SPEAKER_04 0:04

Well, tonight I'm gonna tell you a few tales from TV. Um mainly trying to show you what's involved when we do a program. It's not as uh easy as you might think. In the last 10 years I've been able to do some quite remarkable things which I wouldn't have been able to do had I stayed in my uh Oxford job. But all stories begin somewhere, and this is me aged, I think, about seven, five or six or seven, I can't remember, sixties, early sixties. That's me there. Um always fascinated in the animal world. I couldn't imagine there being anything more interesting than animals and plants, particularly animals, of course. Uh, and I wasn't a particularly brilliant scholar at school. I I um I was pretty average actually, and I would have in my end-of-term report cards things like if George spent less time rummaging in his bag and asking irrelevant questions, he would do a lot better. Well, you know, I often think if you ask an obvious question, you tend to get obvious answers. Ask a question that's a little bit off the wall, you might get a uh a new insight. But I was, I suppose I was a geek. What you would you would say now, you would say a nerd or a geek, because at the age of 12, 13, 14, I just wanted to find out about the natural world, how it worked. So we we would go off on holidays on the west coast of Scotland, normally for the whole of August, and I would make a you know equipment, I would sample rock pools, I would have a collection of of animal skulls or or plants or what have you, and I would enter them uh for you know school uh prizes, which I always won. Uh not because they were brilliant, but because very few other boys entered anything at all. So I I sort of I convinced myself that I was okay at biology, so it stuck. And I went on to do uh a degree in zoology at Edinburgh University, and then of course on to do my my higher degree at Imperial College. But it was in my second year at Edinburgh when I I ch my my whole view of the world you know changed, and it was because I realized that that really insects were the main event on earth. So we were on a field trip to the west coast of Scotland uh for a week, and all my classmates were looking for large hairy animals. They were looking for and eagles and owls and badgers and things that actually are fairly hard to find and not very easy to uh you know work on. But yet at our feet were literally tens of thousands of these ants doing remarkably interesting things. And I I knew then that actually, if you want to understand how the world works, you really have to understand what the small things are doing. And of course, we now know that you know 66 out of 100 of everything is an insect, three-quarters of all animals are insects, and uh to a first-order estimate, the majority of species on earth are insects. So if you don't know what they do and and how they live and how they interact, you can't really call yourself much of a biologist. But anyway, after my degree there at IC, I finally ended up at Oxford, which was I'll be quite honest with you, that this was my dream job. Um I thought, my goodness, this this is how it all works. You work hard at school, you get a degree, you get a PhD, they give you a job at Oxford, and there you are, and you're in that office for 25 years. And uh I thought, this is it, this is so easy, so straightforward. Um, and I was in charge of the Oxford collections of insects, which are very, very large, and I did research and teaching and everything else. There were lots to hold me there. I mean, I imagined fondly that I would die in my office. I I my my fingers would be prized off my oak desk and I'd be zipped up in a bag and taken outside at some ripe old age, or or perhaps even added into our collections of specimens. That would be a brilliant end. Um as I say, there were there was lots of interest there, heaps to hold me there. We have the second largest collection of insects in the UK. We have the holotypes of about 25,000 species. So a holotype is the original thing. So if any of you head off to Africa or a jungle somewhere and you find a new species, the that that individual that you're holding in your hand, which may be a new species, will have to be put somewhere for other individuals to to you know view it and and compare what they've got with what you have, and that's a holotype. Uh and so each of these things over here are are the original ones from which each of these species is known, and they're all all arranged in drawers, the most valuable you know, specimens uh in the world. We also have some interesting hit, you know, old things. Here is a specimen of the Hetse fly collected by David Livingston in Africa, and here in his handwriting here, and there's the bits of the Setsifly. It's in bits because I imagine he went. I must send this to my friend in Oxford, who will uh which of course you know he did. Um we also have other things which are of great interest, um, you know, historically, the Bath White here. This is the oldest pin specimen in the world. So it's uh collected in 1702 in a place called Cambridge. Cambrige. I'm I believe they have some educational institute there. Um there are obviously older insects in the world in graves and tombs and stuff in ancient Egypt because insects when they dry are extremely durable. But this is the first one that's actually on a pin. You can just about see the head of the pin. First specimen that somebody pinned onto a pin to put it in a drawer so that it could be used as a um you know, a specimen. So that that lots of interest at Oxford, and of course, in my area was the Huxley Room, which is the upper part of what was originally this great hallway on the front of the building, as you face the building on the left hand side. And it was through these doors here at the end in 1860 that 400 of Oxford's Great and Good filed with their big dresses and their top hats and their canes to hear about this newfangled theory of evolution. So, I mean it's it's 158 years ago, not very long ago. Uh it was a warm afternoon, and the argument, the debate uh raged for a while. There were folks saying