Sir David Attenborough has revealed he once came close to drowning while testing scuba diving equipment during an early filming trip to the Great Barrier Reef in the 1950s.
Speaking to Prince William during an event to promote his new BBC documentary Ocean, the legendary naturalist, now 99, described the moment he realised something was wrong while wearing a faulty open-circuit diving helmet in 1957.
“When I put mine on for the first time I suddenly felt water and thought, ‘this can’t be right,’” he said.
“But by the time the water got about there I thought, ‘I’m sure this is not right.’ Of course, you’ve got this thing screwed on top of you and you can’t breathe or make yourself heard. I was saying ‘get it off me.’”
He explained how his concerns were initially dismissed by the director — who then tried on the helmet himself and surfaced even faster than Attenborough did.
“There was actually a fault on the thing,” he added.
The presenter, whose career in broadcasting spans more than 70 years, also reflected on the experience of his first dive, calling it a “sensory overload”. But he warned that the underwater worlds he once marvelled at are disappearing fast.
“The awful thing is that it’s hidden from you and from me and most people,” he said of the damage to marine ecosystems.
“The thing which I was appalled by when I first saw the shots taken for this film is that what we have done to the deep ocean floor is just unspeakably awful.”
“If you did anything remotely like it on land, everybody would be up in arms. If this film does anything — if it just shifts public awareness — it’ll be very, very important. I only hope that people who see it will recognise that something must be done before we destroy this great treasure.”
The conversation took place during the launch of Ocean, a new documentary that sees Sir David reflect on his decades of experience to spotlight the planet’s most extraordinary marine ecosystems.
The series aims to show how we are living through an unprecedented era of oceanic exploration, while underlining the crucial role the world’s oceans play in the health of the planet.
