David Attenborough and Jane Goodall talk about their friendship, shared passions and their latest project - to raise awareness of apes
Celia Walden The Telegraph 2 Dec 10;
'I don’t mean to be rude,” says Sir David Attenborough, the voice of my childhood, “but that’s the kind of question an eight-year-old would ask.” We’re sitting by a log fire in the celebrated broadcaster’s west London home. There’s tea on the table and a plate of shortbread, but the atmosphere is not quite as cosy.
I rephrase my question: which single moment has been the most memorable, the most fulfilling of Sir David’s 58-year career? “I have lots of favourite moments, but tell the eight-year-old that and they feel let down. Look, I don’t believe in list-making. Lots of lovely things happen and lots of horrible things happen but I can’t list them in priority.”
That Sir David’s insatiable intelligence should be paired with a slight impatience is no surprise. I had been forewarned that small talk should be avoided (and not, under any circumstances, to bring up the 'national treasure’ epithet), and it’s fair to say that the 20 minutes we spend waiting for his life-long friend, the renowned primatologist Dr Jane Goodall DBE to arrive, won’t top any lists in terms of comfortable tête-à-têtes. Still, once we get on to Hope 4 Apes – the conservation charity Sir David is publicising – the cantankerous manner subsides into something a little closer to his kindly on-screen persona.
It never ceases to amaze the 84 year-old how much we want to make the animal world about us. “Animals have nothing to teach us,” he maintains, “that we can’t learn by looking at ourselves, yet some people think that the only thing we have to learn from animals is to do with humans. That seems to me to be an extraordinarily egocentric view.”
I wonder aloud whether the resurgence of youthful interest from young people in wildlife programmes (Sir David’s First Life series was watched by 3.16 million viewers) can partly be explained by this egocentrism. But despite the lure of technology and the instant gratification of reality TV, Sir David doesn’t believe that an interest in the natural world ever fell away. “It’s always been the case as far as I’m concerned. Of course adolescents are interested in iPods and iPads, but I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.”
The former controller of BBC2 doesn’t watch reality TV (“no, not even I’m a Celebrity”) but is unexpectedly mild on the subject. “I think it’s cheap and cheerful, so who am I to say people shouldn’t watch it? It really costs absolutely nothing to make, whereas if you look at a programme I’m making at the moment about the earth’s Poles, which has been three years in production with 15 camera men living out there for most of the time…”
TV has changed a lot from the days the grammar-school and Cambridge-educated young man from Isleworth – the younger brother of actor and director Lord Richard Attenborough – worked as a production assistant at the BBC Alexandra Palace headquarters. “Still, it was thrilling because there were only a dozen people responsible for all the non-fiction programmes in Europe.” When Sir David stepped out from behind the desk to present, his infectious enthusiasm and distinctive tones of hushed awe captivated audiences. His Life series changed the course of wildlife documentaries. Far from being observational, Attenborough inspired debate about our role in terms of conservation and the environment. Which was where Jane Goodall has just come in amid a blizzard of apologies.
Brought together by their mutual passion for conservationism (Goodall is a UN Messenger of Peace), the pair are jokingly referred to as “Tarzan and Jane” by their colleagues. I can see why. From the moment she enters the room, Sir David relaxes, swapping his tea for the “warming whisky” Goodall begs for and his frown for a smile. Birch-haired and fine-featured, the 76-year-old daughter of a businessman and a novelist from London was known by reputation to Sir David well before their first meeting.
“I’d heard that she was a saint,” he laughs gruffly, his eyes on hers, “a woman who had turned the world of zoology upside down.” Academics were either suspicious or downright rude about the beautiful, Cambridge graduate, he goes on. “She had the effrontery to give animals names. It was also a fact, Jane, that you weren’t a bad looking girl.”
Those looks (she became a National Geographic cover-girl in 1963) were a help rather than a hindrance, she claims, giving her the opportunity to work with the world-famous anthropologist, Dr Louis Leakey. “He didn’t take on any females who weren’t good looking,” she smiles, “but he also felt with good reason that the patience and sympathy required to work with chimps was possessed naturally by women. It’s true that if you’re a good mother, in the old-fashioned primate sense, you have to be patient and understand needs put forward in non-verbal ways.”
I put it to Sir David that Goodall’s admission that she adopted some of the mothering techniques she had observed in female chimpanzees when raising her own son, Hugo, seems to contradict his earlier assertion that we have nothing to learn from animals. “When Leakey studied chimps in the Sixties, it was about providing a greater understanding about early, Stone Age man,” he counters. “It wasn’t about applying those learnings to modern man.” Back then, it hadn’t been proven how close the links between man and ape were, but Goodall talks warmly of the sense of humour she detected in chimps and their natural “altruistic sense,” citing one of her most rewarding professional memories as “the moment Greybeard [a male chimpanzee she befriended] squeezed my finger in reassurance after turning down a fruit he didn’t want.”
Despite a career which has taken both of them from the planes of Africa to the Canadian glaciers neither can remember a moment of abject fear. “Of course you get scared if you’re being charged by an elephant, but actually I’ve been most frightened not by animals but by human beings. When a man is standing there, drunk, holding a gun, and unable to speak a word of your language…” Sir David takes a sip of his whisky, and Goodall murmurs assent. “I have friends who like adrenalin, but I don’t. I live a very peaceable life. My job is to make films about animals behaving naturally, so I’m as unobtrusive as possible.”
The discomfort of expedition life doesn’t become any easier to bear as they get older, the pair concede. “When you’re standing on the top of a mountain in the pouring rain waiting for a helicopter that’s not coming and it looks like five of you are going to have to sleep in a two-man tent, you do wonder what keeps you going.” And what does? “Everything,” Goodall shrugs. “Anything worth doing has got moments of discomfort or even pain,” Sir David finishes. “And the pleasure so grossly outweighs everything else that you don’t even notice the rest.”
For Goodall, her belief in “a greater spiritual power,” is an additional source of strength. And although Sir David is a well known agnostic, I’m curious to know whether William Paley’s watchmaker analogy [that as with a watch found on the heath, a designer must exist] ever comes to mind when he’s examining the intricate workings of an exotic creature at close range. “Evolution can explain all that,” he says briskly, “although sometimes when I’m looking down on termites in their nest going about their business, I do wonder whether someone is looking down at us thinking: 'By golly they’re making a mess of things.’ “Not they,” reprimands Goodall. “We.”
Population control, both agree, is the only way to save our environment. “There are three times as many people on earth as when I first started making television programmes,” says Sir David, “all of whom require food and a place to live. And many of us, including me, take more than our fair share. And while the answer is unclear, one thing is obvious: where women are educated and have the vote, birth rates drop.” Still he feels privileged to “be able to go where the rainforest is, not where it isn’t,” and has no plans to retire. “One day I will fall over….” “And one day I won’t be able to walk,” shrugs Goodall. “But until then,” Sir David smiles, speaking for his old friend too, “we’re enjoying ourselves.”
