Emilie Sandy/BBC
Attenborough Stories David Attenborough is the subject of this program on PBS stations on Wednesday nights (check local listings).
"Attenborough's Life Stories," a three-part installment of PBS's "Nature," serves as a David Attenborough retrospective of sorts, with Mr. Attenborough himself the genial host for a tour of his long career as a maker of nature programs.
His perspective, as would be expected, is invaluable, but it is also bittersweet. We see an amazing advance in the quality of nature filmmaking since his early work in the 1950s, but we also see over that time span an assault on wildlife and its habitats all over the globe.
"The natural world is the greatest of all treasures," Mr. Attenborough says at the start of Part 3, "Our Fragile Planet." "And yet in my lifetime we have damaged it more severely than in the whole of the rest of human history."
Mr. Attenborough was born in 1926 and got into the nature-program business as a young producer helping to film zoo animal snaring expeditions (incursions that, as he notes, have gone out of fashion, as views of conservation have evolved and zoos have developed breeding programs). Merely noting the changes in technological ability and program style over his career would make for an entertaining tour, and does.
Part 1, "Life on Camera," on Wednesday night, leads you to appreciate just how good viewers have it today by revisiting indistinct black-and-white footage from programs like "Zoo Quest," the BBC series that first brought Mr. Attenborough to public attention in the 1950s. He recalls the difficulties of getting those long-ago shots and juxtaposes them with impossibly clear and close-up images from more recent years, when cameras have been able to film inside burrows and pitch-black caves. The program tends to make it sound as if Mr. Attenborough's crews were the only ones fueling the advances in nature filmmaking, but it's enjoyable nonetheless.
Part 2, "Understanding the Natural World," looks at how nature filmmaking and scientific advances have complemented each other over the years. Mr. Attenborough recounts a particularly delicious example from his 1998 series, "The Life of Birds," one that revealed shocking moral corruption among hedge sparrows. Observers had long assumed that those birds and many other types were monogamous, but DNA testing said otherwise. And patient camera operators eventually caught a female bird slipping away from her mate for a quickie with another male.
In Part 3, Mr. Attenborough's dismay at how humans have treated the natural world is evident. But he tries as well to find reasons for hope, both in the resilience of life and in the work of some naturalists and scientists to reverse the damage. It's clear from the melancholy in his voice, though, that this man who has seen so many wonders of nature is worried that future generations may not have the same privilege.
Nature
Attenborough's Life Stories
On PBS stations on Wednesday nights (check local listings).
Produced by Thirteen and the BBC in association with WNET. Alastair Fothergill, executive producer; Fred Kaufman, executive producer for Nature; David Attenborough, presenter.
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