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Chapter 1
A is for Attenborough1
Attenborough and the nature of celebrity
Sir David Attenborough's is one of the most recognizable faces on television today, though his physical appearances have become increasingly infrequent.2 For more than half a century, the windswept hair, the whispering voice, and the simultaneously authoritative and self-effacing demeanour have all combined to make the Attenborough persona one of television's most readily identifiable screen images, and the nature documentaries he has presented one of television's most enduringly successful market brands. Although — unsurprisingly — he dislikes the term, Attenborough has evolved into one of television's premier ‘nature celebrities’, lending his name to a number of different environmental trusts and organizations, and becoming iconically associated with the conservation of the planet and, in particular, the preservation of the world's wildlife. Knighted in 1985 for his services to the broadcasting industry, Attenborough has accumulated a large number of awards and accolades. Many of these are official: he is Knight of the Realm, Fellow of the Royal Society, recipient of the Order of Merit. But many more are populist: in separate polls over the past few years, he has been voted as Britain's ‘most trusted celebrity’ (Reader's Digest), as a ‘national treasure’ (Sunday Telegraph), and as one of the ‘heroes of our time’ (New Statesman); while, in a number of similarly hagiographical pronouncements, he has been praised as ‘the most widely travelled person on Earth ever’ (Leith 2002) and as ‘the most popular man on television’ (Yong 2009). This chapter seeks to enquire into some of the reasons behind Attenborough's massive popularity, not with a view to minimizing his considerable achievements but rather — as in other chapters in this volume — to exploring and critically analysing the different discursive and ideological networks within which they are enmeshed. In addition, as in other chapters in this book, it will be assumed throughout that celebrity is both an intrinsically complex phenomenon and one that is worthy of serious academic study, especially given the significant if by no means unproblematic role played by celebrities in global conservation work.
The most obvious opening question, then, is what kind of a celebrity is Attenborough? At first sight, it has to be said, he seems the unlikeliest of celebrities. Many of the negative characteristics associated with celebrity — vapidity, fickleness, ephemerality — appear almost directly antithetical to the durable Attenborough persona, as is the now-dated if still serviceable view of the constitutive inauthenticity of celebrities, their fame arbitrarily manufactured out of a series of media ‘pseudo-events’ (Boorstin 1992 [1961]). Still less applicable to Attenborough is Rojek's more recent definition of celebrity in terms of ‘the attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere’ (2001: 10); after all, whatever his conspicuous achievements, it is difficult to imagine a less glamorous figure than the old-fashioned if always spirited and adventurous Attenborough, or one less likely to seek out notoriety in either private or public life. Perhaps it might be better to see him in terms of the ‘foundational type’ (Dyer 1986) — a larger-than-life personification adapted to the changing needs of the media and cultural industries that produce it — or the ‘deserving celebrity’ (Gamson 1994), whose perceived authenticity and trustworthiness are recognized as being linked to media representation and publicity mechanisms, but who is nonetheless held in high esteem for his meritorious life's work (Turner 2004: 111). A caveat should probably be issued here. While celebrity embodies the spirit of individualism, the ‘culture of narcissism’ (Lasch 1979) that is embedded within contemporary global consumer society, it is not a direct property of specific individuals; instead, as Turner suggests, it is ‘constituted discursively, by the way in which the individual is represented’ (Turner et al. 2000: 11). Celebrity, in other words, has little to do with the idiosyncrasies of human nature; rather, celebrities are primarily cultural constructs, created and consolidated by the media industries in whose commercial and ideological interests they serve.
As already argued in the introductory chapter to this book, celebrity belongs simultaneously to a number of different symbolic economies within which the various — sometimes dissonant — meanings and values attached to celebrity are negotiated. An understanding of how the ‘celebrity system’ (Rojek 2001) interacts with other, explicitly or implicitly competing ‘regimes of value’ (Appadurai 1986) may go some way towards accounting for the particular nature of Attenborough's celebrity — and the enduring popularity of his work. Attenborough's fame, I want to suggest, lies at the intersection of two very different, by no means compatible regimes of value that help shape general audience perceptions of both his media persona and his nature documentary work. The first of these regimes of value pertains to the economy of celebrity, and is characterized by the populist recognition of individual achievement. The second pertains to the economy of prestige, and is characterized by a class-bound perception of civility and refinement in which institutional authority is as significant as individual success.
