Sony BBC Earth has been showcasing stories of curiosity and adventure taking viewers to corners of the globe otherwise unexplored. The channel’s landmark natural history shows have always struck a chord with the viewers and a very important role in making these shows successful has been played by Sir David Attenborough. Celebrating the birthday of Sir David Attenborough, Sony BBC Earth airs a month-long property titled ‘Chronicles of Sir David Attenborough’. The birthday special Anthology showcases the best from David Attenborough’s career spanning over 68 years in the wild including premieres – Micro Monsters and Natural Curiosities (season 4). Below are the excerpts of his conversation on his recent show The Green Planet.
Why did you decide to focus on plants for this series?
Private Life of Plants, exploited time-lapse, bringing plants to life by speeding up the action so that you could see them grow, blossoms open, and so on. But what could we do that was new? Well, the thing that really is new, is that in Private Life of Plants we were stuck with all this very heavy, primitive equipment, but now we can take the cameras anywhere we like. So you now have the ability to go into a real forest, you can see a plant growing with its neighbours, fighting its neighbours or moving with its neighbours, or dying. And it’s that in my view, is what brings the thing to life, and which should make people say, ‘Good lord, these extraordinary organisms are just like us’. In the sense that they live and die, that they fight, they have to fight for neighbours, they have to learn to reproduce and all those sorts of things. But just that they do them so slowly, so we’ve never seen that before. And that has a hypnotic appeal, in my view.
What would you hope that the audience will take away from watching the series?
That there is a parallel world on which we depend, and which up to now we have largely ignored if I speak on behalf of urbanised man. Over half the population of the world according to the United Nations are urbanised, live in cities, only see cultivated plants and never see a wild community of plants. But that wild community is there, outside urban circumstances normally, and we depend upon it. And we better jolly well care for it.