Admittedly the sounds are recorded and the animals are on film, but the warrior is very much real and enjoying both his first trip to London and his first-ever gin and tonic. We’re at the Whitley Awards for Nature, an Oscar-lite awards ceremony for rising stars in the world of conservation. The venue is the Royal Geographical Society, an appropriate choice given the far-flung origins of tonight’s nominees, each of which has dedicated their life to defending their threatened native species. The Ghanaian chap protecting the Giant Squeaker Frogs has even learnt to mimic their mating call and does so loudly when collecting his prize. It makes for a memorable acceptance speech.
While the evening is shaped around celebrating these conservationists and their projects, the biggest draw of the night is guest of honour and the world’s most revered naturalist Sir David Attenborough. He’s dressed on-brand in a crumpled cream linen suit, looking for all the world like someone who has just come back from exotic travels, which of course he has. He’s at the event to support the conservationists and wants no limelight for himself. Like his documentary subjects, he seems more comfortable hiding in the long grass and remains in the audience, avoiding the stage.
To talk to him one-on-one, he is the charismatic yet humble man you would imagine him to be. He says he gives time to these awards every year, including narrating each of the conservation project’s films, because ‘local people with local knowledge and a vested interest’ do the best conservation work and ‘it’s more important than ever to support those who protect the planet’. It’s lost on no one that the room is full of people inspired to do just that because of the films Sir David has made. The effect is global: President Obama credits Sir David with awakening his fascination in the natural world as a boy and asked Sir David to the White House to pick his brains on conservation and fulfil a childhood ambition of getting to hang out with Nature’s commander-in-chief.
According to Sir David, the growing encroachment by man on our natural habitat and the ever-increasing demands we place on the environment has got progressively worse over his sixty years of film-making. And he’s clear-sighted about the fundamental driver of the issue: ‘there’s no major problem facing our planet that would not be easier to solve with fewer people’.
He also underlines the importance of appreciating what is around us: not just our natural history, although that is of course of fundamental importance, but also our art, other people too. He recommends what he calls an ‘explorer’s mentality’, delighting in and savouring all the riches of life as we journey through it. And while doing so heeds ‘it’s a good idea to create more than you consume’.
There’s also a boyish mischievousness about him. When I ask for his best piece of advice, he feigns ignorance and says he’s never been able to think of anything clever to say his whole life, and then winks. When I push a second time for his most valuable advice, he continues in the vein of what he has been saying about appreciating the miracle of what life on earth has to offer, and it fits exactly with the endless fascination he exhibits in every second of his films:
‘I have never met a child that is not fascinated by our natural world, the animal kingdom and the wonders within it. It is only as we get older that we sometimes lose that sense of wonderment. But I think we would all be better off if we kept it. So my advice is to never lose that, do what you can to always keep that sense of magic with our natural world alive.’
And no one does that better than Sir David.
‘I HAVE NEVER MET A CHILD THAT IS NOT FASCINATED BY OUR NATURAL WORLD, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND THE WONDERS WITHIN IT. IT IS ONLY AS WE GET OLDER THAT WE SOMETIMES LOSE THAT SENSE OF WONDERMENT. BUT I THINK WE WOULD ALL BE BETTER OFF IF WE KEPT IT. SO MY ADVICE IS TO NEVER LOSE THAT, DO WHAT YOU CAN TO ALWAYS KEEP THAT SENSE OF MAGIC WITH OUR NATURAL WORLD ALIVE.’
– Sir David Attenborough
GETTING STOCIOUS WITH DAME JUDI DENCH
I’VE NEVER FELT WORSE ON a beautiful summer’s morning. It’s Friday, 24 June 2016, and the UK has just voted to come out of the EU. I stayed up all night watching the results with the campaign team I’ve been part of for the last six months, realising with a deepening sense of unease that the country has chosen to burn bridges and build walls instead.
Such thoughts are my mental backdrop as I drive to visit Dame Judi Dench at her home in deepest, greenest Surrey. On the way, I pass a multitude of red ‘Vote Leave’ posters, reminding me that at least half the people in the country will be waking up happy this morning. Dame Judi Dench is not one of them.
I find her in her garden. She’s dressed in white clothes and sunlight, sat by an old friend of a table in the middle of her lawn, safeguarded by reassuringly seasoned trees and the crumbly walls of her gorgeous house. She asks how I am. I bypass forty-three years of ingrained Britishness and reply honestly, explaining that I’m unbelievably depressed by what’s happened. ‘Me too,’ she replies. ‘There’s nothing else for it, I’m going to get stocious.’
‘Stocious?’ I ask, confused by the unfamiliar but respectable-sounding term. ‘Yes, stocious. It’s an old Irish word. My mother was from Dublin. It means being drunk, but even more so.’ I guess I was wrong about the respectable part.
We’ve not met before this encounter, but a shared sense of grief bonds us. We huddle together at the table, taking it in turns to bemoan the loss of identity and tolerance we feel the outcome represents. We’re as bad as each other, and wallow communally for a while before pulling ourselves back up into the light.
I end up spending three hours with Dame Judi. She is everything you would imagine her to be: thoughtful, candid, warm, funny, kind, the spirit of solace manifested as a person. Over the course of our conversation we graduate from sipping iced coffee to drinking champagne, but I leave neither stocious nor, thanks to Dame Judi, feeling the need any more to be so.
I do, however, leave intoxicated from the delicious cocktail of advice, anecdotes and affirmation she serves up. My favourite story is of the time eight years ago when she received a bad review from the theatre critic Charles Spencer. ‘He didn’t just criticise my performance, he also listed other things he thought I’d not done well. And that irritated me. So one night I woke up and thought, I’m going to write to him and get it off my chest. So I did. I wrote, “Dear Charles Spencer, I used to quite admire you, I now think you are a total shit,” and sent it off.’
Like all good stories, there’s a second half. Earlier this year, Dame Judi was at the Critics’ Circle Awards. ‘I felt a tap on my shoulder and a man said, “My name is Charles Spencer, I crave your forgiveness,” and I said, “Then you may kiss my boot.” And he did, he got down on the floor and kissed my boot. He then got up and exclaimed, “I’m so relieved.” But I said, “I haven’t said I forgive you,” and I walked away.’ Pause for dramatic effect. ‘I wrote to him the next day and said, of course, “I forgive you.” But it was very rectifying.’
Funnily enough, she never intended to be the subject of acting reviews. Her plan was to be a theatre designer and that’s what she studied, ‘but my older brother always wanted to be an actor and I caught it off him like measles’. And it was her other brother who introduced her to Shakespeare. ‘I was six years old and went to see him play Duncan in Macbeth, and he came on and said, “What bloody man is that?” And I thought this is it, he’s sworn and he’s allowed to stand up there and say it, so after that I used to say “What bloody man is that?” all the time, knowing I could get away with it.’
Her talk of Shakespeare leads to something remarkable happening, for me at least. Dame Judi puts her head back and launches into a heart-stopping recital of the Bard: ‘For once upon a raw and gusty day, the troubled Tiber chafing with her shores, Caesar said to me,