National

Britain’s greatest naturalist and our breathtakingly majestic wildlife prove they’re... liketreasures!

WILD ISLES SUNDAY, BBC1 hhhhh

David Attenborough. What a man, what an icon, what a career. Also, what’s his secret? At 96 he still possesses the boyish enthusiasm of his youth, standing around on clifftops, the wind whipping his snowy mane as though he had just hiked up there for a quick breath of fresh air. Is it turmeric in his tea? A glass of sherry before bed? Kombucha? Is he actually a time-travelling alien? Maybe that should be the subject of his next project: David Attenborough, How Not To Get Old.

Meanwhile, he could make a documentary about the vegetable patch in his back garden and I think we would all still watch it. And in some ways, that’s what this is. Wild Isles is all about this island home of ours, this land that most of us take for granted, rushing to and fro in our busy lives, rarely stopping to witness the wonders of nature unfolding before us. From the northern tip of the Shetland Islands, white birds settling snow on the cliffs, to the chalk streams of southern England, it’s all rather romantic.

Say what you like about the BBC (and many do), no one does this kind of thing quite as well. God knows what they’re going to do when Attenborough finally hangs up his windcheater – I can’t see Chris Packham inspiring the same sort of respect, he’s too much of a blunt instrument.

Not that Sir David ever shies away from difficult, highly politicised subjects such as global warming, species extinction, deforestation, and the like; it’s just that he somehow manages to highlight them in a way that doesn’t make the viewer feel they’re under assault. His is a gentle, erudite, more-insorrow-than-in-anger approach, and to my mind all the more effective for it. He makes me feel like I don’t want to let him down, whereas Packham just makes me want to switch off.

As ever, the cinematography is outstanding. A group of killer whales, cruising like gangsters through the cold waters of Scotland, travelling on their sides so as to not let their dorsal fins give them away, plucking a seal pup from the shallows and playing with it before

killing it; badgers and bumblebees, kingfishers and damselflies, a heart-meltingly sweet mummy dormouse foraging for honeysuckle with a hungry owl lurking nearby; bluebells and ancient oaks, and a thrilling battle between a barnacle goose and two white-tailed eagles – they’re all here. My favourite bit was the puffins. Did you know they mate for life, and return to the same burrow every year to raise a single chick, called a puffling? Honestly, I’ve never witnessed anything as absurdly adorable as these worried little creatures doggedly doing their best to deliver sand eels to their chicks, running the gauntlet of hungry gulls. The term ‘national treasure’ is overused. But Attenborough is the real deal. Long may he continue.

God knows what the BBC are going to do when David Attenborough hangs up his windcheater