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Sceptics said ıt was vulgar!
Sir David Attenborough on his battle to bring colour to BBC2 – and why his next technological leap is virtual-reality TV (even though his own telly still baffles him!). By Jenny Johnston
Sir David Attenborough is hooting with laughter as he recalls the career coup that got away. The year was 1967. He was the controller of BBC2, and charged with the rather epic job of playing midwife at the birth of colour television.
It had already been introduced in the States and Japan, but not to the standard the young Attenborough felt was possible. ‘It was pretty awful actually. In America the quality was not good. It was garish. So when we got word that it was time for us to do it, the race was on to get it right. At the time the Germans were working on it too and, in a very childish way, we wanted to get there first.’
There were myriad technical reasons why it was decided BBC2 should be the first channel to go colour – the smaller scale of the operation made it the obvious choice. But there were also cultural reasons. The younger, hipper BBC channel was supposed to be more culturally on the edge than BBC1. Under Sir David’s tenure it launched the iconic Old Grey Whistle Test, for instance, to bring in a different audience than the more mainstream Top Of The Pops, and the surreal comedy of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Of course it was Wimbledon that launched the colour service, but how interesting that the first programme David commissioned in order to ‘sell’ the idea of colour TV to a surprisingly sceptical audience was an arts show, rather than a gardening one or a natural history special on, say, butterflies. So people were actually against the idea of their TV pictures coming in full technicolour?
‘Oh yes, the reputation of colour TV among newspaper critics wasn’t great. There were viewers – the intelligentsia, I suppose – who said, “We don’t want that. It’s vulgar. It’s horrible.” Part of my job was to
convince them that the colour pictures we could produce were better than anything you’d see in print. I thought the best way of showing that was through art, sculpture, music. I commissioned a 13-part series called Civilisation, which would be shown in colour.’ That show, about the history of mankind, would become the first landmark of colour programming.
The BBC2 designers felt they needed a striking new logo to go with this brave new world, one that would pop up when a programme was available to be viewed in colour (‘For quite some time the vast majority of our audience would only have blackand-white sets,’ he points out). One clearly well-connected colleague came into his office one day with a bright idea. Since they were all about being cutting-edge, why didn’t they ask Pablo Picasso to design the logo for them. ‘I said, “My dear chap, let’s get back to the real world”,’ chuckles Sir David. ‘But he insisted, “No, no, I have a way in. If we offer him a colour TV he’ll be tickled by the idea.” I said, “Don’t be silly. France doesn’t even have colour TV, he wouldn’t be able to get any colour output.” He said, “That’s exactly why it will appeal.”’
Lo and behold, the man was right, and Picasso agreed to ‘do a doodle for us, but with one condition. The composer Stravinsky would have to do the accompanying music.’ Alas, for various reasons the plan came to nothing. ‘It was all off,’ says Sir David, throwing up his arms at what might have been his finest hour. ‘Otherwise I might have had a Picasso hanging there.’ He gestures to the wall behind me. ‘And I’d be worth a million bucks!’
You could argue that as regrets go, this is a minor one. Sir David and his team did land the big prize, getting
getting colour film on the air before the Germans. ‘Just!’ he grins. ‘I think they were three weeks behind us.’ Was the world amazed? ‘Mostly. The critics were largely supportive. I remember them marvelling that they could make out that the Wimbledon player was drinking an orange drink rather than a lime one.’
Some viewers were just too taken with the idea, though. ‘The early sets had a Chroma dial where viewers could turn up the colour themselves, and I used to go into friends’ homes – people I thought had good aesthetic taste – and they’d have turned the dial up all the way. The grass would be lurid green and the sky amethyst. I’d say, “No! Why would you do that? That’s not what the sky looks like in real life.” It was the novelty though.’
The launch proved to be a triumph for Attenborough, and he went on to do not too badly in terms of his own TV career, to the point where his status as a broadcaster and National Treasure rather eclipses his job as one of the most powerful television execs in the country. How glorious that we still have him too, to retell the stories, although even he admits he can’t remember if some are real or invented. For instance, that lovely old tale about the snooker commentator telling viewers watching in black and white that the blue ball was beside the green ball? He laughs.
‘Oh yes, it was real, a joke obviously, but it was real. Or was it? Maybe we’ve all told these stories so much we believe they’re real.’
Hearing about the details makes you appreciate just how much the whole operation was executed on a wing and a prayer. In the earliest days, only two people here had access to a colour TV – Sir David and his producer. ‘They were in the labs. They were the size of washing machines.’
