BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough

By Jean-Baptiste Gouyon

This book explores the history of wildlife television in post-war Britain. It revolves around the role of David Attenborough, whose career as a broadcaster and natural history filmmaker has shaped British wildlife television. The book discusses aspects of Attenborough’s professional biography and also explores elements of the institutional history of the BBC—from the early 1960s, when it was at its most powerful, to the 2000s, when its future is uncertain. It focuses primarily on the wildlife ‘making-of’ documentary genre, which is used to trace how television progressively became a participant in the production of knowledge about nature. With the inclusion of analysis of television programmes, first-hand accounts, BBC archival material and, most notably, interviews with David Attenborough, this volume follows the development of the professional culture of wildlife broadcasting as it has been portrayed in public. It will be of interest to wildlife television amateurs, historians of British television and students in science communication. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030199821

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2019

J.-B. GouyonBBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of AttenboroughPalgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19982-1_1

1. Introduction

Jean-Baptiste Gouyon¹  

(1)

Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London, London, UK

Jean-Baptiste Gouyon

Email: [e-mail]

‘Pleasure. Only Pleasure.’

Identity Fashioning

Summary of the Argument

The Age of Attenborough

Animals, Television and Natural History

References

David Attenborough is no doubt too modest to mention his own name, but in Britain at any rate it is largely due to his own work for the BBC that the lay public has been guided gently from simple programmes about animals to complex and sometimes quite profound essays on primitive societies and the nature of human co-operation.¹

‘Pleasure. Only Pleasure.’

²

At its peak, the audience for the 2017 BBC wildlife series Blue Planet 2 reached 14.1 million viewers, making it the year’s most watched television programme in Britain.³ And, commentators claimed, ‘many of the programme’s marvels are new not just to television but to science itself’.⁴ Given the large number of viewers wildlife television programmes command today, and the claims associated with them, these documentaries are a key part of the apparatus through which our increasingly urbanised societies obtain their knowledge of the natural world.

Wildlife documentaries fulfil a very primordial need: to know about the world we live in and the other life forms sharing it with us. Some of the earliest figurative pictorial representations humans produced some 15,000 years ago were paintings on the walls of such caves as Lascaux in south-western France and Altamira in Cantabria (Northern Spain). They mainly show animals moving, hunting, feeding, and reproducing (Azéma 2006). What were these paintings for? Nobody knows for sure. And although we cannot be certain about what they meant to those who produced them, one thing is beyond doubt: they were part of early humans’ attempts at making sense of the world they inhabited, recording their knowledge of other life forms which, to them, signified life or death. Likewise, wildlife documentaries are meant to help us understand the world we inhabit and find our place in it. But, as such, they deserve to be scrutinised, for, often straddling boundaries—between nature and culture, or human and animal—they unsettle these boundaries only to re-draw them in ways which naturalise specific orders of things. For example, they use the spectacle of anthropomorphised animals, or of humans in the wild, to naturalise social norms (e.g. heteronormativity, the nuclear family as the basic unit of social structure, etc.; Chris 2006; Haraway 1989). This book explores the genealogy of wildlife television in Britain and provides readers with some elements to make sense of how television programmes and documentaries about wildlife have contributed to fashioning how we see ourselves and where we stand in the world over the past five decades. These are essential conversations to have in light of our current environmental predicaments.

Wildlife documentaries are about knowledge. They are premised on ‘an epistemology which itself is grounded in the recording of the particular, physical real by camera and microphone’ (Corner 1996: 3). But although, as any kind of documentary work, they have—or claim to have—evidential value, they also are intrinsically artificial. As David Attenborough noted in an interview in 1984, just after the release of The Living Planet (Chapter 9):

In fact, there is precious little that is natural … in any film. You distort speed if you want to show things like plants growing, or look in detail at the way an animal moves. You distort light levels. You distort distribution, in the sense that you see dozens of different species in a jungle within a few minutes, so that the places seems [sic.] to be teeming with life. You distort size by using close up lenses. And you can equally well distort sound. What the film-maker is trying to do is to convey a particular experience in as vivid a way as he can.⁵

