Sir David Attenborough’s trials

Sir David Attenborough has endured some pretty harsh conditions for the sake of his art, said Jan Moir in the London Daily Mail. During his 60-year career, the naturalist and broadcaster has survived on grubs in the jungle, lain for hours on his stomach in 120-degree desert heat in order to film scorpions, and braved punishing cold in the Arctic and the Antarctic for the series Frozen Planet. During the filming of that TV series, the 85-year-old was caught on an Antarctic plateau when a sudden blizzard blew up, battering his tent. “I was screaming into the microphone to make myself heard,” he says.

But Attenborough’s worst trial took place in a remote Indian village many years ago, when the locals threw a party for his departing crew. “The old women take guava fruit and sort of mumble it between their teeth and then spit it into an old canoe,” he explains. “They leave it for four or five days when it starts to bubble and smell...unappealing, shall we put it that way?” The resulting concoction was served up in a hollowed-out gourd. “I remember thinking, ‘I am not going to be able to do this twice, so I had better get it down properly the first time.’ So I did and managed to summon a smile afterward, and someone cried, ‘He likes it, give him another!’”

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