monkey, monkey, and all the rest of it. And it was at this event that uh Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley, said uh to uh his his friends that he would he would have a crack at uh Wilberforce, who was of course the the the Oxford clergyman, who said to Huxley, is it on your grandfather's side that you're descended from an apeser? And Huxley said, I would sooner be descended from an apeser than from someone who employed a divine to stifle the truth. There are no accounts of what actually happened that day, and if I could if I could ever take a trip in a machine, a time machine, I would like to go back to 30th of June 1860 in this room and actually record what was said. Mr. Darwin was supposed to be here, of course, but he he was uh a wee bit of a hypochondriac. He he was also probably genuinely ill from his trips um on the Beagle, and he was away at Dr. Lane's Hydro Something Home having a cure, but he he was un unable to go. But but it was the first, as far as I know, it was the first time that these ideas had been aired to a large audience. And I could head up to the the Huxley room and breathe in the sort of atmosphere of this you know event. Well, I thought I had I had the dream job. I was gonna stay at Oxford until I died, and then something quite bizarre happened. When you're in Oxford and you're an expert on something, people will find you out. Now, now there is something that you should know about me. Uh as a kid, I had a really bad stammer. I mean, it was it was really off the scale. Uh, and I'm sure that there are lots of you who are friends or have offspring who have stammers and all the rest of it. It's about one person in 85 has a stammer. So if you had said to me at 14, uh, right, George, you're gonna be a lecturer at Oxford University for 25 years, and when you finish with that, you're going to be a television presenter. I would have laughed in your face. Just not gonna happen at all. But it did, and it and it happened in a very bizarre way. Not something I had ever planned, but I had inside me a burning desire to tell people about the world, to say, look at this animal, this is amazing, look what happens here. This is this is a thing that you should all be aware of. And uh early on it was very, very hard, uh, but I did various you know uh items on the news and so on. But it was uh Attenborough asked me if I would be uh his advisor on the undergrowth, uh which was a five-parter on insects, which I I you know agreed to. And it was the year after that that it began in earnest. Now I was on the way home after five hours of tutorials, December 2007, and I thought to myself, you know, if I have a tutorial, I have an audience of four. If I do a cruise ship talk, which I often do for a free holiday, but that's beside the point, uh, I might have an audience of 400. But if I do something really good on the on the idiot box, um I might get an audience of four million. So I resigned. I actually got home, had the beer, and and typed it out. You know, dear director, I resigned my position of assistant curator and handed it in the following day. Half of my auction friends thought I had gone completely insane. I I I had a full-time tenure job, but I really wanted to get out and do something like this, which for the next 10 years and up to now I have been doing. Uh, things that I wouldn't have found very easy to do behind my oak desk doing tutorials. Um, and it all started really because in 2007 the BBC decided that natural history programming was really the preserve of the middle class and the middle-aged. So that that that was their audience base, and they wanted to broaden it out so that they had a much broader age range, and so they hit on the idea of a reality type show, but with science in it, i.e., have a team in a jungle, film them unscripted for six weeks, and edit whatever you get into a program. Well, it it worked. I mean, it was it was a surprisingly great uh idea, and we made five altogether. The Expedition Borneo was the first one, Lost Land the Jaguar, Lost Land the Volcano, Lost Land of the Tiger, and the Dark. And I'm going to tell you a bit about the ins and outs of each of these. Expedition Borneo was the first, it was aired as a five five half-hour episodes over a week. It that they're expensive to make, so they they had to be funded by us and somebody else, in this case the Discovery Channel. Uh, and we picked a place where we were pretty sure would be interesting. So, up here in Sabah and a place called Imback, which has been relatively unexplored. It's a grade two reserve, which means it could be fouled at any time. So, epic journey. Let's take 35 crews, spend six weeks in the jungle, three and a half tons of equipment. I mean, that is a huge amount of kick, which would fill this whole stage. And if you have to fly through four airports, as you often do, and these things, it's a nightmare. Yeah, fortunately, I don't have to do any of that stuff. Uh, and the reason we went to Borneo, of course, it's one of the world's hottest hotspots for animals and plants. So 15,000 species of flowering plants, 3,000 species of trees, mammals, birds. But of course, what what audiences really like, and it's a thing that I I have an issue with, of course, as you can imagine, uh, what they really like are the big hairy stuff. That's what they that's what audiences really want to see. Orangutan is an elephant, Samataran Rhino's clouded leopard. Of course, wow, wouldn't it be great if we filmed one of these things? You know, that would be on the opening shot of the of the film. Well, we did see one actually. It was about week two or week three. A few of us were having uh uh um a week a small bathe and a stream early on in the day. Uh and one of this thing, actually, almost this exact one, came sauntering across the bank. In fact, it was about eight feet from us or less, and we were just we were transfixed, and it it moved across the bank in a manner which suggested that it knew we didn't have a camera. It was that sort of, you know, it was almost going. So you know, I was going, who's got a camera?

