More tales from the natural history of TV’s big beast of the wildlife world

It’s somehow heartening to know that even a consummate professional like Sir David Attenborough has a chink in his armour.

He may be the man who gained exclusive access to mountain gorillas in Rwanda and whose tales of the wild have earned him various Baftas, a host of industry prizes and of course a knighthood. However, show him a rat and the trademark hushed delivery turns into something altogether more animated.

“I don’t mean that I mildly dislike them as I dislike, let us say maggots. I mean that if a rat appears in a room, I have to work hard to prevent myself from jumping on the nearest table,” he confesses in his latest book, New Life Stories, a collection of tales from his prize-winning Radio 4 series.

He recalls staying in a thatched hut in a village in the Solomon Islands while filming when a thunderstorm broke out one night. “As I lay with my eyes closed trying to sleep, I felt a movement on the sheet around my feet. I flicked on my torch and there was a rat running across me. I looked around. There were rats everywhere.”

Needless to say, he abandoned the hut and took his chances with the elements instead. On another occasion, while filming at a temple in India his suspicions about the rodent population were confirmed when early one night one invaded his lodge.

“I was sat on the toilet and a rat leapt right up between my thighs. The fact is that out in the bush, animals are frightened of you and if things get rough you can always do something to scare them off. The thing about rats is that they are not scared off and they actually invade the area where you think you are boss. But I suspect my irrational horror of them comes from the fact that they live at such close quarters with us and while they sensibly keep out of the way when they can they don’t have any real fear of us.”

Since he began his broadcasting career in 1952 – a few years before he actually owned a television – Sir David has become the voice of wildlife documentaries. A favourite of impressionists, the 85-year-old is marking 60 years of natural history programme-making in typical fashion. He already has three new projects in the pipeline and more will most likely follow.

A new series, Frozen Planet, which he filmed recently at the North and South Poles will be shown this autumn, later this year he is off to Borneo for another programme and he is also working on a new 3D series about plants in Kew gardens.

Sir David admits much has changed since he joined the BBC as a trainee producer fresh from Cambridge University and after two years in the Royal Navy. With serious documentaries having to compete for attention amid a myriad of other channels, commissioning editors now have a tendency to go for extremes.

So in recent years we have seen Bear Grylls use the corpse of a sheep as a sleeping bag and watched Steve Backshall carve out a ratings-winning career as presenter of programmes called Deadly 60 and Inside the King Cobra. Before them, there was Steve Irwin, the self-styled Crocodile Hunter who died after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Sir David, who has always kept his pieces to camera to a minimum, is a great believer in letting the footage do most of the talking

“In many adventure programmes, the natural history becomes the supporting cast,” he says. “They are deliberately programmes where someone who the audience can identify with will be meeting snakes or whatever it is, which is a slightly different type of programme to the ones I make. I did adventure programmes back in the 1950s, but in more recent years I’ve tried to do documentaries where natural history is the star.

“However, people drawn to those Boys’ Own adventures often discover that natural history in itself is rather interesting and will try other programmes. I don’t think adventure programmes are damaging providing you don’t maltreat the animals.

“If Steve Irwin is to be criticised at all – and I should add that I think he did a hell of a lot of good and gave vast sums of money to nature conservation – sometimes natural history seemed more of a supporting act for Steve to grapple with. It could seem as though, ‘There’s the snake, let’s go and grab it’, but it’s not a major sin.”

Sir David’s own love affair with the natural world began collecting fossils as a child. Growing up in Leicester he won a scholarship to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge, but he fears many of the early opportunities he had for adventure have been lost.

“All kids have the potential I did, but the problem these days is that they have little chance of encountering these things. The United Nations tells us that over 50 per cent of the world’s population is urbanised, living in towns.”

While Sir David has acquired a loyal following of fans over his six decades in the business, he has had his critics. In the past, some have accused him of not appearing passionate enough about saving the planet and guilty of promoting the idea of an idyllic wilderness.

Not true, he says. In recent years he has attached his support to BirdLife International, set up to stop the killing of albatrosses, and been a high profile backer of the World Wildlife Fund’s campaign to have part of Borneo’s rainforest designated a protected area.

“I spend more time involved in conservation issues in my private life than I do on the screen,” he says. “And nobody’s going to save things unless they know what they are and what makes them interesting. You can’t go out and raise money to conserve something that people have never heard of.

“Some people say you should never do any natural history programme unless you say that nature is under threat and it’s the viewers fault. That’s absurd. It’s like saying you’re only allowed to make a programme about human beings if they’re in hospital.”

Until recently, Sir David used to spend a third of the year abroad, but age, he says, has inevitably caught up with him.

“I can’t climb trees as energetically as I used to and I can’t walk all day – indeed, I find it hard to walk about 100 yards. I’m 85, I don’t behave like a 25-year-old. The truth is I actually loathe getting on aeroplanes and seeing that seething mass of humanity queuing. However, I tell myself that once I’m at my destination it’s going to get better. And it always does.”

Sir David has lived in the same rambling Victorian house in Surrey since 1952 and his career has long been a family affair. While his wife Jane died in 1997 from a brain haemorrhage on the eve of their 47th wedding anniversary, his daughter Susan is his personal assistant and his son, Robert, has followed in his footsteps by becoming an anthropologist.

He admits he’s lucky to have fulfilled many of his earlier ambitions, but even now in his 80s there are still a few things on the “to do” list.

“I yearn to go to the Gobi Desert, but I never shall because the BBC pays me to film animals and the Gobi Desert has very few animals.

“However, I’ll always find something to keep me occupied and find the idea of retirement or just relaxing incredibly boring. Sitting at the seaside with a bucket and spade is what you do when your children are small, but since my grandchildren are now in their 20s they’re not bucket and spade kids any more. My holiday will be going off to Borneo.”

New Life Stories by David Attenborough is published by Collins, priced £20. The final programme in the Life Stories series will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on July 1.