This Side of the Pond

Well here’s a thing I wasn’t expecting to say: the mystery of the yeti has been solved. The answer is not disappointing, either, because it turns out there really have been yetis wandering the Himalayan woods all along.

Arguably the most surprising thing is that the person who revealed the solution has known what a yeti is for half a century. You’d need to be familiar with Sir David Attenborough, the man who basically invented the nature documentary, for that to make sense.

Sir David is a national treasure, voted by the UK public among the hundred greatest Britons to have ever lived. Broadcaster and natural historian, it’s difficult for a Brit to take a nature show seriously if it isn’t narrated by his dulcet tones.

The BBC, for whom he has worked for the majority of his career, has a wildlife department widely regarded as the best in the world. That, too, is thanks to Attenborough, who set a bar 40 years ago that few others have been able to reach.

Attenborough joined the BBC in 1950, but why he did so will forever remain a mystery as he had only ever seen one television show in his life. He became the controller of BBC Two in 1965, a channel that had launched the year before but wasn’t proving popular with the public.

While BBC One has always hosted the popular shows and soap operas, BBC Two is reserved for more niche and diverse programming. Attenborough did that, establishing an identity for Britain’s second ever television channel that remains in place to this day.

He picked out shows on music, the arts, experimental comedy, travel business and much more – he’s even the man who commissioned Monty Python’s Flying Circus. He is also responsible for overseeing the first ever color broadcasts in Europe – the man breaks ground wherever he goes.

Attenborough left that role in 1972 and began to create the body of work he has become most famous for. Life on Earth launched in 1979, the year I was born, and he hasn’t stopped making nature documentaries since.

He forged relationships with scientists by taking their work seriously; for instance, he was allowed access to film Dian Fossey’s mountain gorillas. He innovated new film-making techniques so he could get the shots he wanted, capturing animals and behaviors that had never been seen on camera before.

My favorite of these techniques was the “dung cam”, a disguised remote control camera used to get up close and personal with a herd of elephants. Apparently the animals thought there was nothing strange about a poop whizzing around their feet, clicking and clacking as it zoomed in for a better look, so a similar technique was utilized in the form of the “boulder cam” to visit a pride of lions.

You can now purchase a 24-disc set of natural history programs called The Life Collection, which includes Attenborough’s full body of work. It covers everything from plants and birds to mammals and insects – every major group of terrestrial life.

You’ve likely seen some of his work, though you may not have known it. For some reason, his voice was replaced over here with that of Oprah Winfrey.

This did not make me happy. I like Oprah very much, but she can’t replace David Attenborough in a British heart, nor British ears.

In 2007, Time magazine named him “Hero of the Environment”, saying: “No living person has done more to make the people of Planet Earth aware of the world around them”. Yes, David Attenborough is a national treasure.

These days, he is funneling all his star power and gravitas into the fight against climate change, because it’s his opinion that people won’t care about saving things they don’t know anything about – and if there’s anything Sir David is good at, it’s showing us things we’ve never seen before. He’s seen what we’ve been doing to this planet first hand, and he’s very cross with us indeed.

Thanks to the awareness he brought to the issue, we are now experiencing something called “The Attenborough Effect”. His program highlighting the damage humans have done to this planet aired in 2017, called Blue Planet, and included imagery of dolphins contaminating their newborn calves through their milk and unsuspecting albatross parents feeding plastic to their chicks.

Immediately after it aired, a study was found that over 50 percent of Brits began to reduce the amount of plastic they used, 42 percent started shopping for products using sustainable materials and 57 percent found themselves willing to pay more for eco-friendly products.

Greta Thunberg may be getting all the headlines, but Sir David is doing sterling work – he is credited with triggering the “war” on plastic waste back home in the UK. Even the Queen has banned straws and bottles from the Royal estates – there’s nobody the man can’t convince.

He’s a living legend for so many reasons that, really, it had to be him who solved the mystery of the yeti. He’s the only one with the expertise and clout to get it done.

Apparently, he heard the myths of “human-like monsters” leaving unexplained footprints, but until recently the forest in question was the least known in the world. He found the answer in a scientific paper all the way back in the 1960s but it’s only now, through “trial and error and all that”, his team managed to get footage of the creatures.

The yeti is actually a blue-faced golden-coated snub-nosed snow monkey – if you want to see it, watch out for his latest show Seven Worlds, One Planet. These big buggers walk upright when on slopes, have snubbed noses that look pretty human, have the exact pale-and-golden coat depicted in yeti drawings and are, as Sir David put it, “among the heftiest of monkeys”.

So while you might feel a little disappointed that the yeti isn’t actually the monster you always thought it was, consider this: the old legends were right all along. What else is lurking in the hidden corners of our planet, matching the myths but never proven? We’ll just have to wait for Sir David to find out.