SPEAKER_03 14:14

Have you got a camera? Gordon, where's Gordon?

unknown 14:17

Gordon!

SPEAKER_04 14:18

By the time Gordon came down with his enormous camera, which can film an eagle's eyeball at half a mile, you know, uh that thing had just gone. Uh, it's very hard to make good TV out of folks trying to make a plaster cast of a of a print. It's it's not great TV.

SPEAKER_03 14:36

Yes, this is a clouded leopard. Look, look, you can see the print here.

SPEAKER_04 14:40

Audiences are switched off at this point. Uh my job on this trip, of course, was to make stuff like this interesting. And it's quite a hard, hard job because audiences in the main don't like insects and spiders. In fact, audiences in the main can't tell whether it's an insect or a spider. Uh, and in fact, if if you actually pitch an idea, which I have done several times on spiders, they go, sorry, George, spider programs just don't, it's it's a ratings loser, they say. And I go, okay, but they're really interesting. Yeah, we know, but sorry. So so you have to go in the jungle and find stuff. And you have to know sufficient about everything you find that you're able to say something about them on camera. Uh, I I recall seeing a program on oceans once, uh, not that long ago, actually, and there were two guys from America who were swimming, aqua lungs, and they're swimming, and a thing comes past them like this, you know, and the one guy says, What's that? The other guy says, It's a fish. Yeah, even I know it's a fish, mate. If you if you can see something more interesting than it's a fish, you know. So, anyway, that that's my job on the shoot. Uh, and one of the things that you will experience if you ever go in a jungle is that you will get diarrhea. It is unavoidable. It doesn't matter how careful you are, it doesn't matter how many times you wash your hand and hand shell and all the rest of it. If you spend four weeks in a jungle, remote in a jungle, I mean in a proper jungle, I reckon you'll spend a quarter of your time wishing you were on a toilet, or actually on a toilet, which in the case of our trips is a hole in the ground, basically. And it was exactly on this particular day when the rest of the team, the whole crew, were off trying to film bears, sunbears, or something I can't remember. And I said, Look, I'm sorry, I cannot I cannot move from this spot. I'm gonna have to stand here for the rest of the day. And this thing came down on a silk thread about eight inches from my nose, and it stopped about there, and I went, that's a that's a new species. It's very hard to describe to you that feeling when you see something you know in the wild and you are 99% sure it's undescribed, it's it's it's a new species. Of course there are. There are a million insects for which we have handed them a name. Yeah, there you are, that that's the name. But we're pretty sure there there are eight million other species of insect out there, unnamed in the you know, in the world, and spiders, of course. So this thing came down on its silk thread, and I thought, well, it's an ant, no, it's not, it's a spider, it has to be a spider because it has silk, but it looks like an ant, it even holds up its front legs like this, as if it's an insect, and it moves with the ants. And of course, as you could predict, it eats the ants. So if you're an ant of this particular group, you're never quite sure when you pass something that it's you know, hi there. And it it was in fact a new species. Um so only three of these uh have been described. Now, of course, the reason we went to Borneo, it's remote, it's very rich, but of course it's under threat. So we we drove for something like four hours through this hideous oil palm, uh, which and you can just about see the fires on the edge of the rainforest up here as the uh as it gets hacked back. Uh, and of course, the reason is that the oil palm is extremely valuable, it's very easy to grow. Discovered, I'm afraid, by the Brits in West Africa, and I I do blame them for this, uh, because that they said, Oh, this is a remarkable palm tree. You just squeeze the nuts, you get this fantastic high-value edible oil, and you don't have to use much pesticide on it, and you don't have to use much anything else, it just grows. Let's grow it everywhere and make a fortune, which of course is exactly what has happened. So, Indonesia, Malaysia, it's just gone from 64, uh, it's just gone through the roof, millions and millions of tons. And of course, because of that, and because you find that palm oil in probably one item in six, or one item in eight, which you buy in the shops here, it could be in soaps, foods, anything you want. It's it's it's used. Uh, well, I when I was born in 1954, the whole of Borneo was virtually jungle 85, 2000, 2005, 2020, probably all be gone, or much of it will be be gone. So, but that was a highlight, and the film was, I think, probably seen over the next five years by an audience of about 40 million around the world. That part of the jungle where we were was was then made a grade one um, you know, reserve. So that was good. Well, the next year we we decided to head off in the opposite direction and we said, let's make Expedition Guyana. Fantastic! Let's go and do exactly the same thing again. Uh film in a really, really out-of-the-way area uh with three and a half tons of equipment uh and all that. And about a month before it was aired, somebody high up in the BBC said, Let's not call it Expedition Ghana, let's call it The Lost Land of the Jaguar. Uh, you know, it was a great title and it stuck. The trouble was we we hadn't actually filmed any Jaguars. Well, we s we got one, I think. Um again, I there there is a sheer amount of luck. You can plan things till you're blue in the face, but if you don't see the animals on the day when you're there, uh it ain't you know it won't work. We did see one actually on a bank. Uh we we were up early in a canoe. We had the the cameraman, I was wired up with sound director, we had a guy at the engine end, and as we turned the corner of the stream, there about a hundred yards away was a female jaguar having a drink like this at the stream. Oh yes, you can just see it. Yeah, fantastic shot. So the the director turned to the guy at the engine end and went, now even if you couldn't speak English, right, you would you would interpret surely this as slow down. Yeah? Apparently not. This guy went, okay. The canoe took off like like an aqua hydrofoil towards the Jaguar. It was a disaster. We the the Gordon holding this enormous camera almost went out the back of the boat.

