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[00:00:00] OK? Errrrrrr yeah... wait a minute... no.
[00:00:08] Mindless Wittering Production.
[00:00:12] On set!
[00:00:19] All I knew is I wanted to try and understand the way the world works, the natural world.
[00:00:25] We explore because we are human.
[00:00:30] Science is the storytelling of our time.
[00:00:34] For me, storytelling has always been the way to the Sahara.
[00:00:41] Hello and welcome to Who Moved the Tortoise?
[00:00:44] A podcast about the science and wildlife films that have inspired people.
[00:00:48] I'm Alex Hemingway.
[00:00:50] And I'm Kate Dooley.
[00:00:52] And in each episode we invite someone from the world of science or the media to share the thing that inspired them the most.
[00:00:58] It can be anything. Fiction, comedy, documentary animation, whatever.
[00:01:03] The only rule at Tortoise HQ is that it has to have some kind of science or wildlife content.
[00:01:08] This time we're talking to crossbench peer in the House of Lords, Dr Baroness Alex Freeman.
[00:01:15] Alex studied zoology and animal behaviour at Oxford University before landing at the BBC walking with beasts and dinosaurs.
[00:01:23] While with Aunty she designed award-winning websites and the world's first SMS game to go alongside the epic series she produced.
[00:01:32] She's been trusted with the only set of keys to a nuclear power station for a day, being told to look after your own safety and pop them through my letterbox on your way home.
[00:01:41] Alex's choice for the film or TV show that inspired her is episode 7 of the 1979 BBC David Attenborough series Life on Earth.
[00:02:30] How easy or difficult a choice was that?
[00:02:33] In a way it was easy because it made such an impact on me life on Earth.
[00:02:39] And I don't know whether I watched it when it went out for the first time live because I would have been very young when it went out.
[00:02:46] So maybe I watched it on a repeat.
[00:02:49] And what I remember about watching it was that we watched it all as a family, which was quite a rare thing.
[00:02:55] So it kind of comes with that warm glow of you sitting with your parents and I have a sister and we would all sit together and watch it.
[00:03:04] And also just I was a child who was absolutely fascinated with animals and the environment.
[00:03:12] And I was always bringing in dead animals and, you know, just absolutely obsessed with it.
[00:03:21] Live animals, which was even worse for my parents.
[00:03:25] And life on Earth just kind of really made me from that moment want to work in natural history filmmaking because I wanted to be out there.
[00:03:36] I wanted to be seeing these things and I wanted to be filming them.
[00:03:40] I wanted to be, you know, bringing them into people's living rooms like David Attenborough had with me.
[00:03:44] So right from that early age, I think life on Earth was the most inspiring thing I had seen.
[00:03:51] And it probably shaped my entire life.
[00:03:55] I just don't know where I would have gone with my career if I hadn't watched Life on Earth.
[00:04:03] If there's one place in the world where reptiles still rule, it's here in the Galapagos Islands.
[00:04:10] The ancestors of the reptiles, the amphibians, had wet, permeable skins.
[00:04:17] As a consequence, they couldn't exist for long away from water.
[00:04:21] Reptiles, however, like these marine iguanas, are not so restrictive.
[00:04:26] They can survive in places where amphibians would roast to death within minutes.
[00:04:32] I mean, there are other things that were happening at the time.
[00:04:36] So, you know, it was in context with reading Gerald Durrell books and reading James Herriot books and all of these things that a wildlife obsessed child would be doing.
[00:04:49] So as far as choosing for this, you said to me what was the most influential series.
[00:04:55] I think it was that because it comes right at the start.
[00:04:58] But then, you know, there are so many other really good programs and some of them have been chosen by other people on this podcast.
[00:05:06] So other things I was thinking, I was like, damn, somebody else has had it.
[00:05:10] Which were they?
[00:05:12] I really, really love Parallel Lives.
[00:05:17] Parallel Lives, Parallel Worlds.
[00:05:18] Absolutely brilliant filmmaking.
[00:05:21] Obviously much more recent than Life on Earth.
[00:05:23] And I was already a filmmaker when it came out.
[00:05:25] But I just think that's a stupendous bit of science filmmaking.
[00:05:30] I remember when I spoke to you, Alex, about this.
[00:05:32] And what I loved is there were several different programs almost that stepped you through your career when we spoke.
[00:05:39] So there was a fabulous Carol Vorderman show that we spoke about as well.
[00:05:44] So, I mean, the thing about Life on Earth and watching it back for this really re-emphasized to me is that kind of looking back on it, I imagined that it was, you know, here's this animal, here's this animal, here's this animal.
[00:05:59] But it's absolutely not.
[00:06:00] Woven through it is this storytelling and actually asking questions about, well, how did this happen?
[00:06:08] And how do we know this?
[00:06:09] And I think that's what really inspired me.
[00:06:12] Because as a child, I really wanted to do science.
[00:06:15] I didn't just want to sit and watch animals, which I did quite a lot of.
[00:06:21] But I wanted to know why they were doing what they were doing and how did the world get to be the way it was.
[00:06:28] And I absolutely loved what we now call citizen science.
[00:06:32] So I was a member of my local watch group, which was a conservation group.
[00:06:38] And they used to run sort of scientific experiments that you could do at home.
[00:06:43] And then there was this program that you mentioned, Take Nobody's Word for It, which came on again when I was, I don't know how old I was, but I absolutely loved the fact that there was a pack that you could write off for and you could do these experiments at home.
[00:06:58] And so, you know, I was tinkering in the kitchen with all of these things that you could do.
[00:07:04] And I remember growing plants that allowed you to measure air pollution and just taking part in all of this stuff.
[00:07:12] And the excitement in those days of having a television program that you could kind of be connected with more than just watching it was absolutely brilliant.
[00:07:22] And on BBC Two, what sounds like advice to someone buying a secondhand car?
[00:07:27] As Carol Vorderman and Professor Ian Fells exclaim, take nobody's word for it.
[00:07:52] Carol Vorderman, one of her early shows.
[00:07:55] And it is, it's science, unpacking science for kids with cool experiments that you can do at home.
[00:08:00] And it really reminds me of Fangos the Theory, which, you know, we made so many years later.
[00:08:07] And actually, when you showed me the books, the names on the book are people that I worked with on Fangos the Theory.
[00:08:14] So, you know, there's this continuity, I think, through the generations.
[00:08:18] But yeah, I remember the first episode of it.
[00:08:20] They showed you how to take a photo, put it through a photocopier and then turn it upside down and put it as a print onto a T-shirt.
[00:08:28] So you could make your own printed T-shirts with your own photos on it.
[00:08:33] I mean, genius.
[00:08:34] What child of that era doesn't want to do that?
