Sir David Attenborough at 99 remain as relevant as ever with his hard-hitting new documentary Ocean streaming at the same time as the UN Ocean Conference kicks off in Nice today (9 June).
However, it seems that the veteran wildlife expert and conservationist might never have enjoyed his illustrious career had an early outside broadcast taken a different turn.
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In a recently recorded conversation with William, Prince of Wales at London’s Royal Festival Hall to promote the film, Attenborough demonstrated what had happened almost 70 years earlier when he first tried a diving helmet on camera – on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef for the BBC.
As he tried on a fishbowl-style helmet that had been presented to him, the prince warned him that he might not be able to get it off again.
“It is a strange thing to do,” Sir David agreed as he removed the helmet, “and when I put mine on for the first time I suddenly felt water coming round here,” he added, gesturing to his mouth.
“I thought: ‘This can’t be right’. And by the time it got around about there [his nostrils] I think: ‘I’m sure this is not right’. And of course, if you’ve got this thing screwed on top of you, you can’t breathe, you can’t even make yourself heard – you know, get it off me!”
Fortunately he was able to convey his predicament to handlers in time, but the unsympathetic director then demanded that Attenborough give him the helmet so that he could demonstrate its correct use.
“I said: ‘It’s a fault.’ He said: ‘No, look, come on!’ He put it on, and I’m happy to say that he went under the water and he came out even quicker than I did, because there was actually a fault on the thing.”
New world
Prince William remarked that it must have been fascinating for Attenborough to have been diving at a time when comparatively little was known about the underwater world, and to be one of the first people to be able to see and talk about it.
“Once Cousteau invented the aqualung and the face-mask, that was the moment when suddenly you moved into a new world,” agreed Attenborough. “You were flying alongside fish, which was an extraordinary experience, and the fish of course have no reaction to you because they’ve never seen anything like you before.
“The underwater camerapersons are fantastic. There are people who are actually I think happier under water than they are on land.”
When Prince William asked Attenborough about the state of the oceans, he replied: “The awful thing is that it’s hidden from you and from me and most people.
“The thing I was appalled by when I first saw the shots that were taken for this film are what we have done to the deep ocean floor. It is just unspeakably awful.
“If you did anything remotely like it on land, everybody would be up in arms. If this film does anything, if it just shifts public awareness, it’ll be very important. I can only hope that people who see it will recognise that something must be done before we destroy this great treasure.”
Ocean can be seen in cinemas and is now streaming on Disney+, Hulu and National Geographic.
Also on Divernet: Prince William ‘optimistic’ about ocean future, Hard-hitting Attenborough film condemns MPA trawling, Paper parks: ‘Two-thirds of MPAs ineffective’