SPEAKER_06 21:29

I was holding him saying, no, Gordon, not the camera, no.

SPEAKER_04 21:35

Anyway, we we picked this part of the world because Guyana is a very large country which is virtually all jungle. There's virtually all jungle. Most people are up here, and there's a very few folks here. We wanted to go here, which is about as remote as you can as you can get on the Essequibo, which flows from way up here in the highlands, goes down. You can just about see it as. It flows down to the ocean there. Well, how do we get there? Well, you have to fly your three and a half tons of kit um from the main town airport to a tiny air airstrip some somewhere about here, and then it's 12 hours by canoe with all your kit into the jungle. Now, well, when I say canoe, right, I'm I'm these things wouldn't pass any health and safety check that I'm aware of in any part of the world. They basically you're you've got all this really expensive kit plus personnel, and we're bailing them out virtually for 12 hours as we as we zoom up this thing. Great fun, great fun. Why you might say, do we have to take three and a half tons of equipment on these trips? Well, the reason is, of course, that there are three three teams of us heading off at any time and during the day, filming at the same time. Plus, these expensive cameras don't really like being hot and wet. Not surprisingly. They they they've improved a bit in the past few years. But basically, all of these bits of kit have to be kept dry in a box overnight and dried all the rest of it. Uh if if at the end of six weeks you've got one camera that still actually works, you're doing quite well. You know. And you often have to have special items of kit, such as a small camera, on the end of this very large camera. So when the cameraman is filming a giant otter away over there, the audience can see his face going, look at the size of that otter. Or whatever he he says. We had one special item of kit, which was for the opening shot, which we knew would be a real a real great shot in HD. So it's an HD camera on the end of a very long arm which just pans slowly across these rather super falls. Uh, and as it pans along here, it looks like a little sort of gurgling stream, a chalk stream in Hampshire, you know. And as you you get to the edge, it just goes like that. And that that is in HD, really it makes you jump. Uh, so that was you used for that one shot. Uh and I'll show you what I mean. This is the guitar falls. Uh it's dramatic. Very dramatic. And uh there's a very helpful design here that says the least keep eight feet from the edge. Well, of course, where's the BBC? Not when I keep eight feet from the edge. No, no, no, no, no. In fact, somebody said, has anyone ever absailed down the Kaico Falls? And we went, I don't think so. No. Let's do it. Health and safety out the window, let's go. So it was um it you you have to choose where to absail from, of course, because if you absail from anywhere along here, you die. You absail here, it's a bit hairy. So probably somewhere about here would be s safe enough. So that's what we did. So so here is uh a crew rigged up to go, and there's our our cameraman uh who is filming uh Steve on his way down. He's he's about a quarter of the way down now. This is uh this is a very, very long falls. Now you might be super impressed, as I'm sure you all are, you with wow, this guy's really tough. But actually, individuals who are on camera don't have the hard job. We we actually have the easy job because what you don't forget, what you you may not think about is the fact that he has got to absail down on a rope with Steve at some point, and he has to film, he has to hold his heavy camera, yeah, he has to have a shot composed, exposed correctly, filmed, all the rest of it while he's climbing. Um and there's a sound recorder and a director as well. So all we have to do in the main is is go, wow, that's amazing, or something similar. Uh so it was it was um it was great. We we we found a couple of frogs there. It was just very wet. We destroyed the camera, completely destroyed it. Anyway, one of my highlights on this film was when we found a 120-foot-long hollow tree that had fallen down, huge tree, just fallen down, crunched in the jungle, been completely hollowed out, and I wanted to get up this thing. I I knew there was things in there that I wanted to find. Now, lots of audience of the audience thought that I had been forced into this. Go on, George, get in there, go on, get in, get in, like some Spaniel, you know, go on and find stuff. In fact, it was completely the opposite because they said, Look, George, I know we're a bit slack on health and safety, but from time to time, but you really that's too that is too dangerous. You we don't want you to to go in there. I said, Well, I'm going, so you have exactly five minutes to find a camera. So off I went.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

George is now 25 meters inside this fallen giant.