Wildlife documentaries contain and generate knowledge of nature for their audiences. At the same time, they obey one imperative: the necessity of spectacle (Gouyon 2016).⁶ The artifice of film-making Attenborough describes in this quote is enrolled in creating a spectacular experience for viewers, one from which they will derive not only knowledge but also a sense of wonder, and ultimately pleasure. For, still in Attenborough’s words: ‘It seems to me that science, fundamentally, is concerned with defining man’s relationship with the natural world—making sense of it. And when it does that, it brings great pleasure.’⁷ The consumption of such visual spectacle and entertainment as wildlife films is a subjective experience steeped in emotions (Mitman 1999). For this reason, wildlife documentaries are traditionally conceived of as ill-suited to convey objective knowledge and educate their audiences (Shapin and Barnes 1976; Greenhalgh 1989). If wildlife documentary makers are to be able to achieve their aim, which is to be recognised as trustworthy sources of knowledge about nature, they therefore need to deploy strategies that enable them to resolve this tension between knowledge and entertainment—evidence and artifice —which lies at the heart of the wildlife documentary.

Identity Fashioning

A way to look at the history of wildlife television is to follow the strategies wildlife broadcasters have deployed through time fashioning their public identity as reliable sources of knowledge about nature and constructing the film-making apparatus as a legitimate tool to produce knowledge of the world. A key device in this joint process of identity fashioning is the wildlife ‘making-of documentary’ (MOD). MODs are now a staple of every high-profile nature series, each episode ending with a ten-minute segment revealing secrets about the shooting of iconic scenes in that episode. As a subgenre of the wildlife television programme, however, MODs are quite a recent addition to wildlife broadcasters’ repertoire and are not self-evident. When asked why they were made in the first place, David Attenborough provides a two-fold explanation blending epistemological concerns with preoccupations associated with the material aspects of television broadcasting. Wildlife broadcasters began producing MODs, he explains, when they needed audiences to trust them. He also hints at the fact that these ten-minute add-ons at the end of episodes are convenient to introduce some flexibility in the length of programmes. They make it easier for television executives to sell the programmes to countries where the default length of programmes is fifty minutes and not sixty.⁸ However, some wildlife film-makers do think that those concluding segments are not unproblematic. Peter Jones, for instance, who was the executive producer for the third mammoth Attenborough series, The Trials of Life (1990), whose last episode, Once More into the Termite Mound, is a MOD (Chapter 9), remarked:

now the MOD is a ten-minute segment added to the main programme without even a pause, something that I personally dislike. My understanding is that the controllers and planners find an hour-long programme much more suited to their scheduling. At the time of Trials, the customary length for each programme in the 13-part series was precisely fifty minutes so we are really dealing with changing conventions—but I still do not like the customary current outcomes, as they undermine the momentary emotional and intellectual catharsis when you reach the end of well-constructed films.⁹

This short incursion into the topic of wildlife MODs brings up three essential facets of wildlife documentaries: (1) they are about knowledge; (2) they are commodities; (3) they are well-crafted storytelling devices.

There is nothing necessary about MODs in the first place, nor about their format: a ten-minute concluding segment or self-contained episode. A question which motivated me to research this book early on was how, when and why did the MOD become a genre in wildlife television? The answer lies in the history of wildlife television in Britain, which is what this volume explores. Although wildlife MODs ended up appearing only episodically in the book, when they do so, they stand as milestones in the slow process of accretion of the public identity of wildlife film-makers. The question of how wildlife film-makers construct their public identity, present themselves and their practice to audiences—what could be called the making-of impulse—is central to the argument. Having had a chance, several years ago, to be a science journalist, I have had a long standing desire to understand how scientific knowledge exists in the public realm and how these public forms of existence in turn contribute to shaping the public culture of science. A claim central to this volume is that looking at the history of wildlife television shows how hard British wildlife broadcasters have worked to make their practice, programme making, a part of the production of knowledge of the natural world. In doing so, they not only presented themselves as knowledge producers but also contributed to shaping our common understanding of what it means to study wild animals in the field, and what scientists’ findings in the field mean to all of us.