[00:08:37] If I slide this polystyrene cup of tea, milk, no sugar along the surface of this table, I get a ripple effect.
[00:08:43] But if I push harder, something extraordinary happens.
[00:08:46] Ah, so that's where my tea went, turned into an experiment, eh?
[00:08:50] Until next time, take nobody's word for it.
[00:08:53] Especially engineers during their tea break.
[00:08:55] This kind of hands-on stuff and the fact that these programs were always raising questions in your mind of, you know, why is that happening?
[00:09:05] How does that work?
[00:09:07] All of these things that annoying children like me are probably pestering their parents about and their parents don't actually know the answers.
[00:09:14] These are people that knew the answers.
[00:09:16] And you felt kind of connected to them in a pre-internet way because you could write into shows, you could do these experiments.
[00:09:27] And, you know, the results that everybody had come up with would be featured later in the series.
[00:09:34] So that kind of interactivity with the television programs in those days was also really appealing.
[00:09:41] Life on Earth was this huge, grand, epic international series.
[00:09:47] And it was absolutely telling the story of evolution, which, you know, when you look around at the world around you and you're obsessed with nature,
[00:09:57] the question of how did it all come to be this way and how do fossils fit in?
[00:10:04] The story of evolution was really, you know, important.
[00:10:09] And it sounded such an exciting thing to be discovering.
[00:10:14] And I absolutely loved watching it back.
[00:10:16] I'd forgotten some of the elements.
[00:10:18] So there's this bit where he's talking about why did the dinosaurs go extinct?
[00:10:22] And he actually says, well, you know, one of the clues, there are these theories and he outlines, you know, maybe they were competing with mammals.
[00:10:30] And one of the clues, he says, is to look at an ant's nest and that kind of logical leap of the sort of problem solving thoughts that scientists have of, you know,
[00:10:43] how could we test this hypothesis?
[00:10:45] Well, look at ant's nests.
[00:10:47] What?
[00:10:47] What?
[00:10:48] And so he gets down on his hands and knees and he's saying, look, you can see they're basically doing miniature excavation for you.
[00:10:55] And they're digging up all of these bits.
[00:10:57] And amongst these bits, you can see these tiny fossil mammal teeth.
[00:11:02] And that shows you how small these mammals really were.
[00:11:05] And they couldn't possibly have been competing with these huge dinosaurs.
[00:11:09] The ants in this part of the world roof their nests with gravel.
[00:11:13] And amongst the little chips of stone that they so laboriously haul here are things like, like this.
[00:11:23] This is the tooth of a tiny mammal, a small shrew-like creature.
[00:11:28] And that was the largest mammal that existed in this dinosaur-dominated part of the world.
[00:11:35] It's inconceivable that such tiny creatures could have offered any real direct competition with the dinosaurs.
[00:11:43] No, there are better answers to the problem than that.
[00:11:47] So first of all, it's the fact that he's revealing how scientists think about things and the amazing kind of way in which you have to think laterally to solve your problems and test hypotheses.
[00:12:10] Which, you know, to me at the time was really exciting that, you know, you could have these wacky ideas and follow them through.
[00:12:17] And you could answer these big questions.
[00:12:20] But also the fact that the answer was no.
[00:12:23] You know, this theory isn't right.
[00:12:25] You know, you don't often see that on television.
[00:12:27] They're usually like, when you do this, you expect they're going to look at this.
[00:12:31] And of course, this allowed the scientists to conclude that they were right.
[00:12:34] Blah-de-blah-de-blah.
[00:12:35] But actually, no, the answer was no.
[00:12:37] So it wasn't that.
[00:12:38] So chuck that idea and on to the next scene where he's going to say, so instead there's this.
[00:12:43] And you don't see that very often these days.
[00:12:45] And I just think it's amazing to be showing the real process of science that, you know, you kick out ideas, you test them in fun ways.
[00:12:54] And then sometimes the answer is no and you go on to the next question.
[00:12:58] So, yeah, I can't imagine seeing that in a big landmark series these days where you kind of take people down a blind alley and then move on.
[00:13:08] And the content of it is really quite high level.
[00:13:13] And I went on to study zoology at university.
[00:13:18] And I remember my first year exams.
[00:13:21] And I think I answered an entire question about archaeopteryx purely based on having watched David Attenborough programs.
[00:13:30] Because I hadn't done the work.
[00:13:33] I hadn't done the boring reading.
[00:13:36] What? I'm surprised.
[00:13:37] And instead I'd watch television programs.
[00:13:39] And, you know, there's a lot in them.
[00:13:41] And if as a child you're the kind of child that's taking in all this stuff and, you know, who doesn't take in all this stuff about dinosaurs and all of this, then you can learn an awful lot.
[00:13:51] And I would say, you know, watching it back, there's a lot of kind of first year undergraduate level stuff in those programs.
[00:13:58] And the programs that followed it that I really remember as well are The Velvet Claw, which came out when I was at university and was done partly by one of the people who was a lecturer of mine at university, David MacDonald, which was about the evolution of mammals.
[00:14:19] And that was absolutely fascinating as well, because, again, it's getting at the evolution stuff, you know, the stuff that you can't see around you.
[00:14:28] And so it's telling you stories that you really don't know.
[00:14:31] And Super Sense, which was made by John Downer, who's an incredible natural history producer.
[00:14:38] And that was a program all about seeing things through animals' eyes.
[00:14:44] And that was absolutely revolutionary.
[00:14:47] I remember vividly my father asking me as a child, quite a young child, how can you tell what someone else can see?
[00:14:58] And I remember going through the logic of, yeah, well, you can't just ask them, you know, what's the colour red?
[00:15:04] Can you see red?
[00:15:05] All of these, how would you know?
[00:15:07] And then here it was being applied to other species.
[00:15:10] How can you tell what other animals are sensing?
[00:15:14] What does the world look like to them?
[00:15:16] What does it smell like to them?
[00:15:18] What about animals that can't see and they're sensing things through electro sense?
[00:15:23] And Super Sense tried to represent these other senses in a visual way.
[00:15:30] And again, for me, that was fascinating and mind-blowing and was just opening my mind to all of these things.
[00:15:38] And I went on to study, you know, the evolution of butterfly wing patterns and tried to work out what butterflies could see and how it affected their behaviour and how all of this evolved.
[00:15:51] So basically, everything I watched on television was just then dictating what I was interested in and went away to study.
[00:15:59] So after university, what did you get involved with?
[00:16:02] What is there a TV show that took you on to your next step?
[00:16:06] So I knew that I wanted to work in wildlife filmmaking.
[00:16:09] I had done since I had watched Life on Earth and it hadn't gone away.
