Thirty-six years ago, when Mike Gunton joined the BBC’s Natural History Unit at the start of his career as an enthusiastic young producer, he was told he would be working on David Attenborough’s very last programme. It was The trials of life, a study of animal behavior, and Attenborough, then in his sixties, decided it was time to stop. “Well, that seems hilarious now,” says Gunton. “I don’t know how many series he has done since then, but it must be at least twenty. Long may it last.”
The pair have been working together for almost four decades – Gunton is now 66 and Attenborough 97 – and their latest project is Planet Earth III, the final episode of which airs tonight. Like its two predecessors, which aired in 2006 and 2016, the series has brought us spectacular stories from across the animal kingdom – from a minute-old ostrich cub searching for its mother in the Namib Desert to a group of courageous seals who driving away great white sharks off the coast of South Africa. But a new element to the show, and one that is increasingly present in Attenborough’s other programmes, is the message: this series is all about how animals are forced to adapt, to survive the challenges they face in a world changed by people.
“I’ve done a lot of shows in my life,” says Gunton, “but this is definitely a very important one. It still feels like we have the Planet Earth tingle, in the sense that it tells us wonderful things about nature, but we also say something about being sensitive to how heavily we tread on our planet.” Planet Earth III certainly shows our negative impact on animal life (for example, turtles on Australia’s Raine Island are dying en masse as temperatures rise). But it also shows how we are innovating to improve the situation (while whales were threatened with extinction 40 years ago, a ban on commercial whaling has reduced their numbers to around 12,000). “Right now is a very intriguing time to observe the natural world, and it is also somewhat concerning. But there are parts that make you hopeful, and that should be reflected in the programs.”
In some ways, a lot has changed since Gunton and Attenborough started working together. Attenborough wasn’t a fan of drones when they first arrived on the scene. They continually malfunctioned, and he had to take countless takes walking through a meadow or a jungle as the camera on the drone zoomed out to reveal him on location. “He’s a convert now and he definitely thinks the drone is the key, the breakthrough, in the perspective that it can give you on what’s happening in nature,” says Gunton. Technological progress has been enormous in recent decades. “He is amazed at the leap we have made in the way we use robotic cameras,” Gunton adds. “We can take audiences beyond where the human eye can reach.”
If someone ever asked me, ‘What are your memories of him?’, one of the main things I would say is that we are rolling around laughing, sometimes at the absurdity of the world and the absurdity of what we do.
In other areas nothing has changed at all. Attenborough has always had stories of ‘a penchant for bird courtship’ in his shows, and always will. ‘There’s a series in it Planet Earth III with the tragopan, a very strange bird that lives in China and exhibits very complex and bizarre courtship behavior,” says Gunton. “I don’t think it was ever filmed in the wild. And of all the things we showed David, it was the one that made his eyes light up.” And Attenborough has always been “hilarious,” says Gunton. “If anyone ever asked me, ‘What are your memories of him?’, one of the main things I would say is that we’re rolling around laughing, sometimes at the absurdity of the world and the absurdity of what we do . He is a brilliant storyteller.”
So does Gunton. We’re well over our time slot on Zoom and I can tell he’d happily tell stories for hours about his and Attenborough’s adventures (I hear he’s sent Attenborough into battle with warrior-like termites in Nigeria, and the pair sit, surrounded by butterflies in the Downe Bank Nature Reserve in Kent). Gunton didn’t always think he would delve into natural history – he initially wanted to be a social documentarian – but during his time as a zoology student at the University of Bristol, a paleontology professor took him under his wing and he became an “obsessive” pupil. After going to Cambridge to do a PhD in zoology, he returned to Bristol to work at the BBC’s Natural History Unit, where he is now creative director.
He says Attenborough’s “curiosity has remained absolutely boundless over the years”. When Gunton visits Attenborough’s home in Richmond, “there’s a stack of books on the piano that he’s reading and working his way through.” He’ll say, ‘Did you read this? Did you see this?’ It’s that kind of constant science. He’s so busy. It’s crazy. He’s away at this event and that event and some library here, and the energy is amazing.
He tells me a story to prove that point. During the filming of The green planet, which came out last year, there was a sequence in which Attenborough gave a presentation from a rowboat on a lake in Croatia. It was planned that Gunton, thirty years younger than Attenborough, would do most of the rowing when the cameras were not rolling, but Attenborough was having none of it. At the first opportunity he jumped onto the rowing chair. ‘I’m going to row. No, no, I will. I’ll do it,” Gunton remembers insisting. “We started getting competitive because he was a rugby player at university [in Cambridge] and I. I said, ‘Look, come on, I’m a rower.’ He said, ‘No, we rugby players, we can row as well as you can.’ So as a 94-year-old, he rowed that boat about a mile, and it was a big, heavy boat. Working with him in his nineties is not that difficult, because he can do almost everything.”
Although Attenborough is taking to the field less and less these days, Gunton says his influence on the series goes far beyond his story. “This has been his format ever since he created it Life on earth [in 1979]. So these shows effectively change or revolve around the edges of that format, with its DNA there all the time. Gunton says that with every shot and storyline in the series, he thinks, “How is this going to be told by David?” He will also bounce ideas off Attenborough and seek his advice on trickier scenes.
Attenborough is the right man to ask this. He has forever been the greatest influence on nature programming. His playful stories have us captivated by the antics of everything from spindly weeds in the ground to tiny sea angels in the ocean. Seeing nature in this awe-inspiring way taught us all about the wonders of the world and the need to protect them. And many others – most recently Morgan Freeman, who presented the inferior Life on our planet on Netflix – have failed to replicate its magic.
The last time Attenborough actually went out on location for a series, doing hardcore expeditions, was for The Green Planet. “We went to Costa Rica and all over America and to the deserts of Central and South America,” says Gunton. “And we went to just outside the Arctic Circle in Finland, and to Slovenia. He loved it. Beforehand we talked about how many days we would have, and we said, you know, maybe three weeks or something in total. And his daughter was there, who he works with a lot, and she said, ‘Look, you have to be careful, don’t spend too many days.’ And when she went out to make us a cup of tea, he turned to me and whispered, ‘Actually, let’s do another couple of days!’ That pretty much sums him up. He was 94.”
Gunton struggles to imagine a future without Attenborough guiding us through the natural world. “Forty years ago I was the new kid on the block in the natural history department,” he says. ‘And they said, ‘Of course this is David’s last series, so we have to think about who’s going to take over.’ And that’s something people have been talking about ever since. I think it’s one of those things where we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, but right now it seems to be running on six cylinders.”
He laughs as he admits he “cheekily” asked Attenborough if he would ever retire. Attenborough’s answer? “I don’t know what that word means.”
The final episode of ‘Planet Earth III’ airs on Sunday December 10 at 6.20pm on BBC One