David Attenborough at 97: ‘He still works harder than most of us – seven days a week’

Published

1 year ago

February 25, 2024

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At 97, Sir David Attenborough is a man still happy to crawl on his belly through wet grass to get his shot.

For his latest Sky Nature project, Secret World Of Sound, the world-renowned naturalist and broadcaster explores the ways that animals hear and produce sound, using cutting-edge technology to record noises from nature – with some captured on film for the first time.

Attenborough’s long-time collaborator, and the show’s series producer, Sharmila Choudhury tells The Climate Show: “David keeps us on our toes. He sets the bar very high. And that’s a good thing.

“I think he work still works harder than most of us, usually seven days a week… When he commits himself to something, he gives it 100%.”

Joining the team for filming in the Wye Valley in Monmouth to capture the song of a wild dipper, Attenborough found himself lying on the damp ground hoping that the small bird would show up.

Truly at one with nature, he didn’t have long to wait.

Choudhury explains: “He crawled through the grass to get into the best position, and was all up for it… We didn’t want to leave him lying in the wet grass for hours.

“Miraculously, and this often happens when David arrives on location, the sun suddenly burst through the clouds.

“The dipper flew in. David smiled and delivered his lines of what he wanted to say, you know, smoothly in one go. It’s amazing.”

‘It hits you in the core’

For the same episode, Attenborough explains how bees are struggling with modern fertilisers and climate change.

Choudhury says: “Him looking straight to camera and delivering a message like that is so powerful. It literally hits you in the core.”

Calling him an “inspiration,” and praising his “unrivalled” breadth of knowledge, she adds: “And he obviously has a fabulous voice and style of delivery, which is the cherry on the cake of any natural history program.”

A three-part series, the documentary studies animal behaviour, breaking the sounds they make down into four functions – finding a mate, looking after young, hunting for food or avoiding becoming prey.

Technology worthy of 007

Some of the technology used in the series was borrowed from other walks of life, while other bits of kit were of true James Bond status.

Choudhury says: “We used everything from the tiniest microphone the size of your fingernail, that you could put inside a bird nest or a beehive, to super sensitive hydrophones that you can put underwater to record, the faintest communications between fish.

“There were also a couple of, gadgets that were actually developed for other industries – the gas industry, or for espionage purposes, that we thought might help us to listen in on sounds that we don’t normally get to hear.”

One of those gadgets was the laser vibrometer – a machine which shoots out a laser beam to detect any vibrations caused by noise and amplifies them, so they are audible to the human ear.

It was used to capture the love song of a pair of amorous treehoppers in Costa Rica.

While sound was the focus of the documentary, another theme became impossible to ignore while filming.

‘Every single shoot was impacted by climate change’

Choudhury says: “The biggest challenge, without any doubt, was climate change. It’s something that we’ve seen creep in on us over the years.

“I’ve been making wildlife films for over 30 years. And in the last decade or so, more and more shoots have been impacted by climate change.

“That means animals that would have been predictable in their movements, say, their migrations or where they would be, or the time of year they’d be breeding, are not doing the usual things anymore.

“It started off with one or two parts of the world, or one or two shoots being affected by this. But on this particular series, every single shoot was impacted by climate change.

“That made filming very difficult, and it was very distressing to see the animals suffering in this new world.”

‘The elephants were so stressed’

One example was the team’s trip to Amboseli National Park in Kenya to film elephants.

The plan had been to shoot a story about how mothers and babies communicate with each other – but when they arrived following Kenya’s worst drought in 40 years, they found the elephants in an awful plight.

“The elephants were behaving very differently to before. They had split up into tiny herds and every night they would go out of the park to surrounding fields to try and find some food.

“Every morning they would walk back into the waterhole in the middle of the park, and they would walk single file heads down, absolutely dejected. They didn’t make a single sound.

“The animals were so stressed, they had no energy left to talk to each other effectively.

“After we left, Kenya and Amboseli experienced the worst deaths of wildlife, including elephants, recorded history and that was clearly a result of climate change.”

‘Buy the coral reefs a little time’

But there was some hope amid the devastation being caused to the natural world by the climate crisis – and this was very much set in the world of sound.

