Sir David Attenborough filming Our Planet on Netflix. Photo / Steve Benjamin/Silverback Films
Alastair Fothergill has known Sir David Attenborough for nearly 40 years, and produced or directed the majority of his most celebrated programmes, but Attenborough, now 96, has not appeared on location since 2011 - until now.
The new BBC1 series, Wild Isles, announced today, sees him travelling the length and breadth of the British Isles, an ambitious project that was not without its complications. Filming Attenborough under his favourite tree in Richmond Park - a venerable 700-year-old oak - was one thing, but more challenging was the sequence on Skomer Island off the coast of Pembrokeshire, one of the most important sites for seabirds in southern Britain.
"It was quite dramatic," says Fothergill. "From where the boat lands on the island, there are 87 steep steps and I had to get David up to the top. We took a doctor, and a defibrillator just in case."
He'd been warned. "I told his daughter Susie all about it and he practised on the stairs at home. He's not really doing much outside of Richmond now, but he really enjoyed the trips he did with us this last summer.
"Skomer is a beautiful island and the puffin population there is so dense that you can't really stray off the path. We expected the birds to arrive at around 6.30pm so we got David in place and the cameras all set up - but they didn't turn up for a couple of hours. We were staying at a lovely little hotel on the mainland and I called to say, can we eat at 10? And they said, 'If David Attenborough is coming for dinner we'll serve you any time you like.'"
Skomer is globally important for seabirds - but, says Fothergill, "the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world." And it's about to become a lot more nature-depleted because of HN51, the avian flu epidemic, that is devastating the wild bird population. On the Farne Islands for example, where it is estimated they have lost a quarter of their seabirds, the National Trust rangers who would normally be doing a bird count are instead dressed in Hazmat suits picking up potentially infectious corpses.
Fothergill is appalled at what is happening. "One of the problems is that seabirds are long-lived birds, which typically only have one or two chicks, so this devastation will affect bird populations for a long time - we're talking decades - because of their slow reproduction rate.
"Bass Rock, for example, has the largest gannet colony in the north and it's an amazing spectacle - but the gannets are jam packed next to each other, with less than a couple of feet between them so it's inevitable that any infectious disease is going to hit them very badly. It's got into our wild bird population from domestic populations - it is our encroachment into the natural world that has released these pandemics."
Like Attenborough, Fothergill is essentially an optimist - but with reservations. "I spend a lot of time in the polar regions, and I've seen that climate change is happening faster than anyone predicted - and it's terrifying. Many of the things we're seeing now, the scientists were predicting would be 10 to 15 years away.
"There's a lot to make you pessimistic but there is no doubt that nature's ability to recover is extraordinary and that is the one big hope to hang onto. Given the chance, nature can really bounce back - I've seen examples of that. I think the big change in David in the last 5-10 years is his urgency to communicate the issue and devote his time to supporting things."
Wild Isles has been five years in the making and is divided into five episodes featuring key British habitats - woodlands, grasslands, freshwater and marine. Despite often being hampered by the weather, Fothergill says they managed to capture some exceptional sequences.
He is thrilled that they managed to film golden eagles in the depleted Caledonian pine forests in Scotland. "That's really rare. For two years running we failed to capture it, but then we got some amazing footage of golden eagle chicks." There is also a sequence about the large blue butterfly, deemed extinct in the UK back in the 70s, "but we now have a greater population than in the whole of the rest of the world put together, so it's a good, positive story. And its life cycle is amazing: the caterpillar falls to the ground where it's picked up by ants and it tricks them by releasing pheromones, and then imitates the call of the ant queen. The ants take the butterfly caterpillar back to their nest, and the caterpillar then eats all the larvae of the ants and finally pupates in the ant nest - so it's quite a con."
It is clear that Fothergill is still enthralled by nature and all its mysteries and complications. He's completely animated when talking about foxes stalking june bugs, tawny owls hunting starlings in their roosts, black-headed gulls chasing puffins to make them regurgitate sand eels, golden eagles taking barnacle geese on the wing, bluefin tuna off the coast of Cornwall - all of which, thanks to the luxury of time, budget and good technology, they managed to capture for the series. "There are four or five sequences per episode that could very happily shine in any of the Planet series - they're not just interesting in the British context."
It was his early life in Norfolk which fostered Fothergill's interest in wildlife. Aged 12, he would cycle to the bird reserve at Cley to volunteer. "For as long as I can remember I've been absolutely passionate about birds." He would get excited every year about the arrival of the swallows (and later proposed to his wife Melinda as the swallows flew overhead) and he still finds their arrival stirring now. "Even more so actually. It's the beginning of spring."
Fothergill went to Harrow, where his father was a schoolmaster. He had a biology teacher called Michael Thain who would take a group of proteges off on field trips. "I remember he once organised an expedition to see the Caucasus black cock in Iran." The Shah of Iran was an old Harrodian and the plan was to stay in his palace. "But we crashed our Land Rover in Yugoslavia and that was the end of it - which was lucky, because a month later he was deposed and we would have been there."
It was Thain who inspired Fothergill's initial ambition to be a research biologist. His mother had wanted him to be a vet. "Something sensible like that. I had to promise her I'd never grow a beard, or wear white socks with sandals." He studied zoology at St Andrews and then moved to Durham, and the day after he graduated he went for an interview at the BBC Natural History unit in Bristol. He worked on children's natural history shows and The Really Wild Show, and from there he moved to directing Wildlife on One, which was where he first met David Attenborough.
"It was a very useful series for filmmakers making their first film for the BBC," Attenborough once told me. "It needed some kind of continuity, so I did all the narration. One of these was a film on carmine bee-eaters. Lovely film. I wanted to change a few things, I always do, and normally some chap comes in and agrees and says thank you very much. But in walked this young turk, Alastair. I made my suggestions, and he questioned them, and there was a sort of squaring-off, in which we were establishing what our relative positions were."
They hit it off though, and then worked together on The Trials of Life, and in 1992 Fothergill was made director of the NHU, which was the place to be in those days if you wanted to make wildlife films. He resigned five years later, in order to become series producer of the vastly successful Blue Planet, followed by Planet Earth, Frozen Planet and The Hunt. He left the BBC to work for Disney, where he produced several movies, and co-founded Silverback Films in 2012, with Keith Scholey. In 2019 they made the critically acclaimed Our Planet for Netflix, and since then he has made a film for DisneyNature which follows the life cycle of a female polar bear.
The film took four years to make. "I've wanted to do it forever. Going to Svalbard we noticed that polar bears are hunting differently now because the ice breaks up earlier - and they have resorted to hunting caribou and climbing steep cliffs to steal birds eggs. They're very clever, and the only animals that hunt human beings. I have great respect for them, because they're exquisitely beautiful and so well-adapted for the habitat they live in, which is the most amazing scenery on the planet."
"In 20 or 30 years the polar bears will be largely extinct, though there will be some remnant populations, and my next project will focus on the Arctic, because it's at the cutting edge of climate change."
He is very excited about Wild Isles - "it's nature at its best in our own backyard" - and they have a bit more filming to do, including returning to Skomer, where 97% of the world's population of Manx Shearwaters live - and the plan is to film them fledging. "When the chicks take their very first flight (headed for Brazil) they have to find a high place and the warden assures me that one of them will climb onto David's head for take off."
That, if it happens, would be TV gold.
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