The actual sets were the easy part. More problematic was how to get colour film to them. The switch required massive investment, an overhaul of systems – and the use of techniques that were in their infancy. ‘It was my job to tell everyone how wonderful it would be, but the reality was we didn’t know. I mean, we had a laboratory, and the BBC engineers were incredible, but when the Americans had first tried it, it had been so catastrophic they’d had to shut the system down. We had all sorts of technical issues. We only had two studios and not enough cameras to do what we needed. We could buy more but the technology was developing so quickly we couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t be useless by the time it came to use them.’
He recalls some confusion about whether the BBC studio floors would be robust enough to handle the weight of the equipment. Ironically, the actual filming was a doddle. Colour film had been used since the 1950s out in the field, even by Sir David himself. ‘It was never designed to be shown in colour, but it gave better definition than black-andwhite film. I remember filming in Africa in 1954 in colour. Amazingly, that film was unearthed last year and they showed it again. Astonishing... well, the quality of the colour was astonishing, not necessarily the content. Those were very basic days.’
It’s rather surreal to have him re-create the
excitement, and terror, of those days here in the Richmond, south-west London, home he’s lived in ever since. To say that the advances that have been made since would have been unthinkable then is to put it mildly. ‘Actually, some of the stuff I’m doing now would have been unthinkable ten years ago,’ he admits. He’s just back from the States where he’s been filming a virtual-reality show which lets the viewer interact with him by wearing special goggles. ‘They put them on and there I am, standing in their living room,’ he says, as wide-eyed as a child as he leaps off the chair to demonstrate. ‘I say, “Choose a drawer and open it” then you take out, say, the skull of a sabre-toothed tiger. You can turn it, press a button and make it bigger, smaller, press another button and have it come to life.’
An audience with Sir David, in his own home, is quite something. Today we’re holed up with coffee in his relatively new baby, a vast library built when he bought the abandoned pub next door and added it as an extension onto what was a lovely, but traditional, Richmond villa.
This room, double-levelled to house his vast book collection and full of gleaming glass, is so huge that a grand piano seems dwarfed in the corner. Opposite me are his music and art books, by the thousand surely. His CD collection is huge. ‘The science library is upstairs,’ he nods.
Even without a Picasso on the wall, the room is a testament to a life spent learning. And make no mistake, the maestro is still learning. I ask if he plays the piano. He says ‘not well’ but since this morning he was practising Haydn sonatas we can conclude he’s being modest. He bemoans how he ‘can just about manage a three-part fugue, but the four-part is beyond me. I mean I can play the notes, but I can’t make it sing’, which, if you know about the piano, suggests a certain skill.
What’s interesting is that this room
we’re talking in has no TV. He has a set, of course, but he’s not the sort to make it the centrepiece. Does it have bells and whistles on? ‘Well yes, it has to have because of what I do, but I can’t work it.’ The great Sir David Attenborough, who is television to most of us, can’t work his own TV set? He giggles again. ‘Well, there are four zappers. One for the set, one for Sky, one for the DVD. I don’t really know.’
He’s conservative in his TV tastes. He watches copious natural history programmes, and the news. Drama not so much. And he’s not a soap man. ‘EastEnders? Do you watch it?’ he says, pulling a face. ‘I have nothing against it. It’s visual blotting paper. I mean it’s skilfully written with a narrative people can relate to. I suppose it re-creates the world we’ve lost where we were nosy parkers and knew that the girl next door had got into trouble, and that he’d hit the bottle. Now we live in our little boxes, so I see that it provides that sense of community.’
Social media’s not his thing either. ‘I don’t do it. That is where I am a stick in the mud. I value my privacy. Why should I want anyone to know what I had for breakfast? I mean plenty of people do it, admirable people. I’m not being rude about them, but why? I’m fearful. It’s having a huge effect. All sorts of things are happening that I don’t understand. There are social lunacies, all these murders. I’ve got enough to cope with, thank you very much.’
It’s apt that the man who brought colour to our TV screens has had the brightest of lives himself. And he shows no sign of fading. That the phone still rings delights him. ‘If you’re in the business you know how luck comes into it. I’ve known hugely virtuous people who never had a chance, and hugely famous people who aren’t talented. Yet I’m still getting invited to do amazing things. What sort of luck is that? It’s beyond belief.’
‘My TV set’s got four zappers – I can’t work it’