[00:16:13] So I thought, you know, I was already writing to the Natural History Unit.
[00:16:18] I wrote to the Natural History Unit when I was, I think I must have been 10.
[00:16:24] And they had this programme called Birdbrain of Britain, where, again, it was one of these things where you could design tests to test animal cognition.
[00:16:37] Southampton, 1921.
[00:16:39] A new type of raid takes place.
[00:16:42] Method of entry, breaking through milk bottle top.
[00:16:45] Object, theft of cream inside.
[00:16:48] Culprit, a blue tit.
[00:16:51] Once learnt, this new technique proves popular and is swiftly copied by other criminals.
[00:16:58] Nowadays, the crime wave has spread all over the country.
[00:17:01] They were asking people to design little tests for birds and you would hide a peanut in and you'd put it in your garden and you'd see if the birds could solve the puzzle.
[00:17:15] Of course, as a child, I did this and I had three little tests on my fence at home.
[00:17:21] And I wrote to the Natural History Unit and Alistair Folligil, who became head of the Natural History Unit and is now in charge of his own production company, Silverback.
[00:17:31] He came as an AP to film me in my garden.
[00:17:35] Of course, this was like a dream come true for me.
[00:17:38] So it was feeding the obsession.
[00:17:40] But yes, so when I was coming to the end of my degree and I was also doing natural history writing.
[00:17:47] So I was writing for BBC Wildlife magazine and I was writing to everyone at the Natural History Unit and pestering them.
[00:17:53] They were looking for camera assistants to help out with some field filming in the UK.
[00:18:00] And there was a cameraman based near Oxford, which is where I was living at the time.
[00:18:06] So I asked him if I could help out and they were making a natural world program about, I think it was kind of turning of the seasons anyway.
[00:18:16] And this cameraman needed somebody to be able to film inside birds nests.
[00:18:22] So I volunteered to go and help and he was going to be going away international filming as well.
[00:18:30] So I built these sets.
[00:18:33] It was supposed to look like the inside of a cavity wall.
[00:18:36] So I sent off for these kind of brick samples, which you can buy if you're building stuff and you want a sample of what your brick wall is going to look like.
[00:18:44] So they send you these really thin bricks.
[00:18:47] You'd have to mortar in between them to make it look like an actual wall.
[00:18:50] So I built these sets out of bricks and with glass tops and glass sides and an entrance for the birds.
[00:18:59] And I built a whole load of these.
[00:19:01] And I was doing this in my student accommodation, you know, trying to build all this stuff together.
[00:19:08] And then he went away international filming and I put these up and he had various friends whose houses we could mount these on and we'd wait to see if the birds would come in.
[00:19:19] And they did.
[00:19:20] And I had to keep an eye on them.
[00:19:21] So he literally went away filming for I don't know how many weeks and left me his car keys.
[00:19:26] And I'm a student who has not done that much driving.
[00:19:30] And he's left me the car keys and I felt so terrified because it was this great big film cameraman's estate car.
[00:19:38] And I had the car keys.
[00:19:40] So I was driving this around the county, going into people's houses and people would just sort of leave me their house keys in certain places.
[00:19:47] And I would go and sneak in into their attics to watch all these birds in their nests.
[00:19:52] And we got it.
[00:19:54] And I remember watching the finished film at home and seeing my name came up and I almost cried.
[00:20:01] I was just going around, running around the house going, I got a credit.
[00:20:04] I got a credit on the thanks to.
[00:20:08] And it was amazing.
[00:20:09] But I remember meeting the producer and she had such a vision for what she wanted in the programme.
[00:20:16] And I thought, oh, I'd never really thought about how the producer thinks visually because I'd always thought quite intellectually about the content.
[00:20:27] And yes, we'll show this behaviour and that behaviour and whatever.
[00:20:30] And I'd thought about programmes in that sense.
[00:20:33] But to have somebody sit there and describe how they want it to look and their vision for the programme.
[00:20:39] And I remember thinking, wow, I wonder if I'll ever be able to develop a vision like that.
[00:20:45] And so during my doctorate then, I was doing this camera assistant work and learning how cameras worked and learning about the different lenses.
[00:20:57] And we were shooting on film cameras then.
[00:21:00] So just learning about film and how it all loaded into a camera.
[00:21:06] And I kept assisting this cameraman near Oxford.
[00:21:11] And I remember another shoot that he had to do was to try and illustrate this story of a cow that was the only recorded animal being killed by midges.
[00:21:24] And it was exsanguinated by midges.
[00:21:28] So it was up in near the Arctic Circle and there were so many midges and this cow was tethered that they drank it dry.
[00:21:34] And of course, this is a great story.
[00:21:36] So he needed close-ups of a cow being bitten by midges.
[00:21:42] And we tried, you know, putting cowhide over a blood bag and warming the blood bag and breathing carbon dioxide to try and get them to bite it.
[00:21:54] And they just weren't biting it.
[00:21:55] So he said, well, can you find somebody whose arms are so hairy that they would stand in as a stunt cow?
[00:22:06] And so I went around the labs in my PhD environment trying to find people with really hairy arms.
[00:22:15] Now, this is quite a weird thing to be asking people.
[00:22:18] And there was this Spanish chap who was working on a lab bench.
[00:22:23] And I said, excuse me, would you mind being a stunt cow for some filming?
[00:22:28] And he thought this was, you know, quite funny.
[00:22:30] So I took him up to the cameraman's sort of studio.
[00:22:36] And he had all of these bitey, bitey flies in there.
[00:22:40] He went in and he saw the number that landed on him and he passed out at the sight of it.
[00:22:52] And so this was obviously not going to work.
[00:22:55] So he was kind of sacked as being a stunt cow.
[00:22:58] But now, you know, we had the cameraman there.
[00:23:01] We had everything set up.
[00:23:03] And so the only thing was for me to stand in.
[00:23:06] So I don't have particularly hairy arms.
[00:23:09] But he said, well, if I get in really close, you know, it's the best we can do.
[00:23:14] So I had to stand there being absolutely eaten alive by midges at about 35 degrees C and at about like 200 percent humidity.
[00:23:26] Whilst he filmed a real close up of my arm.
[00:23:45] So you talk there about wondering whether you would ever, you know, sort of dreaming of whether you'd ever be in the position to apply your own vision to a film or a series.
[00:23:53] It seemed such an incredible thing.
[00:23:56] And I just wasn't convinced that I would be able to do that.
[00:24:00] It was the first time that I felt actual doubt that I could do what I really wanted to do and had wanted to do for the last sort of 15 years.
[00:24:09] Was there a moment, sort of a moment of epiphany where you realised you could do it?
[00:24:14] You had made it.
