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'It's totally fiction': Sir David Attenborough on the adoration of millions

There is only one response when you tell people you are going to meet Sir David Attenborough. "Oh, my god," says everyone from colleagues to the barista who makes my morning coffee. "I love him."

What is it about Attenborough? What does he make of all this affection from people who have never met him? "Makes you feel bogus," he says in that distinctive throaty rumble. "I mean, it's totally fiction. Or totally unrealistic, to put it better. Because that's not me – that's only one tiny part of me, by which I happen to earn my living. But it's not me. It's false … I'm not different from anybody else."

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Things of nightmares in Planet Earth II

Sir David Attenborough terrifies audiences and social media in his long-awaited follow-up series Planet Earth II, with a chase scene between hatchling iguanas and an army of snakes.

After 60 years chatting affably about animals in people's living rooms, it's probably inevitable that he's become a surrogate granddad for millions of strangers. He understands this. "If you are a child of three or four, and you see this funny little figure on the television set and, what's more, it remains there, more or less the same – not exactly but more or less – for all those years, it occupies a different space in your mind," he says. "Not only that, but it's associated with all the lovely things that you can think of – all the wonders of the natural world."

Attenborough knows how television works. He understands what makes audiences tick – perhaps even better than he understands the mating habits of pygmy three-toed sloths or the hibernation patterns of bears.

When he started at the BBC, the television landscape was as unfamiliar as the jungles and deserts he would later explore on screen. He was 24 years old. He had once watched a television at his wife Jane's parents' house, but didn't own a set himself. At that point, not many people did.

But he was bored by his job editing science textbooks. He had hoped his degree in natural sciences from Cambridge might eventually take him to exotic locations on research trips, but most zoologists at that time spent their working lives in labs. So instead of ditching publishing to return to university and read for a doctorate, he applied for a job with BBC radio. He didn't get it. But then came a phone call from Mary Adams, a producer with the BBC's television service. Would he be interested in joining their training program?

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Attenborough has written about those early years in his memoir, Life on Air. He and his colleagues were inventing the visual language of television as they went along. In the cafeteria they debated the best way to change shots – by cut or dissolve? "Should we perhaps restrict the use of the dissolve and so establish a special meaning to it – to suggest, maybe, a change of time, subject or location. When could we justifiably use music? Was it dishonest to mix film sequences shot earlier with live action?"

Even now that his age sometimes prevents him from researching and presenting documentaries in the field, Attenborough is still working on scripts. He reviewed – and in some cases rewrote – the voiceovers he recorded for his new nature series Planet Earth II.

When writing, he prefers to watch footage on VHS. "Easier to just go backwards and forwards so that you actually see the moment when the animal does something," he says. The BBC duly keeps one remaining machine and converts the digital footage to analogue so he can use it.

Mike Gunton, creative director of the BBC's Natural History Unit, has worked with Attenborough for 30 years. When he first started working with Attenborough, Gunton wrote a script describing a particular piece of footage as "incredible". Attenborough told him to take it out. If it was incredible, he said, there was no need to say so. If it wasn't, exaggeration wouldn't help.

"That's key – the less words, the more meaning," Attenborough says. "You see, you have to be very careful. The subject you are dealing with is bigger than you are. If you start using those important pictures just as a kind of background to build your own ego as being a comedian or, indeed, being a preacher, then you are on the wrong line."

Attenborough's opinions are powerful and he's careful about expressing them in public. For years he stayed quiet on the issue of climate change. He copped criticism for his silence, but he wanted to be absolutely sure of the facts. Nowadays he's certain enough to tell anyone who asks that humanity must tackle the problem – and soon.

"There are almost overwhelming reasons to be pessimistic," he says. Still, he notes that humans can achieve great things when they work together. Look at the hole in the ozone layer. "People saw the problem and realised that if we didn't do something, humanity would fry. And actually, that ozone hole has healed – not completely yet, but it's healing, because the world's humans saw what they were doing wrong and fixed it.

"The problem we have got now is a lot more widespread and more deeply seated … But it isn't as though we don't understand what the problem is or we don't have ways of solving it – we do. What we need to do is get together."

In the wake of Planet Earth II's airing in the UK, one of Attenborough's BBC colleagues, natural history producer and presenter Martin Hughes-Games criticised the series as "an escapist wildlife fantasy" that ignored evidence of mass extinction and the damage humans are doing to the planet.

As Attenborough sees it, television that's all doom and gloom does no-one much good. His closing address in Planet Earth II is a direct challenge to the viewer to protect the planet but, he says, "people are not going to love something if they don't know anything about it".

"If the only natural history programmes you ever made started off by saying, I'm going to show you something wonderful and now I'm going to show you how you are ruining it, then you'd lose your audience ... If you know what the world is and care for how wonderful it is, that is the very first step in doing something about climate change."

