Patrick Barkham

And in the famous scenes where

David meets the gorillas.

He comments on how sad it is that gorilla is used in human society as a sort of byword for aggression when actually the actual species lives incredibly peacefully and lightly on the planet.

But certainly he doesn't develop explicit, we must save the planet, we must save these species messages within the programs themselves for quite some years.

And that's changed in the last 10 years.

And I think that came about through a kind of growing criticism of his output for not revealing the true scale of the human destruction of the natural world.

He's always been in that BBC tradition of neutrality, political impartiality, kind of diplomacy and care about what he says.

He had a scientific background.

He wanted evidence for everything that he said publicly.

But he doesn't shape the programmes in perhaps the way that people imagine.

They are shaped by a team of biologists, wildlife experts, TV people, who for a long time were quietly saying, we can't include scenes of human devastation on the natural world because we're not going to get the ratings, we're not going to get a primetime BBC slot.

And they've changed their view over the last 20 years as the public mood shifted and people are becoming more aware of the environmental problems.

That programme really sparked a level of popular awareness and outrage about plastic and a mood of something must be done in a way that previous programmes haven't done.

And certainly ever since then, every one of David's programmes has been explicitly environmental with a message of we're doing this to the planet and this species is at risk and we need to change our ways.

The trouble is that the problems are getting worse and worse and worse by the day.

and we don't have time to spare.

That's the difficulty.

It is another world, Madeleine, exactly.

I mean, looking back to 1926 is incredible, really, because David was born into a different geological epoch.

He was born in the Holocene, and we're now in the Anthropocene, which is defined by our sort of disruptive destruction of the planet.