Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

Human beings, because we're so clever, have removed every single one of those population limiting factors... So nothing controls our increase in numbers except our own wish. Since I first started making television programs, the population of the world has increased three times. That's an extraordinary notion. Can it increase four times? Can it increase five times? The Earth is a finite size. So a point will eventually come when we run out of food, when we run out of space and when we will have destroyed most of the natural world. So ought we to do something about it before that happens?

I have no doubt that the fundamental problem the planet faces is the enormous increase in the human population

In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.

We can now manipulate images to such an extrodinary extent that there's no lie you cannot tell.

All the modern devices we have enable us to investigate things and have enabled us to do better.