who kept meticulous diaries throughout filming the original series.
“That’s something I really found extraordinary, because we did these interviews with him and I was asking him questions to recall events and filming locations from 50 years ago – and he was as articulate and an amazing storyteller as ever,” says Victoria Bobin, the documentary’s director.
“You know what they were filming, who else was there and how the filming went. It was a real privilege to hear him talk about making Life on Earth in that way.”
Stepping away from the desk
Commissioned as part of celebrations to mark David Attenborough’s centenary, the hour-long documentary also focuses on the broadcaster’s successful career as a BBC executive.
After being on the “managerial ladder” (as he describes it) since the early 1950s, Attenborough was keen to present another global series, akin to his 1954 Zoo Quest.
While he yearned to do this, “the only other job higher was the director-general [of the BBC]”, he recalls in the documentary.
“I wouldn’t have been any good as a director-general – the director-general is a hugely demanding job with skills that are not mine. I don’t have political skills… I may know about birds of paradise, but I certainly don’t know about prime ministers.”
Eventually, he quit the BBC and pitched the idea of Life on Earth. “That was the turning point of my life, really,” he says.
In a world where colour TV and global air travel was only just taking off, the production team faced plenty of challenges. It often took months of letter-writing before they could confirm meetings with scientists on the ground, and no-one would know whether any footage would be successful until the film stock was sent back to the BBC’s Natural History Unit in Bristol.
“If you film now, everything is online. Talking to the production management team, Pamela [Jackson] and Jane [Wales], made me realise what an extraordinary achievement it was. The logistics were astounding,” explains Bobin.
As well as the incident in Rwanda that almost resulted in their footage being seized, the team had their passports confiscated in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Attenborough’s diplomacy skills were also put to the test in the Comoro Islands when their filming permissions were revoked.
An action man
“In Life on Earth, David’s centre stage, steering the whole program. He’s all over the world and close to the animals. He’s a real action man,” reflects Mike Davis, the documentary’s executive producer.
“And I think it’s lovely, because a lot of people will never have seen that before.”
The mountain gorilla scene is now one of the most famous scenes in wildlife TV – and TV history itself. What other moments still stand out from Life on Earth, a series made 50 years ago?
“There’s a sequence when he’s on an island in Japan and interacting with Japanese macaques,” answers Bobin.
“They’re learning to wash potatoes to make them more edible, essentially. But David explains it with that lovely mix that he’s known for: it’s brilliantly informative but also brilliantly engaging.”
Davis recalls the closing scene of the first episode, where Attenborough dives on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
“There’s famous footage of him there for Zoo Quest in the 1950s in black and white, and it’s an amazing scene,” he explains. (Attenborough has since recalled that he was so taken aback by the experience, that he briefly forgot to breathe.)
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“But the scene in Life on Earth, shown this time in colour, is incredible. And David is wearing a red scuba suit and looks like James Bond.”
“Then he stands by the shoreline and does his final piece to camera where he talks about how life started in the ocean. He says if there was intelligent life looking down on Earth, you’d see colours in the shallows. I’ve returned to it many times because it’s a really mind-blowing way of explaining how you would see evidence of life.”
“And once he delivers that last line, the camera pulls out to this incredibly wide shot of him walking in the shallows. It’s indicative of that ambition in terms of the visuals for Life on Earth, because they would have filmed it from a helicopter. It’s that feeling of epic scale. It’s completely cinematic which really sets it apart.”
A lasting legacy
But the world has changed in extraordinary ways since the 1970s. In a world where audiences can be transported anywhere around the globe through their phone, is wildlife programming still important?
Bobin notes how what we see on TV can have real-world impact, linking the mountain gorilla sequence to support for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
“David – and other people who were there at the time – said that in the mid-70s, gorillas were seen as scary animals. But seeing David with them, especially the babies, totally transformed public perception,” she says.
In 1979, there were only a few hundred mountain gorillas left in the world. Now, there are over 1,000.
Both Bobin and Davis have worked with Attenborough throughout their own careers, and it’s also clear that the film crew of Life on Earth are equally in awe and admiration of him.
“In everything that David has ever done, there’s the idea that if you share the wonders of the natural world and how extraordinary it is, and how beautiful it is and how clever and amazing it is, people will fall in love with it and care about it and want to protect it,” reflects Bobin.
“This documentary is very much about how that extraordinary series was made, but those principles still apply today. Life on Earth was made 50 years ago but it’s hugely influenced TV series today, and that principle of wanting to open peoples’ eyes to the wonders of the natural world – and the enthusiasm that David has for how incredible the planet we live on is – remains.”
You can watch Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure and Life on Earth on BBC iPlayer, as well as a collection of other programmes celebrating David Attenborough’s incredible career.
Top image: David Attenborough with one of his Life on Earth Diaries, in London, 2024. Credit: Robert Hollingworth
