Attenborough

On an afternoon in the late winter of 1978, in the Virunga volcanic forest of Rwanda, near the Karisoke research camp of the American primatologist Dian Fossey, the BBC natural-history cameraman Martin Saunders and the sound recordist John Pearson, working with the broadcaster David Attenborough (then in his fifty-second year and the executive producer of the Life on Earth series), filmed the thirteen-episode sequence that has become, by every careful judgment of natural-history television, the most-watched and most-influential single piece of wildlife broadcasting of the twentieth century. The sequence (Episode 12, Life in the Trees, broadcast in the United Kingdom on the twenty-second of January 1979) involved Attenborough, lying in the moss of the Virunga forest, in the close company of a wild silverback mountain gorilla family. The female of the family came up to him, sat on his foot, and groomed his hair. The male of the family stood behind her at three feet distance. Attenborough, by the planning of the script, was to have delivered a piece-to-camera summary about gorilla social structure; he abandoned the script and whispered, by the transmitted broadcast, the relationship of man and other apes is a very, very close one. There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know. The transmission, by the BBC's audit, was watched by about 500 million people across the first global broadcast cycle of 1979–80, and is, by the modern-television-historian consensus (Joe Moran, Jean Seaton), the foundational sequence of the modern conservation-television tradition.

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