SPEAKER_04 27:15

This is amazing. Look what we've got here. This is a whip spider. These long bits are actually its front legs. And because it lives in darkness, you can see how it's just feeling my finger there. See? It uses these very long legs to feel its prey, and its prey are these cave crickets here. Very sneakily, sometimes the whip spiders reach behind the cricket and just go tickle-tickle on the back end, and the cricket jumps forward into the jaws of the whip spider.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Little is known about the biology of these weird predators. Somehow George has to catch one to take it back to the lab.

SPEAKER_03 27:56

One's just crawled across my place.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

It's as hot as a sauna and crawling with bugs. George is in his element.

SPEAKER_07 28:10

Ah!

SPEAKER_04 28:11

Oh yes. Oh, yes. We love that. I I itched for two weeks after I was covered in spots, uh, and I have no idea what they were, but little tiny spots all over me. Now, there are obviously hazards in jungles. I mean, I I I don't want to pretend that that these things aren't there. They are there, of course. Uh, there are things that will eat you whole. And in fact, in that uh area of the world, there are these enormous cayman who have now realized that canoes equal food. And what what they do in some areas is attempt to hit the rear of a canoe with their tail, and then something hopefully will fall out of the canoe, a dog, a child, as has happened. This thing actually found out within I think two days where we swam in the evening. Uh we didn't swim there anymore for a while. Uh, you will meet scorpions, of course, and there's a very handy rule of thumb if you're ever abroad and you happen on a scorpion, and it's very simple indeed. It's not the size of the animal, because size really isn't terribly important. It's the size, the thickness of the tail and the thickness of the claws. So if you have a scorpion, if you see a scorpion with a fat tail and thin spindly claws like this one, that is gonna be very bad because it you know uses its sting to hit prey. Overcome prey. It's got very, very thin claws. If you see a scorpion that has a thin tail and massive claws, you can pick it up, you can stick it in your shirt. Fine, absolutely fine, but not one that has a fat tail and thin claws. There are several ants out there which are really, really awful. In fact, that one there will give you the most painful sting of any in any animal in the world. It is the most painful state. They there's an index of pain, apparently. It's called the Smit Index. So honeybee is is one, and that thing is a four, which is indescribable. It's apparently like having a hot nail hammered through your finger or hand or whatever. And that is a leashmaniasis sore. Now, we were in this area, and I said to the guys in the team, I said, I can see sand flies flying around, and if you don't know what that means, have a check in your book, and you'll find out that they carry the single-celled organism that transmit that that will hand you leash maniasis. And they went, oh yeah, okay, well, that's fine, yeah, we'll just have a bit of a spray. I said, No, I think you really want to wear long trousers, long shirt, and you know, three of the team had this. Three of the team at the end of the trip. And how you get uh it all out of you is to head to the hospital. I think it's every day for 21 days you get injections of antimony. Not very nice. So if an entomologist ever says to you, I can see sand flies, right? You you know what to do. Uh and there are things like this, of course, out there. This is probably the nastiest viper in the world. It's called the Fer de Lens, and it is very hard to see. Very hard. And they are as dangerous at the size of a Biro as they are at four feet long. Uh and they are not after you, but because they're hard to see, it's just very easy to accidentally, you know, hit one. Uh there's a new hobby, apparently. Uh it's sort of orienteering through jungles. It's the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. Uh I was asked if I would um make some comment about this, you know, for the p advertising, like, wow, this is really exciting, says George McGavin. No, I said, no, I'm not saying exciting, I'm saying this is t craziness. If there's one habitat on earth where you move carefully and slowly and wear boots up to your ankles and beyond, it is jungles. Now, if any of you is of a nervous disposition, the next slide might not be very nice. This is uh a guy's foot, a director, who accidentally stood on a very small fur de lance and he got a bite. And six weeks after, his foot was like this. So all of the skin and flesh here had to be hacked away and he had to have a graft. Uh he was okay, but but it's it is one of the nastiest things. However, and you're all going, I'm never going into a jungle. No, do, because actually, the biggest cause of injury on all these trips isn't the animals. It's not drowning or getting trapped or snakes or scorpions or any of that stuff. It's helicopters. Helicopters are the biggest and most dangerous thing. Every time we have to fly in a helicopter, I just go, oh no. Really? Please, no. Hire cars as well. Uh, 85% of expedition injuries and deaths are caused by hire cars and and driving and helicopters. So all the rest of it is a doddle. Okay. So we were on a roll now, and the third one, Lost Land of the Volcano. We we were beginning to get used to what the audiences liked, we knew what to do. We're still filming about 300 to 1, so 300 hours of film will be edited down to one hour of actual film. But we knew what audiences were really into, and so off we went again to the lost land of the volcano, Papier, New Guinea, where we filmed in an extinct volcano here in the highlands in the south, Basavi and a dormant, or so we thought, dormant volcano up here on Rabat. So it was a fantastic. Now, what the most important and the most highly paid job in in in you know TV world is not directors or the cameramen or the presenters, it's the editor. So editors who stay their entire lives in darkened rooms and they're all pale and easily so you know spindly. But they have to make it from all this film into something that's really great. And that the heart, the the most important bit of any series is the opening 60 seconds, because you've got to hold the audience for the whole hour, and more than that, you want them to come back next week and the week after that. It's got to be so exciting that they will sit and watch, even if they're they're holding it in their hand, about to press onto ITV, they'll stop and go, no, let's watch this. So here's how we try to do it.