[00:24:15] And was that the first film that you got to apply your own vision to?
[00:24:19] When would that have been and what would that have been?
[00:24:21] I don't think there was an epiphany moment.
[00:24:24] I think it's a very slow accumulation of experience.
[00:24:28] And, you know, the first times that you're actually put in charge of things, certainly the first times that I was ever put in charge of things, it all went disastrously wrong.
[00:24:37] Like almost every single first time I did anything, it didn't work.
[00:24:42] I remember when I worked on Life in the Undergrowth, which was my absolute dream, you know, working with David Attenborough.
[00:24:51] And I was with the series producer, Mike Salisbury, in the jungle in South America.
[00:24:57] And he wanted me to film a bit of that kind of 10 minute making of at the end.
[00:25:01] So he was talking to camera and I was walking behind him through the jungle and he was saying, oh, we're going to go and see this.
[00:25:08] And I was filming him and we got about five minutes in and then he said, Alex, is that the microphone cable hanging down there?
[00:25:16] And I hadn't plugged it in.
[00:25:18] So there was no sound.
[00:25:19] So, yeah, having your boss pointing out that you haven't been recording sound for the entire piece to camera was my first experience of that.
[00:25:28] So that wasn't great.
[00:25:29] And yes, I remember the first time that I was directing a presenter and just that you have to say action.
[00:25:39] And it felt so cheesy to me.
[00:25:43] And I felt so underprepared to be the person who calls action that I just couldn't do it.
[00:25:51] And I said, go on then.
[00:25:53] And the whole crew just laughed at me.
[00:25:57] So, yeah, I remember with humiliation, my first attempts at almost everything.
[00:26:03] The first time you do it, it is not a moment of epiphany and triumph.
[00:26:08] It's a moment of humiliation and it doesn't quite work.
[00:26:13] But, you know, you build up and you learn and you fix things in post.
[00:26:17] I still feel silly shouting action today.
[00:26:20] There is just something about I feel like I'm pretending to be a director.
[00:26:24] Yeah.
[00:26:25] You've touched on something quite amazing there, actually, which is you brought to us life on earth, which is this groundbreaking and kind of it's almost a watershed moment in natural history programming that you would have been watching when.
[00:26:36] I would have been fine?
[00:26:37] I mean, let's find out.
[00:26:38] It was February 1979.
[00:26:41] And then partway into your career, you're now working with David Attenborough.
[00:26:46] How did that feel?
[00:26:47] And I mean, what was that experience like?
[00:26:50] Well, it was not the first time that I had applied to work on an Attenborough series.
[00:26:54] I, you know, I had been, as I said, I've been writing to the Natural History Unit all my life.
[00:26:59] After I'd finished my first degree and during my doctorate, I started seriously applying for jobs.
[00:27:06] And, you know, the Blue Planet job researcher on Blue Planet came up and I thought, I'm just going to apply because you have to start applying and getting your name known.
[00:27:15] Obviously, I didn't get that job.
[00:27:17] I was underqualified and I was not a diver or any of these things.
[00:27:22] I applied for the job on Life of Mammals and I got down to the last two for that job.
[00:27:31] And I think they had a thousand applicants.
[00:27:34] And I was absolutely gathered not to get that because I had gone through different rounds of interviews and I'd really, really pinned my hopes on this.
[00:27:45] This was my dream and I didn't get the job.
[00:27:47] And I probably cried for two days straight.
[00:27:50] I was absolutely distraught.
[00:27:52] But then I did get the job on walking with dinosaurs and walking with beasts.
[00:27:58] So I went in a slightly different direction because that was made out of the science unit and not out of the natural history unit.
[00:28:35] So for several years, I was, as you say, I couldn't believe I was being paid to paint eyeballs for extinct animals.
[00:28:46] And do these amazing, amazing things.
[00:28:49] And I absolutely loved it.
[00:28:52] And whilst I was working on that, I was still applying to work in the natural history unit.
[00:28:58] And I got more and more into the interactive side of it because, as I said, I loved the fact that people get so drawn into the series that I ended up sort of seeing the television show as almost like an advert for all of the other information.
[00:29:16] I mean, we had spent years researching this stuff.
[00:29:20] There was so much knowledge within the walking with team that wasn't being broadcast in the television version.
[00:29:30] So we developed an interactive television version.
[00:29:34] We developed a website to go with it.
[00:29:37] There were all sorts of educational things that went alongside of it.
[00:29:40] And it was through working on that that I ended up moving across.
[00:29:44] And I made the website for Life of Mammals.
[00:29:48] So the series that I had absolutely dreamed of working on and really wanted to work on as a television researcher, I ended up working on as a website producer and developing all of the information there.
[00:30:00] And then they advertised for the next series, Life in the Undergrowth.
[00:30:07] And when I applied for that, I was in the natural history unit.
[00:30:10] I applied for it.
[00:30:11] It felt like my dream because I'd worked on butterflies for my PhD.
[00:30:16] Of course, it was David Attenborough's series.
[00:30:18] So it was an absolute dream.
[00:30:20] And I applied for it.
[00:30:21] And I thought, I'm not going to get this job.
[00:30:25] And I went into the interview thinking, I'm not going to get this job.
[00:30:28] And they rang me afterwards and said, we really expected you to do so well in that interview.
[00:30:35] And you just didn't seem like you wanted the job in the interview.
[00:30:40] You seemed so down about it that, you know, we thought we'd ring you just to find out what was wrong.
[00:30:46] Why didn't you want this job?
[00:30:48] Because we're going to have to give it to somebody else who did really well in the interview.
[00:30:51] And can you imagine, you know, I had so much invested in it.
[00:30:57] But I had done a terrible interview because I'd convinced myself that I wasn't going to get the job.
[00:31:03] And very luckily for me, they gave me a trial.
[00:31:07] And I did all right in the trial for the first six months.
[00:31:11] And they kept me on.
[00:31:12] So I did end up on that series.
[00:31:15] And of course, it was everything that I dreamt of.
[00:31:19] Going around the world, always having a passport on you.
[00:31:23] Because you never know when you might not make it home from the office because you've had to fly out somewhere.
[00:31:27] Learning how to do natural history filmmaking out in the field, out in the worlds.
[00:31:33] You know, this was before mobile phones.
[00:31:35] So we would be out in the jungle for weeks and weeks without contact with base.
[00:31:41] And you'd just be, as the researcher, it was just you and a cameraman.
[00:31:46] And the two of you, in tents or whatever, solving problems minute after minute.
[00:31:52] You know, what do I do?
[00:31:53] Having plan B, plan C.
[00:31:56] You've got to find a species.
[00:31:58] Everything's relying on you flying out to somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
[00:32:02] Being able to find the species that you've read about in a paper.
