Sir David Attenborough has bemoaned the state of TV documentaries, saying there no longer seems the appetite among audiences or channel controllers for in-depth factual series.
Attenborough, 88, whose on and off screen broadcasting career spans more than 60 years, said subjects including music and natural history were no longer regularly covered in a serious way.
In a Radio Times interview to promote his latest BBC1 natural history series, Life Story, he said most documentaries were now usually two or three episodes in length at the most, which was not enough to “deal with something properly”.
Attenborough compared this to Civilisation, which he commissioned as BBC2 controller and which was broadcast in 1969, and the first major natural history series he presented, Life on Earth, which both stretched to 13 weekly episodes.
“These days it’s a three-parter if you’re lucky, or it’s a two-part series. I would like a stronger commitment and a belief in your subject,” he said.
“If you’re going to stick with us, stick with us for three months, and at the end of it you’ll have learnt something. There was The Great War on BBC2 – that was a 26-part series. Come to that, The Forsyte Saga was a 26-part series too.”
Attenborough said he was looking forward to the BBC’s updated version of Civilisation, announced by the director general, Tony Hall, this year, but feared that the mood of the audience and TV executives was “against the expert”.
The original was presented by the art historian Kenneth Clark, who guided viewers through the story of western art, architecture and philosophy since the collapse of the western Roman empire. It is regularly hailed as a critical high point in British factual programme-making.
“The general view is that viewers don’t like people coming along and saying they know more about it than you do, so it’s unfashionable,” Attenborough said. “People criticised Kenneth Clark’s mandarin vocabulary in Civilisation – and it was – but it was wonderful to listen to. There are people who know more about it than you do, and I like that. I enjoy being told.”
With regards his TV viewing, Attenborough said he was mainly a fan of non-fiction, but is not always satisfied by what is on offer.
“There are a great number of subjects that aren’t covered. I mean, music is not covered in any other way than a performance, really. There’s no serious programme about natural history on a regular basis.
“I’m a great one for regular programmes that I can make dates with. I like scientific programmes; Horizon is a great series.”
He also said he would find it difficult to define the role of BBC2 today. “I’m not sure how they would define its policy. I would be seriously interested to know, in a paragraph, not necessarily a sentence, what guides them, what guides the editorial decisions on BBC2, because it isn’t overly plain to me.
“I guess that BBC4 has taken on perhaps the invention and experimental side of BBC2, but it wouldn’t harm them to say so. You know, if they said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’ But they don’t actually say it.”
He also revealed that he did not watch The Great British Bake Off or other cookery shows, or quizzes, saying he was not being snobbish about such programmes “but I’ve quite a lot to do and I don’t put on the television as a sort of ‘filler’”.
Reflecting more generally on the state of modern TV, Attenborough echoed the sentiment expressed in Bruce Springsteen’s song 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).
“The sad thing is that you’d think that the more stations there are, the more varied the output, but the practice is the reverse – the more you get, the more similar they become. And you get genres that become the flavour of the month.”
