Cheek to cheek with a very wet rat

And, as he tells Steve Pratt, he's already planning the next one.

ALTHOUGH he's been making natural history programmes for more than 20 years, Sir David Attenborough's latest assignment, The Life Of Mammals, provided him with some unforgettable experiences. Not all of them were pleasant.

Filming sea otters and the blue whale were firsts for the man celebrating 50 years in broadcasting. "I was very thrilled by that, I must say," he comments, before dwelling on the one creature that gives him the shivers - the rat. "I don't like rats. I've never made a secret of that. They are the ultimate horrible thing," he says with a shudder.

And, as he found out, they do appear at the most inopportune moments. "For the first time in nearly a quarter of a century I had a very bad stomach upset in India," he recalls. "I went and sat on the loo, and got rid of the entire contents of my stomach. I was feeling at a really very low point, as one does. Well, I was sitting there and a rat came up from between my legs from the loo."

Now, he can see the funny side. "He was wet, I have to tell you," he laughs.

Moments like that have been far outweighed by the good things that have happened to Attenborough in a career that's more varied than most people probably give him credit for. There might not have been a BBC career at all as his initial application for a job as a BBC radio producer was turned down. Fortunately for him, the up-and-coming television service caught sight of his form and offered him a job in the new Talks Department. His screen break came after several years of producing programmes, when the regular presenter of Zoo Quest fell ill just before transmission. Attenborough stepped in and his on-camera relationship with animals began. But he's not just been a ground-breaking presenter and producer. As Controller of BBC2, he introduced such programmes as Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation and Brunowski's Ascent Of Man, as well as Monty Python's Flying Circus and televised snooker.

"We had huge freedom," he recalls of those pioneering days. "We were positively encouraged to do things like snooker because, if we had the major sports, the country would have been outraged it wasn't on BBC1. So right from the start, we were able to do oddball things."

Success there led to his appointment as Director of Programmes. He spent four years behind a desk before deciding that making shows was where his heart really lay. "I was one step further away from programme-making, and I feel very much a programme person. After eight years in administration, I thought that was enough," he says.

His decision led to his landmark series Life On Earth, still used as a teaching aid in universities, followed by Life Of Birds, Blue Planet and now The Life Of Mammals. His fame is such that he even made the list of Top 100 Great Britons voted for by BBC2 viewers. Such is his celebrity that taxi drivers discuss, not the weather, but natural history with him.

"People certainly know a great deal more than they used to, and the audience is very well-informed, by and large," he says. "A taxi driver asked me only the other day a quite complicated zoological question which 30 years ago would only have occured to a research zoologist working for a doctorate.

"He said to me, 'I don't understand why animals should be doing things that apparently damage themselves for the sake of their offspring. Why would this be?'. Sophisticated stuff, and it had occured to him because of what he'd seen on television," explains Attenborough.

Certainly, he likes to think that his programmes increase people's knowledge and awareness of conservation issues, making them more aware of the value, beauty and importance of the natural world. "I hope they are more alarmed when it appears to be damaged," he says. "And that they make appeals and protest if politicians were to ignore it. But 30 years ago there was no such thing as a Minister for the Environment, and now, big things, leaders of the world all assembling in Johannesburg. They didn't do all that much but, nonetheless, they know they've got to address it anyway."

The appeal of natural history, he feels, is that it's unpredictable. "It's new, it's dramatic, it's beautiful. It's not trying to sell you anything, it's not trying to get your vote. It's a huge relief from the stuff which we are bombarded with where people are either trying to sell you something, or trying to earn huge sums of money on quiz programmes. It's always surprising and astonishingly beautiful."

In his current series, The Life Of Mammals, he introduces viewers to the smallest (the pigmy shrew), the slowest (the sloth), the fastest (the cheetah) and his own favourite mammal, a human. "A three-year-old child is just the most enchanting thing there is," he says. "They're endlessly interesting, absolutely adorable. Chimpanzees come close, but three-year-olds are just so engaging, fascinating."

Filming the series enabled him to hook up with two very special examples of this particular breed of mammal - his grandchildren, who live in Australia.

Clearly, he's lost none of his enthusiasm for his chosen subject, so it's no surprise that Attenborough, now 76, intends to carry on making wildlife programmes for as long as he can. As he tells Michael Palin in Life On Air, a documentary tribute to his life and work being shown on BBC1 on Thursday: "I'm doing what I want to do. I don't know what I'd do otherwise."

He's already planning his next big project. This time he's not thinking big, but small. "The one thing that we haven't yet exploited, thought in fact we have now got the facilities, is to go very, very small. Maybe I'll do that in the next series. I would very much like to use that technical facility of being able to film spiders and ants and bees and scorpions."

The Life Of Mammals continues on BBC1 on Wednesday at 9pm. Life On Air is on BBC1 on Thursday at 9pm.