Pioneers in an endangered world

Waiting for my partner to choose some shoes for a wedding, I became conscious of an old but familiar song playing on the radio station the shop used for background music – John Denver’s tribute to the research vessel, Calypso which Jacques-Yves Cousteau piloted around the world for more than 30 years doing much publicised oceanographic research.   

“Aye, Calypso, the places you've been to,
the things that you've shown us, the stories you tell.
Aye, Calypso, I sing to your spirit, the men who have served you so long and so well.”

The rather cheesy lyrics were inspired by Cousteau and his crew as they sailed Calypso in search of the ocean’s secrets. The television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau that ran in the 1960s and 70s embellished the voyagers’ mystique.

Cousteau was an aggressive self-promotor, happy to accept the accolades of those who claimed him as the inspiration for the modern environmental movement, but there were others, before he came to prominence, that in their day were just as well known for bringing the natural world and its wonders to early television screens.

There was Armand Denis, the expressive Belgian who, with his English wife, Michaela, brought African savanna and Asian jungles to life on BBC television in the 1950s and 60s.  Filming in Africa, On Safari and Safari to Asia were compelling viewing, making them the true pioneers of wildlife documentaries.

If Armand and Michaela dominated on the land, Austrians Hans and Lotte Hass reigned supreme at sea during the same era, making more than 100 films — although for many adolescent schoolboys the attraction was Lotte in a swimsuit rather than the creatures the couple filmed.

Then of course there is the legendary David Attenborough, the only one of these early adventures still with us — championing the cause of environmentalism as he moves into his ninth decade.

They worked in the golden age of nature documentaries when television was unlocking exotic places and animals that had previously been seen only as backdrops to cinema dramas. Their work might have been in grainy black and white, but they were the first in their field and for a while audiences were enthralled by the wonder of it all.

The advent of colour television brought a revival during and after the 1970s, but in the 21^st century these productions have largely retreated to specialist channels or as settings for reality television shows. The planet has been fully explored; many of the land and marine animals that once thrilled us are under threat from human population explosion and exploitation.

We are constantly warned of the number of species facing extinction; how some of our best known and loved animals will soon exist in zoos, if at all — but little if anything seems to change.

The supreme irony would be if the work of these early filmmakers will one day be our only link with a world where animals roamed wide and free — or simply remembered in a romantic song about a time long gone.