Summary of the Argument

Wildlife MODs and other forms of disclosures are part of the broader history of wildlife film-makers’ public fashioning of their social identity. Wildlife film-makers are best seen as scientific showmen. And as such, they are highly concerned with issues of disclosure and concealment. As historian of science, Iwan Morus, wrote about Victorian scientific showmen:

Deciding what to show and what to hide was an issue that concerned anyone involved in the business of exhibition. The key to successful performance often lay in the management of information between performer and audience. … Even if showmen did not want their audiences to see all their secrets, they wanted them to see enough to recognise and applaud the skill and ingenuity that lay behind the successful show. Strategies of concealment and exposure therefore lay at the heart of scientific performers’ self-fashioning. (Morus 2006: 105)

This volume approaches the history of wildlife documentaries from this perspective of broadcasters’ self-fashioning of their social identity as truth tellers. In doing so, it identifies three stages in the history of wildlife television, punctuated by as many MODs. First, as wildlife television making was becoming a profession, patrolled by experts in the recreation of nature on-screen—broadcasters—the latter found it necessary to disclose some of their techniques to justify their use of the artifice of film-making whilst remaining true to nature. A film like Unarmed Hunters (BBC 1963), arguably the first wildlife MOD made for British television, defines wildlife broadcasters as professionals capable of producing natural historical knowledge through film-making. This trajectory entailed distancing wildlife television from the culture of amateur natural history in which early nature broadcasting originates (Chapter 2) and moving closer to scientists investigating animal behaviour in the field (Chapter 6). A driving force for this rapprochement between scientists and broadcasters was David Attenborough, who started his career at the BBC, producing natural history programmes in collaboration with Julian Huxley and then the London Zoo (Chapters 3 and 4). But, as scientists got more involved in wildlife television, broadcasters felt the necessity to distinguish their profession from that of scientists and to assert that if scientists wanted to become film-makers, they had to stop being scientists (Chapter 5). Yet, scientists-turned-film-makers’ involvement with wildlife film-making had a transformative effect on the practice of filming wildlife for television (Chapter 7). The film-makers of Oxford Scientific Films turned film craft, the capacity to design ingenious film-making devices to show natural phenomena from hitherto unseen perspectives, into the equivalent of amateur naturalist cameramen’s field craft. Camerawork became a key component of the stories told in wildlife television programmes, as exemplified in the 1972 The Making of a Natural History Film (Chapter 8).

Through this trajectory, the meaning of objectivity in relation to wildlife television is transformed, as is the film-making apparatus’s relationship with nature. In the first period of wildlife television, dominated by amateur naturalists, support for the films’ claims to objectivity came from film-makers providing evidence that they had not interfered with nature when filming, simply holding the camera to passively record their encounter with the wild and share it with audiences (Gouyon 2011a). But once the production of wildlife television has become the work of professionals, claims to objectivity for the films they present rest on the idea of ‘mechanical objectivity’ (Daston and Galison 2007). The images appearing on-screen stand as the outcome of a process which does not involve a direct encounter between a human subject and nature but one between mechanical devices and nature. Film-makers’ intervention consists in creating the conditions for this interaction, and ultimately results in the creation of nature. For, the version of nature offered to viewers, presented as revealing hitherto unknown aspects of the natural world, only exists there, on-screen. With the professionalisation of wildlife film-making, wildlife documentaries become performative in the sense that the film-making process creates the subject of the documentary. Nature becomes the outcome of filming.¹⁰

Life on Earth (1979) came out of this professionalisation and exemplifies the performative capacity of wildlife documentary making (Chapter 9). With this series, wildlife film-makers do not anymore simply show nature; they make it visible. Broadcasters’ close relationship with scientists was essential to produce this pinnacle of the history of wildlife television, as they relied on scientists to find out where and when to go and film the stories they wanted to tell to depict the evolution of life on the planet. Life on Earth, the first of the major so-called Attenborough series—an enduring genre to this day—ushered the figure of the ‘telenaturalist’ in the professional culture of wildlife television. I first proposed this term in my PhD dissertation to emphasise the distinctive character of Attenborough’s screen performances (Gouyon 2011a, b). By contrast with studio hosts presenting natural history magazines, such as Peter Scott, whose natural history expertise exists outside the studio, the telenaturalist’s expertise proceeds from television and depends on the medium to manifest itself. The telenaturalist is a television-show character who performs natural history on the TV screen for no other purpose than the production of television programmes, and who relies on the film-making apparatus to produce natural history knowledge. This performance is a one-man show that rests, partly, on the purposeful exclusion of other human beings from the picture, notably scientists. Yet, given the cognitive authority our culture vests in science, the telenaturalist’s trustworthiness, and his appearing as an epistemic equal to scientists, ultimately depends on him being seen as standing on an equal footing with scientists. This is achieved with wildlife MODs produced alongside Life on Earth, The Living Planet , and The Trials of Life (Chapter 9).