[00:32:05] Being able to help the cameraman capture that information, that behavior.
[00:32:11] And then getting the rushers back.
[00:32:13] This is film rushers.
[00:32:15] And trying to get film back through airport security where they want to put it through an x-ray scanner.
[00:32:21] And you've got to be able to use a changing bag.
[00:32:26] So keep everything in the absolute dark because film cannot be exposed to anything.
[00:32:31] You've got to be careful of people's digital watchers having displays that could expose the film.
[00:32:37] And we'd all heard terrible stories of film from Life of Birds being exposed on the way back from filming.
[00:32:44] So I was absolutely terrified.
[00:32:46] And it was brilliant.
[00:32:48] Had so many stories.
[00:32:49] One of them was bringing back film footage.
[00:32:52] Had been filming, I think in South America and then North America.
[00:32:55] So I'd traveled up.
[00:32:57] Had a lot of film stop with me.
[00:32:59] I was coming back through LAX, I think.
[00:33:02] And so I went up to the guy at the airport.
[00:33:07] Because it's good to warn people that you're coming through with this film stock.
[00:33:10] And I said, I'm coming through with film stock.
[00:33:12] So, you know, is there a route that I can take where people can check it without putting it through the scanner?
[00:33:18] And he said, oh yeah, I think I've got notification.
[00:33:21] You're Ocean's 11, yeah?
[00:33:23] He's like, no, I'm not Ocean's 11.
[00:33:26] I have a question.
[00:33:27] Mm-hmm.
[00:33:28] Say we get into the cage and through the security doors there and down the elevator we can't move and past the guards with the guns and into the vault we can't open.
[00:33:39] Without being seen by the cameras.
[00:33:41] Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot to mention that.
[00:33:44] Yeah, well, say we do all that.
[00:33:46] We're just supposed to walk out of there with $150 million in cash on us without getting stopped?
[00:33:58] Yeah.
[00:34:02] Yeah.
[00:34:02] Oh.
[00:34:04] Okay.
[00:34:07] Hilariously, when you get to Heathrow with film stock, you have to take it straight to the developers.
[00:34:13] There was a developer actually at the airport.
[00:34:16] And he arrived, you know, he'd been on this transatlantic flight.
[00:34:19] I had been out in the field for weeks and weeks and weeks.
[00:34:22] So I was hair full of sand.
[00:34:25] All of the bags of footage were not in beautifully labelled cans.
[00:34:30] One of them was wrapped up in a bin bag that was all gaffer taped up.
[00:34:34] So I arrived absolutely exhausted, muddy, messy, all these rushes kind of labelled with bits of gaffer tape.
[00:34:44] And I arrived at the developers on site in Heathrow at the same time as the kind of Hollywood film crew where they've got somebody smartly dressed with their little wheelie trolley of beautifully labelled rushes and film cans.
[00:34:59] And so the two of us are checking in our footage at the developer at the same time at the same desk.
[00:35:06] And there's me kind of shedding sand from my hair and handing over these gaffer tape bin bags and going, yeah, hang on a minute.
[00:35:16] Let me just count up what I've got.
[00:35:19] And yeah, so it's a different kind of filmmaking.
[00:35:21] But still, it was it was the best experience.
[00:35:27] You're not suggesting to me you would have swapped places.
[00:35:29] Well, I was just thinking that as I was saying it, you know, would I have swapped places to be on Ocean's Eleven?
[00:35:38] No, I don't think so.
[00:35:39] Because actually what I had been, you know, the experience of being out and seeing the stuff that I'd seen and the fact that we were capturing on film things that had never been seen before and bringing it back.
[00:35:55] It feels an amazing thing to be bringing these precious canisters back and you don't know what's on it.
[00:36:02] So it's not like these days where you've seen it all.
[00:36:04] You might have had a monitor, but more likely you've looked down the camera lens.
[00:36:11] You've seen roughly the kind of framing and the setup.
[00:36:15] And then you've just had to watch it happen for real and seen the cameraman, you know, desperately trying to focus everything and follow the action.
[00:36:25] And that terrible thing at the end, which cameramen always swear at you for saying, which is, did you get it?
[00:36:34] Well, we'll find out.
[00:36:35] And you don't find out for weeks and weeks and weeks.
[00:36:37] They send this off to the processing laboratory and then they create, you know, they process it.
[00:36:44] So you get the positives back and then those positive prints get sent to the office and they have to be put through telecine.
[00:36:52] So it literally goes through the projector to be put on to tape so that you can watch it.
[00:36:57] But that moment that it arrives and you go down and you sit in this darkened room and it's the first time that you see your rushes from, you know, a couple of months ago.
[00:37:07] And you see whether you got it, whether it was sharp.
[00:37:10] Is it in focus?
[00:37:11] Was it correctly exposed?
[00:37:13] And it's just your heart is in your mouth, especially if your series producer is sitting behind you to see what you got.
[00:37:20] So, yeah.
[00:37:21] And, you know, did it get exposed?
[00:37:23] Did it did it come through the x-rays?
[00:37:25] All right.
[00:37:26] Did you travel all right with it?
[00:37:27] Is there any of it scratched from all that sound that fell out of your hair?
[00:38:05] Wow.
[00:38:05] I mean, it's made so differently today, isn't it?
[00:38:08] It's all digital filmmaking.
[00:38:09] You can see it there and then you can rewatch it.
[00:38:12] You know, you've got it in the can or you haven't and you just do it again and wait another week for that animal to appear or another few minutes for that behavior to happen or, you know, whatever it is.
[00:38:23] But, you know, there and then.
[00:38:24] Well, when I was working on Life in the Underground, one of the things that was just being invented at the time was a post trigger.
[00:38:31] So, we were occasionally filming not on film but on tape and that allowed you, because on film it's incredibly expensive.
[00:38:44] So, you know, especially if you're filming at high speed or, you know, which we were quite a lot of the time, you'd get a few seconds out of a real hundred pound reel of film.
[00:38:53] And so, if you wanted to film something that was only going to happen once, and especially if it was only going to happen once and quickly and you were trying to film it in high speed, that was your absolute nightmare scenario.
[00:39:06] So, I remember the very first Natural History shoot that I got sent on, and of course, I was so excited.
[00:39:12] This was my first Natural History shoot, was to film eggs hatching.
[00:39:16] And in retrospect, I should have thought through what that meant, because of course, you don't know exactly when eggs are going to hatch.
[00:39:25] And we knew roughly within the next few days.
[00:39:29] So, I flew out and I sat in front of these eggs, and I couldn't go to sleep until these eggs had hatched.
[00:39:35] So, I was sitting there for 36 hours staring at unhatched eggs.
