Sir David Attenborough: Animal magnetism

He's been our best-loved guide to the natural world for 50 years, but shows no sign of slowing down. On the eve of his new television series, Sir David Attenborough talks to Steve Connor

On his living-room wall, Sir David Attenborough has a painting of one of his many obsessions. It is Mount Roraima, a massive table-top block of sandstone that rises majestically out of the rainforests of South America, isolated by vertical sides some 2,000ft high. This is the very plateau that is said to have inspired The Lost World of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and for four decades it was on Attenborough's long list of "things to do".

When Attenborough first saw Mount Roraima he was on a filming expedition in British Guiana (as it then was) for a 1950s television series called Zoo Quest. He was within 50 miles of what he describes as one of the most romantic mountains in the world and the temptation to go there and climb it proved irresistible. Unfortunately, the maps at the time failed to show that the river he was following, which was supposed to flow towards the mountain, in fact veered off in a different direction. Attenborough would have to wait a good deal longer to set foot in the lost world. "That mountain haunted me for 40 years," he says.

Haunting moments are what Attenborough does best. There are few people who can justifiably claim to have seen and done as much as the doyen of wildlife broadcasters, who is celebrating 50 years in television. He has travelled the world many times over, climbed the highest peaks, descended into subterranean caverns, tramped through the snows of Antarctica, scrambled up the sand dunes of the Sahara, dived among coral reefs and hauled himself into the canopy of the tallest tree.

In that time he has caught baby alligators with his shirt, stroked the paws of a tame lioness, ridden on the backs of elephants, lolled about with mountain gorillas and caught the imagination of just about every schoolchild who has ever watched him over the past half-century. Indeed, many distinguished zoologists, such as Richard Dawkins, credit Attenborough with doing more than anyone alive to inspire generations of youngsters to take more than a passing interest in the natural world.

At 76, Attenborough shows no signs of slowing down. He has just finished his latest series, The Life of Mammals, which is to be shown on BBC1 later this month, and is already planning his next, a tribute to the unsung heroes of evolution: spiders, insects and other invertebrates. The enthusiasm he shows on the small screen is matched by the breathless pace and excitement of his recently published memoirs, Life on Air, which documents his many decades of exploration and discovery.

His career with the BBC took off when he stood in for the usual Zoo Quest presenter, who had fallen ill. His natural talents in front of the camera were immediately recognised by the BBC mandarins and he became the star of the programme. He soon realised that appearing on camera gave him the power to produce the sort of programmes he yearned to make. "The power was to dictate what programmes I do," he says. "If you appear on camera and can bring an additional factor, you have some degree of power to get your programmes accepted."

During those early days of natural-history broadcasting, the technology of filming animals in the wild was, to say the least, primitive. For a start, there was no way to precisely match sound with pictures. Then there was the perennial problem of lighting, which boiled down to getting a camera close enough to an animal without scaring it away.

There were also the many logistical nightmares of travelling to remote places. On one occasion, for instance, Attenborough had to call upon all his considerable charm when a team of native porters in Borneo refused to go beyond their tribal boundary – they were worried about a tribe of cannibals in the next valley.

No sooner was Attenborough gently remonstrating with them than a band of about 70 men brandishing fearsome-looking weapons came charging out of nowhere. Any normal mortal would have panicked, but Attenborough strode purposefully towards the advancing horde with his right hand outstretched while shouting a cheery "Good afternoon!" The English charm paid off, and the "cannibals" agreed to accompany him and his camera crew deeper into their territory.

In the cosy comfort of his London home it is easy to laugh off such incidents, but there must have been times when he was really scared? He ponders the question with deliberation. "I've been really scared by other human beings," he says. "I've been scared by drunks with guns and I've been scared because of my own incompetence."

Many of his programmes have required him to film underwater, and scuba-diving is one activity he has come to fear. "What you realise when you are 30 to 40ft down is that mummy nature did not design you to be down there. If the slightest thing goes wrong, just the slightest thing, you're dead if you don't know how to deal with it."

Before he was married, Attenborough was a keen rock-climber, but he realised in his fifties that he no longer had the head for heights he once did. "There are sequences in the programme where I'm standing on a tea-tray, and I mean a bloody tea-tray the size of this," he says, outlining a tiny square on his coffee table. "I was 120ft up talking about life in the treetops and I'm balanced on this tea-tray. Petrifying."