SPEAKER_06 35:17

On the far side of the world is a remote tropical island, carved by waterfalls and covered in thick jungle. New Guinea. And it's heart, a rugged mountains and deep gorges. It's one of the least explored corners of our planet. Over nine months, the field of scientists, adventurers, and filmmakers, the field of expeditions must be unfortunate.

SPEAKER_04 37:15

That's what we try and do. So the the first 60 seconds or or even under is is really, really, really important. Basavi itself is a really interesting place. It's a volcano, a very, very large one. Across the rim, it's about 4k across the rim. This went off last about 200,000 uh years ago, i.e. when early, early us were beginning to migrate out of Africa. So this was when it was going. And it's now uh extinct and clothed in jungle. So we were a little bit worried about the the guys who inhabit this whole area because we heard that they don't go into the crater ever. And so we you know, we we were a bit unsure as to why, and we sort of asked them, said, Look, you know, we are are we okay if we go in here? We're not gonna, you know, be in some sort of place that you don't think we should. Oh, they said, Are you well about you know spirits and stuff? Well, well, yes, we were, so I'm thinking it might be, you know, ancestral, you know, home. No, no, no, they said it's just it's a hell of a slap. If you're hunting for food, you we have to go up the volcano, down the volcano, hunt for prey, then we're gonna drag it up or eat it, drag it all, and no, no, it's just it's just not worth doing. Oh, fine. So basically, there have been very few individuals in this area at all ever. So there's one place you can land a heli, or nearly land a heli, on the edge of this huge rim that goes on for four kilometres, and it's about here, and it's about eight feet across. You can just about have a heli down, but not switch the engine off. Don't switch the engine off, because if it slips one way or the other way, it's not gonna be good. So you just simply hover it throughout the kit. And we had a frog expert, we had a bat expert, we had a bird expert, we had it was the most exciting team ever. And our expert on frogs was a chap called Alan Allenson from Hawaii, and he got off the heli onto here, and he stood about here, and he went, I can hear a new species of Hylies right there. I went, Really? And he went and got it, and he he knew the calls, and he said, That is a new species of Hylies. So it was like amazing. So jungle camp was pretty grim. I know lots of people have this idea of jungles being sort of magical places with animals flicking about. No, they're they're actually green hell. I have been in jungles which I would term green hell, okay? Because they're very hot, very humid. You stand still for more than five minutes, things grow up your legs and and begin eating you. Uh your clothes are disgusting at the end of six weeks. You can't wash that well or your clothes. And of course, because of continuity, you can't really have clean clothes every morning. So you basically you they're filthy clothes, you wear them at the end of the day, you hang them up on a tree, you wash yourself, you get into your little dry hammock. That's your only piece of dry anything for miles around. And then in the morning, you just put your wet clothes back on. I know it's horrible for about 30 seconds, and then it's fine. Um so it was pretty rough. Uh, but that's the heart of the whole thing. This this jungle lab which we built, uh, where everything would be brought back, all the bats, all the fish, all the birds, everything would be would be looked at here, and you know, it was for me, it was heaven. Well, I had to catch a few moths right at the top of the crater rim. And uh the way it worked, I only had one evening, uh there was only one evening to go. The previous day we had got this amazing shot from a heli, which was so far away I couldn't even hear it, but it was able to, you know, frame me up and then pull back to show me as a as a tiny spot in the frame.

SPEAKER_06 41:10

So no one imagined just how rich this mountain would turn out to be. In the weird moss forest that clings to the rim of the crater, George is setting a trap. It's carefully positioned right on the cliff edge. Once night falls, the high-powered light bulb will be switched on to attract insects to the sheet.

SPEAKER_04 41:58

And that's gonna be, hopefully, it's gonna be heaving with bugs. And then the problems began because that night it began to rain, and it I mean, rain, I mean, it really rained. Torrential. It went on and on and on. And I said to our director, I said, Look, I'm terribly sorry about this, but we can't catch moth tonight because they they won't come out. It's just it's it's raining, it's just pipping it at. And he looked at me and said, George, I've just spent about 7,000 pounds on that shot from the helicopter, you know, of you spreading out your seat and then pulling back to reveal this glorious jungle.

