The BBC: A Century on Air

by David Hendy

It was an audacious approach. Behind the scenes at the BBC, Attenborough had to face down complaints that ‘green slime is not the way to start off a big series’. Yet the gamble paid off, not least because the opening episodes featured images of such startling close-up intimacy that even some of the world’s tiniest creatures kept everyone glued to their sets. In the penultimate episode, viewers witnessed the most extraordinary sequence of all. The idea, Attenborough explained, had been for him to be filmed on a Rwandan mountainside explaining the evolution of the opposable thumb while gorillas moved about some distance away. It did not quite work out as planned: I turned round to talk to the camera to give this thumb-and-forefinger story when I felt a weight lying by my feet and I looked down – and there were two baby gorillas undoing my shoelaces. Well, I couldn’t really talk about the thumb-and-forefinger while that was going on, so I stopped… and then I felt a tap on my shoulder and I turned round and there was a huge female gorilla and she put her hand on me and put her hand on my head and turned round and looked at my face. And this went on for, it seemed to me, an age. And it was paradise – it was such a privileged delight. I couldn’t believe it was possible. And eventually they left, and I crawled back.