When it comes to animals, Attenborough relies heavily on the advice of scientists and other experts who guide him on how to make the closest possible approach. But even so, there are times when he contemplates the sanity of what he has done. "I think I have undue faith in the expertise of others," he says, recalling a shot when he talks to camera as a huge grizzly bear in the background catches a salmon in a stream. "The reason you're there is for you to say something into the camera, and if you're saying something into the camera you're almost certainly turning your back on the animal, and if you're turning your back on the animal, you can't see what they are doing.

"I like to know when to run. They say you should never run because a bear can run so much faster, but I like to think that if there are two of you running, you only need to run faster than the bloke you're running with."

Violence is, of course, an everyday part of the natural world and it raises difficult editorial decisions in judging just how much of it to include in a peak-time programme. Attenborough says that he was criticised by some people for showing a remarkable film sequence in The Trials of Life where a band of chimpanzees hunt, capture and kill a small Colobus monkey. The chimps were shown tearing the monkey limb from limb, almost exalting in the gruesomeness of death.

It is sometimes difficult to decide what to leave on the cutting-room floor. "You can define the two extremes fairly easily. One is that you can cut out any graphic violence totally, and that of course ends up in a fairy story with people thinking that there isn't any pain in the natural world," he says.

"The other extreme is to do a programme which says, 'These are all killers, everything is ghastly,' and that is not true either because you lose the butterflies and the humming-birds. This dilemma is not a new thing. The coming together of the viscera and the soul is what they were struggling with in Greek theatre all the time – and that's what we have to do."

More recently, there has been a trend to show nature in a more adventurous way, illustrated by Steve Irwin's The Crocodile Hunter. One sociological study, by Meryl Aldridge of Nottingham University, suggests that these cheap and cheerful "presenter-led" programmes were actually better at explaining the complexities of evolution than so-called "blue chip" series such as The Blue Planet.

Dr Aldridge has criticised the Attenborough style of programme-making for portraying evolution as the result of "intelligent design" rather than, more correctly, the accumulation of chance adaptations. As Dr Aldridge says: "The tendency to imply that evolution is an intentional process is strongest in the most ambitious, expensive and widely-viewed programmes, precisely because they are telling a story about the wonders of nature on the large scale. Less high-prestige programmes, including radio, seem to have the space to treat science in a more subtle way."

Attenborough is understandably peeved by such attacks. "The basic classification into 'presenter-led' and 'blue-chip' programmes is hopelessly flawed to start with," he says. He acknowledges that a script that says "an anteater has a long tongue so that it can eat ants" can be misinterpreted as suggesting intelligent design, but this is patently not what is meant.

He is also bemused to hear that Irwin's programmes can be seen as anything other than good adventure stories. "And that's fine. However, I don't think he tells you a great deal about herpetology or about the physiology of reptiles, but that's not what he aims to do," says Attenborough. "I would wish that sometimes, perhaps, he had more respect for the animals."

A respect for animals is perhaps the richest seam to run through the Attenborough era. His portrayal of the sheer natural wonder of life has led him to become the unofficial figurehead of the environmental movement, even though he refrains from making overtly political statements. He is studiously ambivalent, for instance, on the issue of genetic modification (GM). "My trouble is that I am very shy of saying one thing or the other because I have this absurd reputation, or absurd position, of being a mouthpiece of naturalists to a considerable degree, so I have to be very cautious about what I can say."

He also refrains from being too gloomy about the planet's prospects. "I don't think we are likely to have a complete environmental collapse in the immediate future, but I equally think that there is no way that we can avoid losing quite a lot of species over the next few decades. So it's going to be an impoverished planet, but not a catastrophically impoverished planet, I would say. We can make sure that fewer species are lost by doing something than if we did nothing. I think we have an obligation to do things."

One thing he is proud of is that his programmes have actually added to the sum of human knowledge – many have shown scenes of the natural world that were quite new to science. He also believes that the narrative element of documentary films, which frequently portrays animals as individuals, has even changed the attitude of scientists.

"I actually think that television has had a profound effect on zoology that has not been noted. It's suited us to occasionally personalise an animal, and of course scientists said this was monstrous sentimentalism. Although it's difficult to say that we were the cause of it, the fact of the matter is that scientists have started to do the same thing," he says. "Maybe we were just doing it in parallel, but I like to think we may have had some influence."

'The Life of Mammals' will be shown on BBC1 from 20 Nov. A one-off programme 'Life on Air' is on BBC1 on 1 Dec