The new series is full of footage to inspire awe. As a pygmy sloth swims across a lagoon in search of love on the Isla Escudo de Veraguas off Panama, every damp strand of his fur glistens in high definition. When komodo dragons fight on their island home in Indonesia, you can see flecks of blood in the strings of slobber that dangle from their jaws.

The original Planet Earth, in 2006, was the first natural history series to be filmed in high definition. Ten years on, new technology helped the BBC's crews catch footage of animal behaviours never before seen on screen. Remote camera-traps captured snow leopards – usually solitary creatures – in a battle over a female in the Himalayas. In the final episode, dedicated to urban environments, infrared traps and thermal cameras filmed leopards on the hunt for pigs in central Mumbai. A sequence that shows racer snakes shooting across a shingled Galapagos beach to strike at iguana hatchlings has been watched more than 8 million times on YouTube.

Even after so many years, Attenborough finds all this tremendously exciting. He wants to show me a clip of a pufferfish filmed for a previous series, Life Story, so Gunton finds it on his phone. "It's a little fish – that big," Attenborough says, holding thumb and forefinger apart, "which makes a pattern on the sea mud, in order to induce the female to come down and lay its eggs in the middle. It is the most wonderful thing you've ever seen."

For all his knowledge and enthusiasm, Attenborough might never have made it onto the screen had his first boss at the BBC had her way. After his first appearance on camera, Adams wrote a memo: "David Attenborough is intelligent and promising and may well be producer material, but he is not to be used again as an interviewer. His teeth are too big."

But in 1954, Attenborough convinced the BBC to send him to Sierra Leone to direct a series about a London Zoo collecting expedition. Zoo Quest ought to have been presented by the zoo's curator of reptiles, Jack Lester, but he fell ill during the first broadcast and Attenborough was forced to take his place.

When Attenborough eventually moved into management, becoming controller of BBC Two, he insisted on a clause in his contract that allowed him to keep making the occasional programme. During his eight years in senior administration at the BBC, he commissioned Monty Python's Flying Circus and oversaw the introduction of colour television. His name was tossed around as a likely candidate for director-general, but by that time he was ready to get back in the field. "Eight years was enough sitting behind a desk," he says.

Watching Planet Earth II's footage – lions taking on buffalo in the flooded grasslands of Botswana, golden eagles soaring through the Alps – it's easy to assume Attenborough must be envious of the younger producers who were there as it happened. A pacemaker and a new set of knees kept him filming in far-flung locations until well into his 80s, diving deep in the Barrier Reef in a tiny submarine as recently as 2014. But these days he doesn't travel quite as much. Was it tough watching Planet Earth II's footage of penguins on Zavodovski Island, a volcanic speck in the south Atlantic so remote that few have set foot on it? He leans forward and says in a conspiratorial whisper, "I've been there."

Of course he has. Thirty-six years ago he was on an ice-patrol ship, on his way to do some filming in South Georgia. "The captain – nice chap, very enterprising – said, 'Nobody's ever landed on Zavodovski as far as I know. We've got a helicopter on board. Would you like to go?' And I said, 'Would I ever.' So he landed among these 10 million chinstrap penguins and we were there for a day."

But there must be some sense of regret that he can't get there now. "Oh, all the time," he says. "Of course, yes. I'd love to have seen those snow leopards, actually."

At home in Richmond in south-west London he takes pleasure in spotting kingfishers and watching the dragonflies that flit over his garden pond in spring. He has lived there since he moved in with Jane in 1952. She died suddenly in 1997 after a brain haemorrhage.

These days their daughter Susan spends a lot time at the Richmond house, keeping things in order and running Attenborough's business affairs. Their son Robert is a retired bioanthropologist, who worked for many years as a senior lecturer at Canberra's ANU.

Attenborough has said that of all the places he has been, Richmond is his favourite. He likes the climate and the fact that London is full of museums and concerts of "serious" music.

But his travelling days are far from over. For the piece-to-camera that opens the series, he soared in a hot-air balloon above the Swiss Alps – "Marvellous!" He gave his closing address, a direct challenge to the viewer to protect the planet, from the top of London's Shard skyscraper. And in February, he will visit Australia and New Zealand for a speaking tour. No wonder Gunton is already talking about a possible Attenborough at 100 TV special. "I've got the script ready," he jokes. "Standing by."

Attenborough gets about 30 letters a day (he doesn't use email). Occasionally he hears from creationists, who criticise him for talking about evolution, or failing to credit god for nature's bounty. In November, he became the target of Donald Trump's Twitter gang over an obviously tongue-in-cheek remark that the president-elect should be shot for his climate-change denial.

But most people who write to Attenborough do so to thank him for his decades of work and to tell him what it has meant to them. And though he claims their affection is misplaced, he replies to every one.


Sir David Attenborough will be in Sydney with his Quest for Life tour from February 7-9 and in Melbourne February 11 and 12.

Planet Earth II will screen on Channel Nine in the week beginning February 12.