Beyond presenting film-makers as professionals and disclosing their technical virtuosity, wildlife MODs define participation in film-making as a shared means for telenaturalists and scientists to collaboratively investigate the workings of nature. Submitting to the constraints of film-making in the field, they all obtain new knowledge and understanding of the natural world. MODs justify delegating the act of knowing to the film-making apparatus—cameras, editing room, dubbing studio—and turn wildlife television into a mechanically objective tool of knowledge production. Once More into the Termite Mound , the MOD for The Trials of Life (BBC 1990), places field scientists in relation to film-making in a position comparable to that of the telenaturalist. Emphasising the film-making apparatus’s central epistemic function over human subjects’ agency, MODs are also displays of modesty which reinforce the telenaturalist’s status as a truth teller. A question left hanging at the end of the book is whether the epithet ‘telenaturalist’ can apply to other wildlife television screen personalities, or will remain indissolubly tied to the age of Attenborough.

The Age of Attenborough

When preparing this book, I met twice with David Attenborough. My hope was to find out from the man himself answers to all the questions raised by repeated dives into the material kept at the BBC Written Archives Centre (BBCWAC) in Caversham Park, Reading. On my visits to Richmond, I met the most affable of men, at the same time fully aware of his status and unassuming about it. Two memories will stay with me for a long time: the moment I rung the bell, Attenborough opened his door in one decisive pull, as if lifting a curtain, darting his inquisitive blue eyes at me whilst introducing himself. Upon my second visit, his daughter welcomed me and lead me to the sitting room, and I stood on the doorstep, waiting for Attenborough to reach the end of a piece from the Romantic repertoire he was magisterially interpreting on a grand piano. Perhaps more significant for a historian, though, is that in Attenborough I also found someone who considered that he had written everything he wanted to say about his own involvement in the history of wildlife television in Britain in his memoirs (Attenborough 2010), and was somewhat reluctant to talk about himself any further. Above all, Attenborough came across as very forward-looking, not so much interested in the past as he is in the present and what his next projects will be. Although he left no question unanswered, nothing motivated him more than discussing his then current endeavour: the filming of a series on bioluminescence. To meet with David Attenborough when one studies the history of wildlife television in Britain is more than meeting the individual; it is getting in touch, by proxy, with all the people who appear in this book, from Julian Huxley and Desmond Hawkins to Mick Rhodes and Christopher Parsons, and accessing the world view which informed the development of wildlife broadcasting in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described the ways in which individuals involved in a field of activity like scientific research achieve status and recognition through the accumulation of symbolic and material resources. For a scientist, symbolic resources could be academic titles (e.g. honorary doctorates and medals) and material ones could be grants, a laboratory, people working in their research team. The sum of these resources Bourdieu called symbolic capital. Within a given field, the more symbolic capital individuals accumulate, the more power and authority they gain, which in turn enables them to shape their field to their advantage and accumulate even more material and symbolic resources, and eventually achieve dominance in the field (Bourdieu 1994, 2001).

BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough is a historical study of the development of a field, that of wildlife television in Britain, roughly over the five decades that followed the Second World War. As the chapters in this book show, the production of wildlife television programmes and documentaries is a profoundly collective process, only successfully achieved through well-coordinated team work. However, wildlife television is also a field in which recognition goes to those demonstrating the property of skill to produce good television programmes, as judged by audience reception and ratings. In this field, symbolic capital is unequally divided. Those individuals who produce programmes successful with large audiences will accumulate more of it than those only able to address a niche segment of the television watching population. And as in any field, those who accumulate more symbolic capital are able to shape the field so that it will enable them to accumulate even more capital. Within a given field of human activity, some individuals have therefore more influence than others.

In the field of wildlife television, David Attenborough managed early on to produce television programmes which chimed well with the cultural context and consistently achieved very good ratings. In other words, Attenborough was very successful early on in his career at accumulating symbolic capital, and over the years has accumulated more than anyone else in his field. Accordingly, he can be said to have shaped the field to his advantage, making it work so that his way of approaching wildlife television making became the norm. The title for this volume therefore is intended to reflect Sir David’s position of dominance in the field and to acknowledge his epoch-making influence on it. But it should not be taken to imply that this book is a biographical account of David Attenborough. It is not. Instead, BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough tries to understand how wildlife television as it was produced during a given epoch—which goes from the early 1950s to the early 2000s and perhaps will be remembered as the age of Attenborough—has come to stand as the accepted stereotype of how nature should appear on-screen today.