[00:39:41] Honestly, I was literally hallucinating through lack of sleep by the time that they hatched.
[00:39:49] But anyway, so, it was a lot of sitting around.
[00:39:51] You couldn't just leave things running.
[00:39:52] But we wanted to film these spiders that throw a net over their prey, net casters in Australia.
[00:40:01] So, I'd flown out to Australia, was filming these spiders, and we had a post trigger, which was amazing.
[00:40:08] So, it meant that the camera was always recording to tape, just in a kind of loop.
[00:40:13] And when something happened, you pressed the button, and it had recorded the previous X seconds.
[00:40:19] So, that allowed you to catch these moments for the first time, really.
[00:40:24] It's very stressful when you're doing it.
[00:40:25] It's really stressful.
[00:40:26] I remember one where I got the button pressing out of sync.
[00:40:30] So, I had been recording when I didn't think I'd been recording.
[00:40:35] And then I pressed the button thinking, now I'm recording.
[00:40:37] And I wasn't recording, because I just stopped it.
[00:40:40] So, I missed the whole thing.
[00:40:43] And, you know, everybody looks at you.
[00:40:45] That moment, that sinking stomach moment when you realised you've just messed up.
[00:40:50] Going back to Life on Earth.
[00:40:52] Yeah, the film I'm talking about.
[00:40:53] Yeah.
[00:40:55] Not me.
[00:40:55] I thought it might be nice just to talk a little bit about Sir David himself, because it really feels like this is the big watershed moment of his career.
[00:41:06] It's a slightly ridiculous thing to say, because at this point, you know, he's already a national figure.
[00:41:11] He's already been the director of BBC Two.
[00:41:14] Introduced colour television.
[00:41:16] He has been sort of touted as the next director general.
[00:41:18] And yet, by the late 70s, he's decided he just wants to be a filmmaker.
[00:41:24] And I think this is the series that propels him from very well-known and well-loved guy to national treasure.
[00:41:33] And kind of cementing him as the figure that he still is today.
[00:41:36] Because it's in this series, of course, that we get the amazing interaction with gorillas as well.
[00:41:42] Which has almost become his signature.
[00:41:45] And this is how they spend most of their time.
[00:41:49] Lounging on the ground, grooming one another.
[00:41:54] Sometimes they even allow others to join in.
[00:42:10] There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging of plants with a gorilla than any other animal I know.
[00:42:23] They're so similar.
[00:42:27] Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell are so similar to ours that we see the world in the same way as they do.
[00:42:37] From your perspective, having been inspired by him, having worked with him, but also with your kind of very broad career that you've had.
[00:42:45] What is it about him?
[00:42:47] What makes him such an effective communicator?
[00:42:49] I mean, watching back Life on Earth just for this program, it really struck me how much he absolutely knows his stuff.
[00:42:58] You know, the pieces to camera are ridiculously long because he knows it all.
[00:43:03] It's not like he's memorizing a script.
[00:43:06] I mean, I'm sure he is, but he knows it absolutely inside out.
[00:43:11] And so when he's speaking to you through the television, you feel like he is just telling you what he knows and he's sharing it.
[00:43:22] So it's not feeling like he has learned a script and he's presenting it.
[00:43:28] And as you say, the thing with the gorillas, you know, he's able to ad lib pretty much anything, whatever happens, because he absolutely knows the subject inside out.
[00:43:39] It feels incredibly natural.
[00:43:41] And it also often means that he can make the most of whatever happens.
[00:43:47] So the best moments are often unscripted things that he will just be able to do.
[00:43:53] And the camera crew and the director are just following what he does because he's leading it.
[00:44:01] And I think that's really quite rare.
[00:44:03] And I think the other thing, he tells stories in the scripts and he writes all of the scripts for his own programs that he's presenting.
[00:44:13] Not the ones that he's narrating, but the ones that he's presenting.
[00:44:16] He tells the stories and he has an absolutely natural storytelling ability.
[00:44:22] But off camera, he's just full of stories and he absolutely knows how to tell the stories to their best so that you're on the edge of your seat.
[00:44:33] You're laughing with him.
[00:44:34] He's just able to engage people and to get you to want to listen.
[00:44:42] So I think it's a mixture of a natural charisma, but also a really, really deep knowledge of the subject.
[00:44:53] He's so natural, isn't he?
[00:44:55] Wherever they put him on the Galapagos or when he was in amongst all the dinosaur bones.
[00:45:01] That was one of my favourite bits.
[00:45:02] He's walking amongst.
[00:45:03] I mean, I don't know if anyone would be allowed to do that nowadays on camera.
[00:45:08] You might have to get special permission to actually walk amongst all these dinosaur bones where they are in this kind of rock face.
[00:45:15] And he's just there scrambling among them, telling you this story.
[00:45:19] And because he knows this stuff, he's so passionate about the subject matter and communicating it right.
[00:45:25] That he's just able to tell you this story as he's scrambling around and thinking about not falling over.
[00:45:31] And as I say, the pieces to camera go on for so long because he's just telling you stuff.
[00:45:36] And he clearly just knows it all.
[00:45:39] And it's probably not learnt rote.
[00:45:42] I'm sure it's not learnt rote.
[00:45:43] I mean, one of the things when you film with David is he does have a presenting persona.
[00:45:50] So it's not like it's very different from his natural persona, but it's just up a notch.
[00:45:57] And so he will walk through, you know, if you've got a complicated piece to camera where he's walking through and the cameraman just wants to have a run through to practice the focus and the framing and everything.
[00:46:08] Just know where all the points are on this piece to camera.
[00:46:11] And he'll walk through it and he'll do his piece to camera.
[00:46:14] And it sounds just like David doing a piece to camera.
[00:46:16] And the cameraman will be all ready.
[00:46:18] And then he does the real thing.
[00:46:20] And when he does the real thing, he just takes it up a notch.
[00:46:23] And it's so common for the cameraman, if they're not used to David, to jump and lose focus because they're just like, suddenly it's gone up a massive notch in just presenting style.
[00:46:37] So, yeah, it is funny to watch that.
[00:46:41] 14 different species of dinosaur have been found in this quarry, ranging from tiny little creatures, no bigger than the size of a chicken, to real monsters like the animal to whom this enormous thigh bone belonged, which is one of the biggest land living animals the world has ever seen.
[00:46:59] Most of the bones left in this quarry today come from carcasses that have been dismembered either by the river or by scavenging reptiles.
[00:47:08] But by the time quarrying finished here in the 1920s, over 30 near complete skeletons have been taken away.
[00:47:15] And indeed, many of the most beautiful and impressive dinosaur skeletons in our museums today come from this quarry or from other quarries working in the same formation.
