Who am I?

Another instalment in the Goat's rather easy series

1. I was born in Isleworth and grew up on campus at University College, Leicester, where my father was principal. I had two brothers, one of whom became a famous lachrymose actor. My parents also fostered two refugee Jewish girls for seven years during the war.

2. As a child I got paid to source newts needed for the university zoology department for three pence each, obtaining them at night from a pond five yards from the department.

3. I joined the BBC and became a famous presenter, though was originally discouraged from appearing on camera because my teeth were too big.

4. I presented Zoo Quest, between 1954 and 1963, travelling to tropical countries with people from London Zoo to capture animals for their collection. I regret it now because these animals never bred in captivity, nor were likely to breed. Here I am chasing a giant ant-eater.

   

5. I became controller of BBC 2 in 1965, and introduced an eclectic mix of programming, including Civilisation, the Money Programme, Man Alive, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Old Grey Whistle Test and Pot Black, credited with the unfortunate boom of the sport in the 1980s.

6. I turned down Terry Wogan’s application to be a presenter on the channel, because we already had an Irish announcer and to have two Irishmen presenting on BBC Two “would have looked ridiculous”.

7. I pioneered the introduction of colour TV in the UK, winning a race against the Germans to introduce it. It started in July 1967 with the Wimbledon tennis championships. I pushed successfully for the balls to be bright yellow rather than white for easier visibility on TV, and the change stuck. Remarkably, 5,000 gullible people had already bought colour TVs, despite all programmes previously being in black and white. Colour TVs cost £300 then, around £7,000 in today’s money, and more than four times what you can pick one up for now.

8. I became Director of Programmes for both channels in 1969 and was being recommended to be Director-General in 1972. But I wanted to return to programme-making and resigned in 1973.

9. I produced and presented Life on Earth in 1979. The 13 episode series took three years to make, filmed in 100 locations with a team of 30 travelling an aggregate of 1.3 million miles and with the help of 500 scientists.

10. One cameraman spent hundreds of hours filming Darwin’s frog. The male incubates babies in its mouth and then spits them out. After 180 hours watching a frog he left for a quick loo break and returned to see the babies sitting beside the father. We eventually got one to spit on camera. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004j5y9

11. The most famous clip is of me cuddling gorillas in Rwanda. I originally wanted to get close to film a piece about their opposable thumbs, but then a female and two young gorillas began to groom and play with me. “I was just about to start talking, when I felt a hand come up on my head, and she twisted my head so she could look straight in my eyes, and looked inside my mouth and put her finger in my mouth”. I was transported. It was one of the most erotic privileged moments of my life”. The director reminisced: “I thought my God his head’s going to come off and we haven’t finished the series yet”. Unfortunately only a few seconds had been recorded because the cameraman was running low on film and wanted to save it for the opposable thumb description.

12. On the way to Kigali airport with the film canisters, we were intercepted and taken to an army compound, where for a good while it looked as if we might be shot. We also ran into trouble in Iraq, about to go to war with Iran, but luckily

    our associate producer leant across the desk of a distracted official, stamped the team’s passports himself, and we legged it.

13. Over the next 35 years I produced a further nine series in the Life Collection, covering more or less all life on land (except humans). Then I did Blue Planet and Ocean to cover the sea. It’s estimated I have narrated over 343 hours of documentary content and 212 hours as a presenter, in a career spanning eight decades.

14. I was easily top of a recent poll on national treasures, ahead of Judi Dench in second and Stephen Fry in third. The King was fourth. I am also the most favoured person to be a non-elected head of state.

15. Not everyone loves me. Environmentalist George Monbiot has attacked me for years, lamenting that I waste my uniquely influential position by shying away from alarmist messages of environmental collapse which would turn viewers off.

    Monbiot says wildlife filmmakers “have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict. They are telling a false story, creating a fairytale world which persuades us that all is well, in the midst of an existential crisis”.

16. I think that’s harsh, I’ve been talking about climate change for more than 20 years, and have become more and more pro-activist. I was in favour of the student strike started by Greta Thunberg in 2019, saying “my generation is no great example for understanding – we have done terrible things.'

17. In the 2019 Netflix documentary Our Planet, I showed walruses falling to their death off a cliff in Siberia, blaming climate change, though some critics accused me of a “tragedy porn climate hoax” claiming they were stampeded off by a polar bear. You can choose who you want to believe, Britain’s foremost national treasure with 72 years of broadcasting experience, or a Daily Telegraph article quoting a climate change denying Canadian zoologist who was fired the same year.

18. In 2016 I was the subject of death threats and calls for an FBI investigation after suggesting Donald Trump could be shot. National treasure status confirmed.

19. By the way I hate this national treasure thing. According to my long-term colleague Mike Gunton: “I say hates it… If anybody says he’s a national treasure, he sort of slightly raises his eyebrows and says, “Really?” That’s a generational thing.’

20. There’s only one animal I don’t like - rats, which I trace back to a night in the Solomon Islands during a thunderstorm, when I woke up to find them running across my bed and the floor of my hut.

21. I can’t drive and have not passed my driving test (yet).

22. I am 100 years old today!

Happy 100th birthday, mystery celebrity.