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The journey begins in a row of allotments lodged deep between two north London streets. It’s 8.30pm and David Attenborough – 99 years young, in customary short-sleeved blue shirt and chinos – is on the hunt for Tottenham’s most elusive resident. He gets settled on a camping chair. Waits. Emits a tiny rhapsodic gasp as the creature in question appears. It’s a … fox.
“It’s still a huge thrill to see one suddenly emerging from the bushes,” he whispers to camera of a sight so bog-standard most Londoners wouldn’t bother looking up from their phones. “A totally wild creature!” Attenborough holds out a hand. Murmurs a delighted “hello”. The fox comes within a few inches of the greatest natural historian and broadcaster this country has ever produced, then slinks off into the night. What an encounter! And if you think that’s exhilarating wait until you see his reaction to a pigeon getting on the tube.
For those at the precarious stage of the holidays where a poultice for the heart is urgently required, I give you Wild London. An exquisitely cheerful, beautifully produced, unexpectedly moving special, captured over Attenborough’s centennial year, in which he seeks out the wildlife of the capital and we discover that the secret to a good life isn’t actually a parasite cleanse or a facial for your vagina – it’s appreciating what’s on your own doorstep. Which in Attenborough’s case is a megacity home to 9 million people, 2.6m cars, 607 sq miles of concrete, asphalt and steel, and more wild animals than seem possible in such unnatural circumstances. Plus, of course, one vanishingly rare David Attenborough. “Throughout my life I’ve had the good fortune to travel the world witnessing many spectacles,” he says in a black cab home to Richmond. “But this is the place to which I’ve always returned.”
And so to Hammersmith station, through which Attenborough once regularly commuted, his day “always brightened” by the sight of … yes, I too was thinking a rat! But no. Pigeons. Hopping on and off trains before the doors close with the chutzpah of Indiana Jones grabbing his hat, while commuters look on obliviously and Attenborough explains how pigeons typically use the sun and magnetic fields to find their way, but in urban areas have learned to navigate using landmarks, roads, even train lines. Honestly, does British telly get any better than this?
Next, peregrine falcons, which Hamza Yassin fans will know are now nesting in pairs all over London. When Attenborough moved to the capital in the 1950s they were virtually extinct in the UK. Today? “They’re thriving in London in greater numbers than almost any other city in the world.” There’s breathtaking footage of the fastest animal on Earth soaring through the city, nesting in the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross hospital and factories on the Thames, which work as ideal substitutes for their natural cliff habitats. “London’s concrete canyons”, Attenborough calls them. “Plenty of opportunity to make a killing in the city.” The writing, as ever in his films – which he has always insisted on refining and rewriting himself – is lyrical, mischievous, glorious.
So much evokes childlike wonder: “green squadrons” of parakeets, honeybees drunk on fermenting nectar, Aesculapian snakes along Regent’s Canal, emperor dragonflies breeding in the pond outside the Natural History Museum and, most astonishingly of all, the return of wild beavers to a London wetland. A species that disappeared from the UK about 400 years ago. “If someone had told me when I’d just moved here that one day I’d be watching wild beavers in London I’d have thought they were mad,” he says. “Imagine what else can be achieved if we let nature back into our cities.”
It’s not only beavers that blow his mind. “Oh, what a lovely thing,” Attenborough says, holding a four-week-old peregrine falcon chick. He marvels at a vixen hiding a chicken bone under a car’s windscreen wipers. He’s tickled by the “hedgehog highways” the owners of London’s 4m private gardens have introduced, cutting holes in fences to allow males to travel up to two miles every night in search of a mate. In Hyde Park he witnesses a face-off between some territorial coots and a frankly terrifying herring gull, whose taste for pigeon meat “has given him the glossiest plumage on the shores of the Serpentine”. Without getting into the gruesome details, I found myself jumping up and screaming three words I never thought would fall out of this Londoner’s mouth: “Come on, pigeon!”
What is most moving is seeing the common urban spectacles the rest of us take for granted, or don’t see at all, elevated to the giddy heights of an Attenborough documentary. Whether he is witnessing a herd of fallow deer cross an east London street to feast on someone’s garden roses, or narrating the high-stakes drama of a mother trying to hide her fawn from an off-lead dalmatian sniffing about the bushes of his local park, it’s this endless capacity for wonder, on his own doorstep and everywhere else, that is most humbling. This one human animal has changed the way we see the natural world. Whatever will we do without him?
