Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries have been staggeringly well-received. Planet Earth
Brothers—and every other TV show, ever. The original Planet Earth sits at #3. And if it had
enough votes to make the list, his 2015 documentary The Hunt would sit at #6. Their
popularity is without parallel.
Some of the reasons for this popularity are familiar to us. There’s their subject matter, ‘the
sheer grandeur and splendour and power of the natural world’, as Attenborough puts it.
There’s the intimacy and clarity of the photography. And there’s Attenborough’s venerable
voice, the enrapt voice of a master naturalist whose wonder enraptures us in turn.
But that voice does more than murmur richly. It uses words. Like magic tricks, however,
Attenborough’s words rely most strongly on one element: the element of surprise. And
there’s nowhere that Attenborough surprises us more regularly than at the start of episodes.
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| In his element |
Shock and awe
Take a look at these opening words from Planet Earth II’s episode, Deserts:
Imagine a world where temperatures rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Where there's no escape
from sun, wind and dust. Imagine a world with almost no food or water. These are the
conditions in one third of the lands of our planet. To live here demands the most
extraordinary survival strategies.
The setup is perfect. He tells us how inhospitable deserts are—a shock if (like most people)
you don’t think about them much. But there’s a second shock: in a cunning twist he tells us
that this is what one third of our planet is like. One third? ‘So shocking,’ we profess.
The key is that this second surprise is nearly gratuitous. The first surprise is relevant because
the inhospitality of deserts provides the episode’s chief tension. But Attenborough mentions
the scale of deserts because he just wants to astound us—because astounding us stimulates
our curiosity. Surprises intrigue. They keep us engrossed.
Here’s an even denser salvo of wonders, from Planet Earth II’s Grasslands episode.
Attenborough’s crafted the first two thirds of the paragraph such that every phrase is a
moment of awe and novelty. But this time, he amps up the novelty by taking something we
think we know well, and showing us how little we really do.
One quarter of all the land on Earth is covered by a single, remarkable type of plant. Almost
indestructible, it can grow two feet in a day. And be tall enough to hide a giant. That plant is
grass, and the world it creates is truly unique. The grass in northern India is the tallest on the
planet, home to some of the most impressive creatures to tread the Earth. These are the good
times, but in just a few months, all this fresh growth will be gone, and the animals will be
forced to move on. That is the way things are on grasslands across the planet. A cycle of
abundance, destruction and rebirth that affects every creature that lives here.
Our curiosity isn't piqued by any old novelty. Tell me an obscure property of bacterial
collections around hydrothermal vents and I’ll politely pick my nose. So Attenborough lures
in us by contradicting and developing what we already know. Think grass is boring? Not so
fast. It’s crazy! And sure, you know about dolphins and jungles, but did you know about the
type of almost-blind dolphin that lives in the murky waters of a mostly-submerged Brazilian
jungle?
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| Moody tiger for scale |
This pattern also obtains in the way Attenborough structures episodes. Start with the
familiar; surprise with the strange. Only when we’ve spent time in the company of familiar
animals—lions, sloths, Madagascar’s lemurs—will we appreciate the charms and
idiosyncrasies of the creatures we meet later—like headlight beetle larvae.
When the magic meets the message
There is one way that the Grasslands introduction could prime us for the episode even
better. It starts by shocking us with how little we know about grass, but the episode’s actual
theme is the grass’s cycle of abundance, destruction and rebirth. The surprise still compels
us, but it emphasises the wrong thing. Unfortunately, this mismatch is often unavoidable. It
can be difficult to find a twist that instantly grips the audience and illustrates the theme.
Often, it’s just a matter of luck.
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| Intriguing, but unthematic |
And sometimes you get lucky. Here’s one example where Attenborough perfectly aligned his
twist and his theme. It’s the opening episode of The Hunt. The introduction starts with the
usual moments of ‘yeah, wow, of course’ before moving into the twist (italicised).
The duels between hunters and hunted are as dramatic as any event in the natural world. The
stakes could not be higher. For both, it's a matter of life and death. Yet, surprisingly, it's the
hunters that usually fail. To have any chance of survival, predators must be perfectly tuned to
their own hunting arenas. Every habitat brings a different challenge. This series will reveal, as
never before, the extraordinary range of strategies predators use to catch their prey. But even
for the most skillful, success is never guaranteed.
The twist counters our intuitions. Lions and tigers and polar bears can fail? Even with all
their fearsome teeth? As soon as we concede that they might fail sometimes, we’re trotting
after this idea throughout the whole series just to see how it works. All because, like a sneaky
predator, the theme lured us on.
So if you want to capture the interest of your audience, start with surprise. Especially
surprise the audience with contradictions or developments of what they think they know.
And, if you can, make sure your biggest surprise is the theme of what you’re going to talk
about (or at least illustrates that theme). It works. It can animate academic writing, speeches,
and even blogs. In fact, though you may not have realised it, you’ve already endorsed the
technique by reading this far. It was Attenborough’s method that brought this article’s
opening paragraphs to life.
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