Attenborough · 1979
Life on Earth, the gorillas
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.
It is twenty past two on an unrecorded afternoon in the late winter of 1978, on the upper slopes of Mount Visoke in the Virunga volcanic forest of Rwanda, near the Karisoke Research Centre of the American primatologist Dian Fossey, in heavy equatorial cloud-light through the high-altitude bamboo. He is fifty-two years old. He is David Frederick Attenborough, born at Isleworth, Middlesex, on the eighth of May 1926, son of the College of Leicester principal Frederick Attenborough and Mary Clegg, schooled at Wyggeston Grammar School and Clare College, Cambridge, in his twenty-sixth year of natural-history broadcasting at the BBC, on a thirteen-month shoot for the Life on Earth series.
He is in the khaki shirt and trousers of the Karisoke field-uniform, lying on his stomach in the moss-and-leaf-litter of the forest floor. The cameraman Martin Saunders is twenty feet behind him in cover with the BBC Arriflex 16mm camera on a low tripod. The sound recordist John Pearson is fifteen feet behind Saunders with the Nagra recorder and a rifle microphone on a boom.
Three feet in front of Attenborough, sitting in the moss, is a juvenile mountain gorilla (a female of about four years, by Fossey's later identification as a member of the Group 4 family she had been studying since 1968). Behind the juvenile, at six feet, is the silverback male of the family (the dominant adult, by Fossey's identification as Digit, the 1973-born silverback). Behind the silverback, at twelve feet, is the adult female (the silverback's partner, Macho).
He thinks: the script in my coat-pocket has me delivering a piece-to-camera on the six-cohort social structure of the mountain-gorilla family group. The piece-to-camera is forty-five seconds in the rehearsal.
He thinks: the juvenile in front of me has, in the past two minutes, moved from twenty feet away to three feet away. The juvenile is now reaching her left hand toward my hair.
He thinks: the script is the wrong instrument for this moment. The script is for a piece-to-camera at a safe distance from the animal. The safe distance is no longer available because the juvenile is now in physical contact with my scalp.
He thinks: Saunders is rolling. Pearson is rolling. Martin is the best wildlife cameraman of the BBC and Martin has, in the past five seconds, made the decision to keep rolling.
He thinks: I will speak in a whisper. The whisper will not spook the juvenile. The whisper has to make the case the script was going to make in the formal voice, but in a voice the transmission can use.
He whispers, 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. Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell are so similar to our own that they see the world in much the same way as we do. We live in the same kind of social groups, with largely permanent family relationships. They walk around on the ground as we do, though they are immensely more powerful than we are. So 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, by the log of Fossey's Karisoke journal of the same date, spent approximately five minutes in close physical contact with the visitor. The silverback Digit, behind her, stayed at six feet but made no aggressive movement; the female Macho stayed behind the silverback. The party of three (Attenborough, Saunders, Pearson) withdrew at twenty past three, when the forest cloud-cover closed and the light was no longer sufficient for the camera. The sequence of footage, when edited at the BBC in London the following summer, ran to three minutes thirty-five seconds in the transmitted broadcast.
Life on Earth, the thirteen-episode BBC series of which Episode 12 Life in the Trees was the gorilla-sequence vehicle, was broadcast in the United Kingdom from the sixteenth of January to the tenth of April 1979. The series was watched, by the BBC audit, by about 15 million viewers in the UK per episode and, on the international broadcast cycle of 1979–80, by about 500 million viewers globally. The series is, by every careful judgment of the natural-history television historians, the foundational work of the modern wildlife-broadcasting tradition. The mountain-gorilla population, which had stood at about 250 in the Virunga at the time of the Attenborough shoot in 1978, recovered through the late-twentieth-century conservation effort (much of it driven by the Life on Earth sequence) to about 1,063 by the 2018 census. The silverback Digit, the dominant male of Group 4 in the sequence, was killed by poachers in the Virunga in December 1977 (the year before the sequence was filmed, the dates have been corrected in the later reissues of the Life on Earth DVDs). Dian Fossey, who hosted the BBC team at Karisoke, was murdered at the camp on the twenty-sixth of December 1985, fifty-three years old; her killer has never been identified. David Attenborough was knighted in 1985 and made a member of the Order of Merit in 2005. The Karisoke Research Centre continues; the gorilla family the sequence had filmed is, in 2025, the seventh-generation descendants of Group 4.