A brief discussion of Bourdieu's notion of prestige as a form of ‘symbolic capital’ seems appropriate in this context. For Bourdieu, symbolic capital is ‘economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized and thereby recognized, hence legitimate, a “credit” which, under certain conditions, and always in the long run, generates “economic” profits’ (1993: 75). Disavowed commercialism frequently underlies what Bourdieu calls ‘cultural consecration’: the sum of evaluative processes by which cultural and economic differences are separated out in order to produce a naturalized civility uncontaminated by economic considerations and imprinted with the ideology of ‘distinction’ — itself a crucial marker of difference which ‘sets people apart from the common herd by the characteristics of elegance, nobility and good form’ (236). Situating his argument mainly in the context of the bourgeois art world, Bourdieu suggests that the privilege its practitioners accord themselves partly derives from their capacity to claim a certain ‘aesthetic disposition’ (257). This disposition enables judgements about art to be made by those who have arrogated to themselves the right — the entitlement — to make them; and these credentials apply to other fields of cultural production as well. This has interesting implications for Attenborough's work insofar as his fame is connected both to the democratization of knowledge (the TV naturalist as science popularizer) and to a reconfirmation of the cultural authority of the dominant social order (the TV naturalist as privileged member of the BBC establishment and the English cultural elite). Nor is this merely a question of scientific authority, since Attenborough's — as will be seen in later sections of this chapter — is also a thoroughly aestheticized appreciation of the natural world in which, through the composite figure of the celebrity as public intellectual, scientific and aesthetic knowledge are brought together in one person (the TV naturalist as connoisseur).
In fulfilling his double role as fêted public intellectual and as volatile ‘celebrity-commodity’ (Marshall 1997), Attenborough also draws attention to the contradictions embedded within TV nature, in which animals are themselves turned into commodities, conjured up for the camera by the presenter-host in his mediating role as ‘cultural impresario’ (Rojek 2001), but joined to a conservationist ethic that promotes the inherent value of animal life. I will have more to say later about how these contradictions play themselves out in Attenborough's nature documentaries, but for now I want to press further on the seemingly paradoxical notion of Attenborough as ‘trusted celebrity’. What is it exactly that makes Attenborough such a trustworthy figure, and how is this compatible with his celebrity? I want to outline some possible answers to these questions by looking, in no particular order, at his capacity to communicate scientific knowledge in a non-intimidating, enthusiastic manner; at the balance between authoritativeness and affability in his screen persona; at his established status as a popularizer of science and experienced TV presenter; and at his embodiment of a readily identifiable, and ideologically reassuring, kind of Englishness in the post-war BBC mould.
In his 1997 book Celebrity and Power, the media theorist David Marshall distinguishes between cinematic celebrity, which tends to keep its spectator at a distance, and televisual celebrity, which is organized around conceptions of familiarity that allow for sympathetic identification with the TV host (Marshall 1997: 119). For Marshall, the host role brings together individual and institutional identities, with the one blurring into the other when the host is perceived to be a metonymic stand-in for the network itself (124). While the paradigm of the TV talk-show host — Marshall's main example — isn't the same as that of the nature documentary ‘lone presenter’, the effect of familiarity is quite similar; and the Attenborough persona, in this context, combines the institutional authority of the network he embodies with the individual approachability of the TV host. Extrapolating from this, the huge success of the Attenborough programmes can be linked to a dialectics of attachment and detachment in the celebrity persona. Attachment consists in the extent to which the persona is able to mobilize sentiments and feelings, and to share his own enthusiasms with the TV audience; detachment consists both in the scientific knowledge he possesses and the institutional authority he carries as a leading figure in the network (BBC). This dialectical process may help explain why the Attenborough persona often appears simultaneously avuncular and aloof, alternately self-assured and self-effacing, combining the scientific authority of the expert with the passionate curiosity of the amateur.