SPEAKER_03 42:38

You this is your last night. You have to catch the moths tonight.

SPEAKER_04 42:42

There is no ifs or buts about it. I went, okay. Don't blame me if it all goes horribly wrong. Well, experts can be wrong sometimes. This is what happens. I'm just overwhelmed. I never imagined my seed such a diversity of mothers. I mean, some of these things I've never seen before in my life. Yeah, show and tell. Show and tell. Well, at the end of that uh trip, we we we then went off to this place, which we thought was dormant, and we head to Tava Burr, which is a subvent of this very large caldera here, which is about the same size as the other one. But that that was active, I think, in the early 80s. Uh anyway, we got there in the boat. That's as close to an anxious face as I ever as I ever show on on TV. Because as soon as we set off in the boat, literally as we pushed it off the shore to head towards the half a mile straight to this thing, it went and I turned to the rectum and said, I thought you said it was dormant. He went, Yeah, well, so did we. Well, that it just got worse and worse. It got absolutely horrendous.

SPEAKER_05 44:58

We're evacuating camp in a hurry. And with very good reason.

SPEAKER_02 45:08

Show me, show me, show me. Come on. That's one of the bombs that that came out. We thought we were safe here. We were a long way away, and it landed here. That would have killed you in Scott.

unknown 45:25

Instantly.

SPEAKER_02 45:27

So I think we should all go now.

SPEAKER_06 45:33

George's mission has come to an abrupt end.

SPEAKER_04 45:37

Right. Too right. But we stayed to to film it till three in the morning in ultraviolet and infrared and slow-mo, and it was only when the rocks were coming over our heads and going splash in the sea behind us that we thought, actually, this is this is probably not such a great idea. Well, at the end of that trip, we got uh twelve new species of frog, three new species of fish, uh a new bat, very uh oddly. Uh we got various other lots of insects and spiders which will be new species. But on the very last day, of course, we find this thing in the crater. This is a giant woolly rat or a woolly giant rat, uh, has never seen a human being. Uh its father hadn't seen a human being, its great, great-grandfather had never seen a human being. So, not surprisingly, it's not terribly alarmed. It should be, it really should be alarmed. It was almost as if it was saying, Hello, who are you? I'm a giant woolly red. You don't really want to know who we are, really, honestly. But that is all, that's all the press after we got back home. 18 interviews back to back, and all they wanted to know about was this thing. That's all they wanted to know about.

SPEAKER_03 46:50

I was going, but look at all the frogs and and the the the bats really and the spiders are wonderful. Yeah. Just the rat, George. Just tell us about the rat.

unknown 47:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 47:02

Well, of course, the reason we went there again, hugely under threat. These two satellite images of the area, we're probably up about just a bit higher than this image, in fact. We're only taking four years apart. That is that is unlogged. And four years later, virtually, virtually logged. Uh all the ex all the trees that they can reach have been reached. Uh, and we reckon the experts on the team estimate that at the rate that was happening, uh, more than half of all the trees will be gone in 2021, which is only four years away. I hasten to remind you. Well, this is the problem I have in TV now, and I can I don't think I'm gonna believe you if you say you weren't looking at this. Because unfortunately, audiences do tend to immediately see the cute, furry things first, and they they sort of avoid the blocker, all the rest of the stuff. These animals are cute, they're attractive, they're like us, they have big brains, forward-facing eyes, they have hands, little fur, all the rest of it. And they are cute, I agree with you, but we could probably survive pretty well as a species without these, and I know that Chris Packham got a humongous amount of hate mail for for suggesting that pandas might not be terribly useful uh as a species, but uh I I won't go down that route. Uh, but what I would say is that things like bees and wasps and flies and beetles and are incredibly useful. They are they are the bedrock of of everything, they are the glue that holds ecology into one place. There's actually only one thing on this image that we could remove, and that is the headlights, which is there. So it's one species that it occurs on us on our hair. It's evolved probably from an animal which was on um um a bird in a cave. But anyway, it's ended up on us. And we could, in theory, because we now have seven million phone handsets in the world. And sorry, billion. Billion. And there are about seven billion of us in the world. So if we we could make sure everybody had a phone handset, we could have a text sent and go, right, global headlights eradication day is next Tuesday. So could you please kill all the headlights on your head and your kids? Uh and you could, in theory, in 24 hours, kill every headlight in the world, because they only occur on your hair, that's it. It wouldn't happen, of course, somebody would forget to do it. But the point is that is theoretically achievable, but yet we are blindly removing countless thousands of insect species without ever knowing they were even there. And I think this will be a huge issue. A huge issue. So I was very glad at the end of this that I was offered this show. This has been on for 10 years, in fact, we're now in the year um 11. And it's handed me a vehicle for the most incredible films on bugs and spires, insects in the UK. We have audiences of about 5 million every every evening. And I've made in the last 10 years something like 84 short films about lots of weird stuff, about the weirdest insects, the rarest, the most interesting insects in the UK, how why are flies, you know, you know, hard to swat, why flies don't enjoy you know striped animals. That is actually a horse, which we painted. It's tremendous. We get the total and we painted it in this you know special paint. And sure enough, the the flies go, oh no, I don't want to eat that. Which explains why zebras uh aren't attacked by by flies. Um anyway, here is one film I made which is is held up as a sort of ideal one-shot film. We take a day in the field, we film it in a day, it's edited in half a day, so it takes about you know two days all told, and we have to have a lot of luck. But here's a a typical one-shot film, which is about quite an interesting animal, which very few of you will have seen. But here's how it lives. Britain's wildflower meadows are bursting into life, and they're the perfect place to come face to face with an alien-like insect that's on a mission impossible.