Animals, Television and Natural History

The history of television partly is a history of animals on-screen.¹¹ Animals, as conveniently self-moving objects, figured prominently in early programmes broadcast in Britain between 1936 and 1939, participating in the effort to fashion what was then a new medium as a truthful source of factual knowledge. A medium from the outset framed as dealing with factual information as opposed to mere entertainment, television needed to demonstrate its trustworthiness. As with early cinema so with television, animals became ‘central figures in the presentation of [a] new and progressive technology’ (Burt 2001: 206); animal programmes, dispensing expert knowledge about wildlife to viewers, served to establish television’s epistemic credentials.

Natural history is a pursuit born out of a desire to document, to catalogue the world, to identify the unknown, and in this way to know ourselves (Ritvo 1997; Burt 2001; Razac 2002; Daston and Mitman 2005). Since the nineteenth century, natural history has enjoyed the status of a universal discipline, broad enough in its topics of interests from minerals to insects and plants, to appeal to the many. A reservoir of knowledge and practices from which professional scientific disciplines keep emerging (Outram 1996), natural history is also an enduring scientific training ground. At the interface between professional and amateur science, it was and still is considered well adapted to convey the basic principles of scientific enquiry, for curiosity can spring out of the observation of familiar objects. For example, Grant Allen, a late-nineteenth-century populariser of evolution, reckoned that although not all non-scientists would be interested in the minutiae of the evolution of anatomical structures or physiological processes, starting from such common objects as berries, shells or tadpoles, and explaining their general features was an efficient way of presenting general evolutionary principles to a wide and diverse audience (Lightman 2009: 219). Natural objects are familiar ones from which unfamiliar stories, based on scientific claims, can be derived. These stories are not simply educative; they are also edifying. For to teach people how to order the world is also to teach them how to position themselves in relation to others in the social world (Ritvo 1987).

Placing us in a close visual proximity with animals, to peer into the intimacy of their existence, wildlife documentaries allow us to experience genuine alterity. They alleviate our feeling of existential solitude. Animals, the other living beings we share our finite environment with, are our ontological partners in ‘the arts of living and dying well in multispecies symbiosis’ (Haraway 2015: vii–viii). Besides, wildlife documentaries are a source of emotional comfort, for they relieve our feeling of ‘ontological insecurity’, the ‘sense of confusion, loss, unpredictability and anxiety’ which sociologist Adrian Franklin (1999: 56) associates with late modernity’s characteristic ‘perpetual state of change’ and lack of direction. Wildlife films offer us, notably with the so-called blue-chip documentaries (Bousé 2000), the spectacle of timeless, unchanging nature. From the 1950s to the early 2000s, the period covered in this book, wildlife consistently appeared on television as both object of knowledge and subject for the material performance of television production. But whilst this duality persisted over the period, the presentation of wildlife on television has itself been inflected by two factors: the establishment of television as an institution capable of generating an authoritative discourse on the world and, within the institution, the rise and development of a professional culture distinct from both radio and cinema, that places a premium on broadcasters’ ability to show things and to tell stories, principally by visual means.

UCL, April 2019.

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Footnotes

1

Norman Swallow, 1966, Factual Television, London: Focal Press, p. 154.

2

J. Burgess, & D. Unwin, 1984, ‘Exploring the living planet with David Attenborough’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 8(2), 93–113, 102.

3

Graham Ruddick, ‘Blue Planet II is year’s most watched British TV show’, The Guardian, 6 November 2017. Available online at https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​media/​2017/​nov/​06/​blue-planet-ii-years-most-watched-tv-show-david-attenborough.

4

Elle Hunt, ‘Blue Planet II: From octopus v shark to fish that crawl, the series’s biggest discoveries’, The Guardian, 10 December 2017. Available online at https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​tv-and-radio/​2017/​nov/​20/​blue-planet-ii-what-have-we-learned-so-far.

5

J. Burgess, and D. Unwin, 1984, ‘Exploring the living planet with David Attenborough’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 8(2), 93–113, 103.

6

See Louson (2018)