Attenborough is better understood as a popularizer of science than as a popular scientist; indeed, despite his university science degree, he is not really a scientist at all.3 Here he is linked to a long tradition: as Gregory and Miller suggest, the popularization of science is as old as science itself and just as political, one notable example being the Victorian attempt to expose ‘the world as an organised, ordered system, in order to keep the working classes in their place’ (1998: 23). Attenborough's project is more democratic than this (though, as I will explain, not as democratic as it claims to be), but connections can still be traced to some of the Victorian popularizers, who — in Lightman's words — ‘made science more accessible by avoiding jargon and complex classification systems, and [who] conveyed scientific information in an attractive literary style’ (2007: 163). These popularizers both emphasized the ‘moral lessons to be learned through an understanding of nature [and] stressed the sense of wonder to be experienced when faced with its beauty’ (163) — sentiments that still apply to much of the natural history programming of today. Attenborough's nature documentaries distil some of the best aspects of Victorian popular science: the reconciliation of science and wonder in nature; nature's uses as moral lesson and model for human behaviour; the hunger for visual spectacle; the idea of a richly varied but still fundamentally orderly — and classifiable — world. However, crucially their medium is different, and it makes more sense to link Attenborough to the more recent rise of the specialist ‘science media professional’ — science writers, but also science broadcasters, who reached far wider audiences — in the 1960s and 1970s at a time when television was becoming the mass medium for science, whether articulated through the TV scientist — Bronowski, Cousteau — or his often no less enterprising counterpart, the knowledgeable TV host — Attenborough, Cronkite, Moore (Gregory and Miller 1998: 38, 41). Science media professionals provided a bridge between the ‘expert’ world of professional science and the ‘lay’ world of the TV audience; they also came to personify science in public, often so effectively as to be turned into bona fide scientists themselves and credited with an expertise that most of them — Attenborough included — would certainly not have wanted to claim for themselves.
TV science, like other forms of science journalism, is always likely to be more about journalism than about science; it is inevitably bound by the rules and conventions of its medium (Gregory and Miller 1998: 131). It also raises unresolved issues about the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ science, the consensus position being that these exist on a continuum rather than inhabiting separate spheres. As Gregory and Miller rightly suggest, popularization isn't just about reaching ‘the public’, but several different publics, while it also spans a number of communication models: one doesn't need to be a media theorist to see the inadequacy of a sender-transmitter-receiver model that has professional scientists at one end and the public at the other, with a range of popularizing figures — journalists, broadcasters and so on — somewhere in between (86). Nor is it easy to know without extensive empirical research what impact TV science has had, and continues to have, on its disparate publics; the messages may be simple enough to decipher, but it is far more difficult to know whether these have ‘got across’ (128). Notwithstanding, it seems legitimate to say that successful science media professionals such as Attenborough have been given an authority, increased rather than diminished by their celebrity, which is out of keeping with their degree of scientific knowledge, and that is linked at another level to the very myths — the ‘objectivity’ of science, the ‘reliability’ of science as a form of applied common sense — that even popularizers, whose skills lie more in synthesis than in specifics, are eager to debunk.
To some extent, this authority has to do with the specific forms of ‘lay expertise’ attributed to the individual presenteras-celebrity. As Boykoff and Goodman suggest, celebrities may be understood as opening up ‘space in the public sphere and the science/ policy nexus through the creation of novel form[s] of “expertise” or “authorized speakers”’ (2009: 396; see also the Introduction to this volume). While Boykoff and Goodman's emphasis is on building the parameters for a global celebrity system that accommodates very different levels of both specialist and general knowledge, their suggestion creates the possibility of thinking not just about ‘celebrity expertise’ — i.e. those forms of semi-authorized knowledge that accrue specifically to celebrities — but also about the ways in which the celebrity system embodies knowledge in particular individuals, giving them an authority and, perhaps more important, a believability that doesn't necessarily correspond to thei...