SPEAKER_03 51:55

I'm on the trail of the oil beetle, and I really want to witness this extraordinary survival strategy, which all comes down to being able to hitch a piggyback ride on a bee.

SPEAKER_04 52:08

To see this remarkable behaviour, I've come to Devon to meet naturalist John Walter, and using the latest macro lenses, we're going to reveal the life cycle of this bizarre beetle. That's it. The object of all our attention.

SPEAKER_03 52:25

It's obviously a female fish, she's really quite big.

SPEAKER_01 52:28

What makes these beetles so fascinating to me? And when I first ever saw one, it looked like some sort of alien creature. And I thought it's got to do something weird as well. It can't be a normal beetle with a normal behaviour.

SPEAKER_04 52:41

It is one of the strangiest bouquet beetles, it really is. And if I hold her very gently, she will secrete from her knee joint a little tiny blob of oil. That's what she gets a name from. This oil is toxic, it tastes vile. And that protects her from being eaten by birds or any other insect. Well, she has to find a mate, that's the next toxic thing for her. The female beetle releases pheromone scents into the spring air, and it's not long before she attracts a mate. But she's not done with him yet. She drags her mate around for over an hour, which ensures the tens of thousands of eggs she lays throughout the meadow are fertilized by him. She needs to lay so many because the chances of any of her young surviving what's coming next are slim. When the beetle larvae emerge, they instinctively crawl up the nearby stems and head to the flowers. For those that get to the top, it's not the flower they're after. It's what is attracts. A solitary mining bee. The bees are visiting flowers on their incessant search for pollen, and the oil beetle are going to be lion wait, hoping for the ride of their lives.

SPEAKER_03 54:26

This is the critical point. The survival of their species depends on the young oil beetles being able to piggyback onto one of these bees, and they've only got seconds. To get it wrong, it's game over.

SPEAKER_04 54:41

They crawl from the petals onto the bee's back. Many get knocked off, but a few will keep a hold as the bee flies back to its nest. The bees unwittingly carry the few larvae that have survived the ride underground. These holes are the entrance to the bee's nest, and it's here where the young oil beetle's mission ends. In there are the bees' own eggs and stop parts of pollen, and it's these that the oil beetles are ultimately after. The successful beetle larvae will feast on these resources over the summer and pupate into adults. Of the 30,000 eggs the female beetle lays, only a handful will have made it this far. Next spring, a new generation of adult beetles will emerge, and one of Britain's most remarkable life cycles will begin all over again. Because I have been known for a long time as The Bug Man, so it was a bit of a surprise when they said, George, we want you to make a three-part series on Babys One about monkeys. And I said, Well, are we just gonna film monkeys or are we doing everything? Oh yeah, everything. I said, Well, then you can't call it uh Monkey Planet, because we're filming apes as well. It took three months of argument, and they still called it Monkey Planet, it doesn't matter. Anyway, I'm gonna show you the last film. When the mums were killed, no, no, not that one. They lost the library of insects. Stop! Next one. This shows you how things how it's sometimes very hard. Filming with insects is actually quite easy because you know what they're gonna do, pretty much. When you're filming with primates like these guys, you never quite know what's gonna happen. And it can be painful. Painful. I much prefer insects. Yeah, that'll that note to self, never hold a bonobo upside down over your groin. Okay, I'm gonna end there, but uh it's become the fashion now that uh we in the ivory towers who you know do research, we're supposed to get out there and talk to everybody, which we should do. And Fagan here, who is one of my all-time heroes, he said if you don't want to explain science, it's perverse. It's if when you're in love, you want to tell the world. And that's that's what I've been trying to do for basically all of my adult life, and hopefully I'll have a few more years. Anyway, thank you very much.