During filming, the team discovered an Australian scientist whose research had found that by playing the sound of a healthy coral reef at the site of a dying reef it could help regenerate it and bring back some of the fish.

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Choudhury explains: “They are hopeful that they might be able to buy coral reefs a little bit of time whilst we tackle climate change.

“It won’t be a solution in the long run because the reef will continue to die off if the oceans continue to warm. But it’s a little ray of hope, at a time when we so badly needed.”

Watch the full interview with Sharmila Choudhury on The Climate Show with Tom Heap, Saturday and Sunday at 3.30 and 7.30pm on Sky News.

Secret World Of Sound With David Attenborough is streaming on Sky Nature and NOW.

UK

Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Published

6 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Liverpool players past and present have joined the family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva for their funeral in Portugal.

A service was held in the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in their hometown of Gondomar near Porto in northern Portugal on Saturday morning.

Mourners lined the streets and some in the crowd clapped as the brothers’ coffins were carried into the church.

The funeral – in pictures

Jota, 28, leaves behind his wife of only 11 days, Rute Cardoso, and three young children.

His younger brother, 25, was an attacking midfielder for Penafiel in the second tier of Portuguese football.

Liverpool manager Arne Slot, captain Virgil Van Dijk and teammates including Andy Robertson, Conor Bradley, Ryan Gravenberch, Cody Gakpo, Curtis Jones, Darwin Nunez and Joe Gomez were seen at the service.

Former teammates Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Fabinho were also there.

Van Dijk carried a red wreath with Jota’s number 20, while Robertson had a wreath featuring number 30, Silva’s number at Penafiel.

Some of Jota’s teammates in the Portuguese national side also attended, including Bruno Fernandes, of Manchester United, Ruben Dias and Bernardo Silva, of Manchester City, Joao Felix and Renato Veiga, of Chelsea, Nelson Semedo, from Wolves, Joao Moutinho and Rui Patricio.

Ruben Neves was one of the pallbearers after flying in from Florida where he played for Al Hilal in the Club World Cup quarter-final on Friday night.

‘More than a friend’

In a post published on Instagram before the service, he told Jota he had been “more than a friend, we’re family, and we won’t stop being that way just because you’ve decided to sign a contract a little further away from us!”

Jota’s fellow Liverpool midfielder, Alexis Mac Allister, said on Instagram: “I can’t believe it. I’ll always remember your smiles, your anger, your intelligence, your camaraderie, and everything that made you a person. It hurts so much; we’ll miss you. Rest in peace, dear Diogo.”

Porto FC president Andre Villas-Boas and Portugal national team manager Roberto Martinez were also in attendance.

‘With us forever’

Speaking after the ceremony, Martinez said the period since their deaths had been “really, really sad days, as you can imagine, but today we showed we are a large, close family.

“Their spirit will be with us forever.”

The service was private, but the words spoken by the Bishop of Porto, Manuel Linda, were broadcast to those standing outside the church.

He told Jota’s children, who were not at the service, that he was praying for them specifically, as well as their mother and grandparents.

“There are no words, but there are feelings,” he said, adding: “We also suffer a lot and we are with you emotionally.”

The brothers died after a Lamborghini they were travelling in burst into flames following a suspected tyre blowout in the early hours of Thursday morning.

No other vehicles are said to have been involved in the incident.

Liverpool have delayed the return of their players for pre-season following Jota’s death and players past and present paid tribute to him and his brother on social media.

Flowers have been left outside Anfield, where flags have been lowered to half-mast and all club shops, museums and tours have been closed until Monday.

UK

Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Published

9 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.

MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.

Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.

In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.

“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.

“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.

“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”

Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.

The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.

It comes after Ms Reeves said she was “totally” up to continuing as chancellor after appearing tearful at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Criticising Sir Keir for the U-turns on benefit reform during PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the chancellor looked “absolutely miserable”, and questioned whether she would remain in post until the next election.

Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”

In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.

“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”

Sir Keir also told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby on Thursday that he “didn’t appreciate” that Ms Reeves was crying in the Commons.

“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.

“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”

UK

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva’s funeral in pictures

Published

11 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota and Andre Silva's funeral in pictures

The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.

The Liverpool forward, 28, and his brother died in a car crash in Spain on Thursday.

Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.