Life on Earth, the gorillas

Some thresholds in the history of an idea are crossed not by argument but by a single image that refuses to be unseen. The case for kinship between humans and the other great apes had been made for over a century in books, in laboratories, in the careful diagrams of comparative anatomy. It waited, all the same, for a man to lie down in the leaf-litter of a Rwandan forest and let a young gorilla put her hand on his head while a camera was running.

THE BROADCASTER

David Frederick Attenborough was born at Isleworth on the eighth of May 1926, second son of the principal of University College, Leicester. He read natural sciences at Clare College, Cambridge, and joined the BBC in 1952, the year before the Coronation, when television was still a tentative grey rectangle in a minority of British sitting-rooms. By the late nineteen-seventies he had spent a quarter of a century making the camera follow animals into places the camera had not previously been welcome. Zoo Quest, the early expeditions to Borneo and Paraguay, the controllership of BBC Two, the colour service, the commissioning of Civilisation and The Ascent of Man: by his fifty-second year he had built, more thoroughly than any other man alive, the editorial grammar of television about the natural world. Life on Earth, conceived in 1976 and shot across thirty-nine countries over three years, was to be the summation. Thirteen episodes, three thousand million years, one presenter. The twelfth episode would deal with the primates. The primates would have to include the great apes. The great apes meant, in practice, Rwanda.

THE APPROACH

It is twenty past two on an afternoon in the late winter of 1978, on the upper slopes of Mount Visoke in the Virunga volcanic forest, two thousand and seven hundred metres above sea level, in heavy equatorial cloud-light through the high-altitude bamboo. The camp at Karisoke, run for ten years by the American primatologist Dian Fossey, is an hour's climb below. The cameraman Martin Saunders has set the Arriflex 16mm on a low tripod twenty feet behind the presenter, who is on his stomach in the moss-and-leaf-litter in the khaki of the field-uniform. The sound recordist John Pearson is fifteen feet behind Saunders with the Nagra and a rifle microphone on a boom. The silverback, the one Fossey calls Digit in her field notes, is six feet beyond the presenter. Behind the silverback, at twelve feet, the adult female Macho. Three feet in front of the presenter, in the moss, sits a juvenile female of about four years, head tilted, watching the small pale primate on the ground watching her. The script in the coat-pocket, forty-five seconds long, gives a piece-to-camera on the six-cohort social structure of the mountain-gorilla family group. The script assumes a respectful distance. The distance is now three feet and is closing.

A SECOND OF TIME IN THE VIRUNGA

The juvenile reaches her left hand toward his hair. He registers, in the order in which a broadcaster's mind sorts these things, the following facts. The camera is rolling; Saunders, the best wildlife cameraman the BBC has ever employed, has in the past five seconds made the unspoken decision to keep rolling rather than break cover. The microphone is live. The silverback, immensely more powerful than any man in the clearing, has not moved. The juvenile is now in physical contact with his scalp and the script is, in the simple operational sense, the wrong instrument: it was written for a voice pitched to carry across a clearing, and the voice that can be used in the next ninety seconds is a whisper, no louder than the rustle of leaves under a hand. He has spent twenty-six years learning when to read the autocue and when to put it down. The argument the script was going to make in the formal register has to be made now in the register of a man who does not wish to startle a child. He whispers into the microphone, by the transmitted broadcast, There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know. He goes on, still whispering, about sight and hearing and the sense of smell, about social groups and permanent family relationships, about the immense power of the creature behind the juvenile, and ends, if there were ever a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature's world, it must be with the gorilla. The juvenile sits down on his foot and begins, with the unhurried courtesy of her species, to groom his hair.

THE WITHDRAWAL

She stays in close contact for approximately five minutes, by the entry Fossey makes in the Karisoke journal that evening. The silverback holds his ground at six feet and makes no aggressive movement. Macho holds hers behind him. The party of three withdraws at twenty past three, when the cloud-cover closes over Visoke and the light is no longer sufficient for the camera. They walk down to Karisoke without speaking much. The footage, edited in London the following summer, runs to three minutes and thirty-five seconds in the transmitted cut.

KARISOKE

Dian Fossey is thirty-six years old that winter and has been on the mountain since 1967. She receives the BBC party with the wary hospitality of a woman who has learned the hard way which strangers cost her gorillas and which do not. The silverback Digit, the dominant male of the family group the team has filmed, had in fact been killed by poachers in December 1977, the year before the shoot; the silverback the camera caught in the bamboo was his successor, a confusion the later DVD reissues quietly corrected. Fossey will be murdered in her cabin at Karisoke on the twenty-sixth of December 1985, fifty-three years old, the killer never identified. None of this is known in the clearing in the late winter of 1978. What is known, in the clearing, is that the camera was rolling and the gorilla did not flinch.

THE BROADCAST

Life on Earth is transmitted in the United Kingdom in thirteen weekly episodes from the sixteenth of January to the tenth of April 1979. The audience for each episode is, by the BBC's own audit, about fifteen million in the UK. The global cycle of 1979 and 1980 reaches, by the same count, about five hundred million viewers. Episode 12, Life in the Trees, goes out on the twenty-second of January. The three minutes and thirty-five seconds in the Virunga become, by every careful judgment of the historians of natural-history television, the most influential single sequence in the history of the form. The case for the kinship of the great apes, which had been made on paper since Huxley, has been made on a Sunday evening in fifteen million British sitting-rooms by a man whispering on a forest floor while a young gorilla grooms his hair. Donations to the mountain-gorilla conservation funds rise within the month. The Rwandan government, which had been considering a road through the Virunga, reconsiders. The mountain-gorilla census, which stands at about two hundred and fifty in 1978, will recover by 2018 to one thousand and sixty-three, the only great-ape population in the world to grow rather than decline across the late twentieth century.

RETURN

The career runs on for nearly half a century after the clearing. The knighthood in 1985, the Order of Merit in 2005, the further series, the trust, the late-life turn to climate. The whisper in the moss is, by long consensus, the moment at which the modern conservation-television tradition begins, the moment at which a medium previously content to describe the natural world commits itself to defending it. The argument that the great apes are our kin, that the line drawn around the human is thinner than the eighteenth century needed it to be, has been won not by a treatise but by a glance held for five minutes between two primates on a Rwandan hillside, with the cloud closing and the camera running. The seventh generation of the family group is, in 2025, still on the slopes of Visoke. The Arriflex is in a museum. The film, on its three minutes and thirty-five seconds of celluloid, holds a juvenile female with her hand in a fifty-two-year-old man's hair, and the man, in a voice no louder than the leaves, conceding the point.