[00:47:26] But the other thing I really noticed watching Life on Earth is it was alongside series like Civilization as well, these great big landmark series that he would have pieces to camera and scenes that were split between locations.
[00:47:43] So he would finish one location and lead on to the next location in a seamless within the same thought, as it were.
[00:47:53] So he could almost have a sentence that started in Arizona and finished in Portugal or whatever.
[00:47:59] And I thought that this was where they must have invented the David Attenborough look of the, you know, the blue shirt that we are all incredibly familiar with and that he has to have ordered specially from M&S.
[00:48:11] And actually watching it, no, he's in different clothes in practically every scene.
[00:48:18] He's in jeans.
[00:48:19] He's in jeans, everyone.
[00:48:21] It's crazy seeing Attenborough in jeans.
[00:48:23] There's a scene where he's in the absolute pouring rain with giant tortoises, I think.
[00:48:30] And he's absolutely soaked to the skin.
[00:48:33] I mean, it's just, I can't imagine now asking David to do a scene where he's that wet.
[00:48:42] And you just think, look at the state of you.
[00:48:46] It's so visceral though, even the filmmaking then.
[00:48:49] It's not yet this kind of, you know, masters of narrative storytelling that we have today.
[00:48:55] It's still quite an illustrated lecture.
[00:48:59] Even though you don't have the same shot ratios that you might have today, it's a lot faster cut and things like that.
[00:49:06] But it's still so visceral, the shots they have, that they're able to get the access to these animals.
[00:49:11] And also this amazing music score that they have, which I didn't love it, but I can see it really worked.
[00:49:18] Yeah, I agree.
[00:49:18] And it was a unique music score.
[00:49:20] Yeah, exactly.
[00:49:22] There can be no question of the success of these early reptiles, for they dominated the world for 130 million years.
[00:49:31] During that time, they developed into all kinds of shapes and sizes.
[00:49:46] Edward Williams, he's like, was this amazing composer and he used synthesizers on the tracks as well, which is kind of one of the early uses in this kind of show.
[00:49:56] I mean, what you're saying about the visceral nature of it and the fact that some of these animals, I can't imagine how much heavy kit they must have carried to these locations to try and film this stuff.
[00:50:11] I mean, when we were filming, we would have, you know, 27 cases of kit and the two of you to carry it all.
[00:50:17] But they would have had even bigger, heavier stuff in those days.
[00:50:23] To get it on location is one thing, but they're still capturing behavior.
[00:50:29] You know, it's not just here's a tortoise, you know, here's a tortoise doing something amazing or here's a snake eating a frog or whatever.
[00:50:38] What they managed to capture was incredible.
[00:50:41] And I watched it and I could almost hear a goggle box version because you could imagine people at home going, look at that.
[00:50:50] Even now, people would be going, look at that.
[00:50:53] What they managed to capture.
[00:50:58] These garter snakes are very advanced members of their group.
[00:51:02] Not only have they developed the technique of hibernation in order to live through the winters when the ground is covered with deep snow,
[00:51:09] but they've also managed to overcome many of the limitations of egg laying.
[00:51:14] A few months after this communal mating, the offspring appear.
[00:51:20] I scribbled down a few notes as I was watching it.
[00:51:22] Just I was trying to sort of compare it to the stuff that he still does and the stuff that I've made with him as well.
[00:51:27] And re-watching it, it is the Attenborough series that you remember.
[00:51:31] And, you know, it's classically Attenborough.
[00:51:33] But I think you've touched on the music.
[00:51:35] The music, I think, was very of its time.
[00:51:38] I felt the script, and again, not the ad-libbed, not the to-camera stuff, but the script felt a bit more lectury than I think you would deliver nowadays.
[00:51:47] And then the other really obvious thing that leapt out was that we didn't see him on screen until the eighth minute of the film.
[00:51:54] And I can't imagine that you would do that nowadays.
[00:51:57] Yeah.
[00:51:58] As you say, the style of the narration is very different.
[00:52:03] And I did actually watch a bit of Life on Earth and then a bit of Planet Earth 1 and then a bit of the most recent Planet Earth just to see the difference in the style of narration.
[00:52:16] And, yeah, the lecture style, using quite a lot of technical terms, you know, it does feel like you're sitting in an undergraduate lecture sometimes.
[00:52:26] There's none of the emotional storytelling.
[00:52:29] And I think that really is obvious from the programs that are being made just in the last few years, how much more it leads with an individual animal's story.
[00:52:42] The emotion and the kind of what's going to happen next to this individual animal.
[00:52:47] And then often, you know, that's put in the context of using that story to tell a bigger story about the ecology or the conservation or whatever.
[00:52:56] Life on Earth absolutely doesn't do that.
[00:52:58] Life on Earth is instead of an emotional connection, it's a much more intellectual connection where you're raising questions of,
[00:53:05] so how did this then come to be and how did amphibians, how were they able to develop to live in a drier environment on the land?
[00:53:17] You know, it raises these questions and then answers them in a very different way from I think you see in most television programs now.
[00:53:24] And I wonder why that change has come about.
[00:53:28] Is it because we're able to capture much more behavior now?
[00:53:32] So the behavior that you get on camera lends itself to the following of the story of these individual animals.
[00:53:40] Is it because the emotional storytelling is much more engaging and brings more people into it?
[00:53:48] You know, I think it's really interesting to think about why that change has happened.
[00:53:53] And, you know, the positives and negatives of it and how, you know, maybe the two can be combined in different ways.
[00:54:00] What different formats we're using now for different ways of telling science stories and natural history stories.
[00:54:09] I feel like how we tell natural history stories and science stories and engaging audiences has been a real constant throughout your career.
[00:54:17] Tell us about how you jumped from TV to what you're doing now.
[00:54:22] Baroness.
[00:54:23] Well, so in the science unit, I moved from natural history to science because I was so interested in going more in depth into the whys and the hows of why the world is the way it is and how we can find it out.
[00:54:42] And so I moved into science and I became series producer of a series called Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, which is a health program for BBC Two.
[00:54:52] And whilst we were thrashing out for that, we ended up on a format that always asks a question at the beginning of every section.
[00:55:04] So it's a magazine show.
[00:55:05] You would have eight short items within a program.
[00:55:10] And each one of them, we found if you asked a question and hopefully a question that the audience themselves might be interested in the answer.
[00:55:18] And then you clearly answered it at the end.
[00:55:20] You could go on any kind of journey in between.
[00:55:22] So that, I think, was probably, you know, in a way harking back to that life on earth structure of intellectual curiosity.
[00:55:32] But also what I was doing in it was I increasingly wanted to involve people in it.
