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As he prepares to unveil his final landmark documentary series, Life In Cold Blood, Sir David Attenborough talks to David Clensy about his life in broadcasting. Picture: Simon Galloway

The world was a very different place back in 1979, when David Attenborough first unveiled his epic documentary Life On Earth.The ozone layer was a place only meteorologists had heard about, “meerkats” was a simple feline dismissal, a lyrebird was a girl who told a fib and global warming was the onset of summer.

But the public’s understanding of the natural world around us was about to develop faster than at any point in history. And the “Life” strand of epic documentaries devised by Attenborough and the team at the Bristol-based BBC Natural History Unit played no small part in bringing the our planet’s wildlife mysteries into peoples’ living rooms.

Every few years since, we have marvelled at series such as The Living Planet (1984), The Trials Of Life (1990), Life In The Freezer (1993), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life Of Birds (1998), The Life Of Mammals (2002) and Life In The Undergrowth (2005).

Just about every kind of life on earth had been covered by Sir David, who was knighted for his efforts in 1985. As the animals trotted in, two by two, Sir David became the man who put the “arc” into the natural history unit’s archive. The only creatures yet to be covered in any great detail were reptiles and amphibians – the ones, let’s face it, that are least popular among the fur and feather-loving viewing public. But now as the 81-year-old broadcaster brings the epic strand of documentaries to a close, he finally gets to grips with the cold-blooded critters. Life In Cold Blood comes to our screens this week.

“It’s not so much that we kept them until last deliberately,” Sir David says. “But something had to come last. It’s more that we knew what we wanted to cover first. There’s so much affection for birds and mammals that we focused our attention on them earlier.

“In fact, reptiles and amphibians are one of the most fascinating elements of life on earth. They were the first creatures to step out of the seas, and their world is so varied and specialised, there’s certainly plenty to see in the series. I’m sure there’ll be no problem in keeping peoples’ attention.

“The bigger problem is encouraging them to tune in in the first place because, let’s face it, there are few people who come home in the evening, pick up the Radio Times and say, ‘yippee there’s a documentary on this evening about snakes’. But I think viewers will be pleasantly surprised. Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as slow, dim-witted and primitive. In fact, they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate and extremely sophisticated.”

And Sir David should know. He had a primitive reptile named in his honour back in the early Nineties. After discovering that the Mesozoic reptile Plesiosaurus conybeari had not, in fact, been a true plesiosaur, the paleontologist Robert Bakker renamed the species Attenborosaurus conybeari.

“It’s very flattering, when you have a fossilised reptile named after you,” Sir David chuckles wryly – it’s the sort of thing you must take in your stride when you see your name being given to everything from a long-beaked New Guinea echidna to the new room in the Natural History Museum.

He may have become an icon of the small screen, but Sir David’s entry into the world of television was far from smooth. After serving his National Service in the Royal Navy, he took a position editing children’s science textbooks for a publishing company. He soon became disillusioned with the work and, in 1950, he applied for a job as a radio producer with the BBC. He was rejected for the post, but his CV later attracted the interest of Mary Adams, head of factual broadcasting for the Beeb’s fledgling television service.

Attenborough, like most people at that time, did not own a television, and he had seen only one programme in his life. However, he accepted Adams’ offer of a three-month training course, and in 1952 he joined the BBC full time.

Initially discouraged from appearing on camera because Adams thought his teeth were too big, he became a producer. His early projects included the quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and Song Hunter, a series about folk music presented by Alan Lomax.

Sir David’s association with natural history programmes began when he produced and presented the three-part series The Pattern Of Animals. The studio-bound programme featured animals from London Zoo, with the naturalist Sir Julian Huxley discussing their various attributes. Through this programme, Attenborough met Jack Lester, the curator of the zoo’s reptile house, and they decided to make a series about an animal-collecting expedition. The result was Zoo Quest, first broadcast in 1954, which Attenborough presented at short notice, due to Lester being taken ill.

In 1957, the BBC Natural History Unit was established in Bristol. Attenborough was asked to join it but he declined, not wishing to move from London where he and his young family were settled. Instead he formed his own department, the Travel and Exploration Unit, which allowed him to continue to front the Zoo Quest programmes as well as produce other documentaries, notably the Travellers’ Tales and Adventure series.

And though he has explored almost every corner of the globe, and his professional life has been inextricably intertwined with the Natural History Unit for half a century, he says he’s never explored Bristol.

“I’ve always got out of the car and walked straight into the BBC building,” he says. “I never really got to know the city at all.”

But in recent weeks he’s come to the defence of the Natural History Unit, which could see sizeable cuts at its Whiteladies Road headquarters under the latest BBC budget crackdown. The unit will have 57 out of 180 staff posts axed and £12 million sliced off its £37 million budget as part of a wave of 2,500 job cuts across the BBC.

“With cuts of that size, you simply can’t continue the same level of output,” Sir David says. “Or if you do, you’re going to replace it with something very skimpy. Let’s face it, if they can cut the staff back by around a quarter, and not see any deterioration in output, it would be a pretty damning indictment of the unit.”

So could Life In Cold Blood mark the end of an era for this kind of landmark BBC documentary? “Well,” Sir David sighs. “I certainly hope not.”

It’s hard to imagine cuts such as these being made in Sir David’s time among the top echelon of the corporation. By 1965, Attenborough had reached lofty heights as controller of BBC2. Under his stewardship, the channel introduced the British public to the landmark documentary format – with series such as Civilisation And The Ascent Of Man taking pride of place on the schedule.

But he was keen on diversity, and also brought the world The Likely Lads, The Old Grey Whistle Test and Match Of The Day.After just four years, he was promoted once again, to become the director of programmes – making him responsible for the output of both BBC1 and BBC2, but he turned down the offer to become director general a few years later, and in 1972 he resigned to return to his first love – programme-making.

Although Life In Cold Blood will be his last landmark series, Sir David has no intention of retiring completely – he’s already filming another 10-part documentary on the subject of evolution to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin Of Species in 2009.

“It’s what I love to do,” he says. “I’ve been very lucky over the years, having the opportunity to make the programmes that interest me.”