[00:55:40] I guess harking back to the things that had really inspired me when I was young.
[00:55:47] So we would end up running experiments with members of the public in order to answer the questions, because I found more and more that actually academic science quite often doesn't answer the questions that the public wanted to ask.
[00:56:04] So when we would ask the audience for questions, they would ask questions to which there wasn't yet a decent answer.
[00:56:11] So I actually partitioned some of the budget to do proper scientific trials.
[00:56:17] And we would run randomized controlled trials with real people within the tele budget and tele timescale, which was quite a challenge.
[00:56:28] But we had a fantastic team of people who became really, really specialized and really good at doing that and ended up being invited to universities to show how you can do these things.
[00:56:38] Because in the television world, you're very good at recruiting volunteers, at getting things done quickly, at problem solving.
[00:56:46] You know, how am I going to get a blood sample on ice from London to Newcastle and then get the results back in time, begging favours, all of these kinds of things.
[00:56:56] So whilst making trust via the doctor, I became increasingly interested in science that serves society and how society and science work together.
[00:57:09] The questions that people actually have and how we can answer them and the relationship between the two.
[00:57:16] And I ended up moving to a job leading a centre in Cambridge, which was about evidence communication.
[00:57:25] And I didn't really know. I didn't really know what I was doing, what kind of communication I was doing.
[00:57:32] I wouldn't have ever considered myself as a science communicator because I think of science communication as enthusing people about science.
[00:57:41] And that wasn't what I was doing as a filmmaker.
[00:57:44] But I certainly wasn't doing evidence communication either, because what it turns out is what I found after taking the job as head of a centre for evidence communication,
[00:57:54] is that evidence communication is how to communicate evidence in a way that helps people that have decisions to make,
[00:58:01] base their decision on the evidence or take the evidence into consideration.
[00:58:05] So I ended up having a research group who researched how to communicate evidence to people, particularly numbers, to help people understand it.
[00:58:18] But also a group and I blatantly recruited people from within the media who knew how to then put this into action.
[00:58:28] So we would make communications for things like for the NHS.
[00:58:33] So we're still doing it now.
[00:58:34] We're making decision aids so that patients can have the evidence in front of them about what their different treatment options are and the pros and cons of each one.
[00:58:46] And they can make up their own mind what's important to them and therefore what treatment they might want to do or no treatment at all.
[00:58:52] And doing this in a way that is clear and easy.
[00:58:56] But you don't need to engage people in the way that you do when you're making television.
[00:59:00] So you don't need to grab people's attention and make them want to sit down and be entertained for half an hour because you're talking to people who already are engaged.
[00:59:11] They really want to know some stuff because they've got a decision to make.
[00:59:14] And this all of this has really changed the way that I think about what I'm doing when I'm communicating.
[00:59:21] What are your aims?
[00:59:23] Are you aiming to inform people or persuade people?
[00:59:26] Have you made up your own mind?
[00:59:29] And what you're doing is taking people on a journey and almost leading people through a forest by the hand to where you are going to take them,
[00:59:39] which I feel is what we do when we make a television program most of the time.
[00:59:43] And we're engineering the music, the script, the visuals to take people on an emotional journey where we know where they're going.
[00:59:52] We're taking them with us and they're along for the ride.
[00:59:56] The evidence communication is like producing a map of the forest for somebody and saying there are three or four different paths to this forest that you could take.
[01:00:06] And it's up to you.
[01:00:07] Here's the map and take your own route through it.
[01:00:11] And now I've ended up in the House of Lords as a crossbench peer, which is an actual job that you can actually apply for.
[01:00:20] So in the House of Lords, there are things like the committees, there are debates.
[01:00:25] And I want to be able to help ask the right questions in those debates and in those committees.
[01:00:31] Thank you.
[01:01:01] documentary makers, trying to communicate the importance of scientific ideas and make them relevant to people's lives.
[01:01:09] And also to bring the evidence that is then brought to light.
[01:01:14] So in a select committee, you know, there's a really interesting one on at the moment into ultra processed foods and obesity and how, you know, this whole environment around us in the UK is tending to lead us to eat more of more unhealthy foods.
[01:01:33] And so really, you know, they've interviewed experts from all of these companies, from academia, from businesses, from everywhere, from public health.
[01:01:44] And they've really got world experts in the room and ask them stuff.
[01:01:48] And all of this will end up in a report.
[01:01:51] But I want to take all of this is filmed.
[01:01:53] I want to take all of this information and put it together in different ways, like podcasts and video where people, all of us in society can now access this stuff and find out what's going on.
[01:02:06] And therefore, make up our own minds about what laws should change, how things should be regulated.
[01:02:12] I just think it's really important.
[01:02:14] So, again, it's about this kind of relationship between science and society and how communication is absolutely key to keeping these things together, keeping academia and society's needs and other researchers and researchers within charity and government and making sure that everybody is understanding everybody else and bringing it together to make decisions, personal decisions, policy decisions.
[01:02:41] The way we always like to end is to ask, given the fact you've had a chance to go back and watch this again.
[01:02:48] How did you feel watching it back?
[01:02:50] And what does this film in this series mean to you?
[01:02:54] Watching it back, there was a touch of nostalgia.
[01:02:58] So a little bit of remembering being a little child with my family clustered around a little television.
[01:03:06] So a kind of slight warm glow for times past.
[01:03:12] But also, I did find it quite inspirational.
[01:03:15] I think, as you were saying, that music and the language, which was very of its time.
[01:03:22] And it made me think of that kind of time where filmmakers and David and things like Civilization, they were really, really aiming to do something different from what I think we're trying to aim to do now.
[01:03:40] Thinking about what the series was trying to achieve.
[01:03:43] It's that feeling of right back then in the late 70s of trying to bring the whole world into people's living rooms and things that people sitting at home would have never seen and never heard about.
[01:04:00] And I think that is a world that we don't in the UK and America live in anymore.
[01:04:11] You know, we've probably seen so much stuff on television, online.
[01:04:16] You can look up any of this stuff at the touch of a button.
[01:04:19] And it just transported me back to a time where that would have been all brand new.
[01:04:26] And it made me think about what are we doing now?
[01:04:31] What are we bringing to people's living rooms now?
[01:04:34] And what can we think about that can have that same effect on people of completely changing the way they think about the world and bringing them stuff that will change their lives in the way that life on Earth changed mine.
[01:04:52] Amazing.
[01:04:53] Thank you so much, Alex.
[01:04:54] Thank you.
[01:04:54] It's been an absolute joy speaking with you.
[01:04:56] Thank you so much for bringing this in.
[01:04:58] It's been so nice to, it's been lovely to rewatch it and to just think about these things again and reminisce.