18/02/2014 The One Show

Hello and welcome to the One Show with Matt Baker. And Alex Jones.

Tonight's guest was in esteemed company last night with Her Majesty

the Queen and Dame Helen Mirren. Tonight he is slumming it with us,

it is a Sir David Attenborough! Good evening, Sir David. Great to

have you here. We have a brilliant picture of you. Caught between two

Queens, so to speak. So to speak! Was it a good evening? Yes, very

good, and evening in praise and celebration of the Royal Academy of

come my brother is president. -- the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, of

which my brother is president. He is not well, so I was representing him.

This was 1958, with Prince Charles at ten years old, and Princess Anne

at eight. And that cockatoo was a cockatoo which I traded with pygmies

in the centre of New Guinea, and we had been marching for... I don't

know, about eight or nine days through unexplored mountains, and we

met these pygmies. And one of them had this on his shoulder, and I

fancied myself as long John Silver, and I traded it for, I think it was

two cakes of salt. Big cakes of salt, which is what we were trading

with. And the pygmies had done something to one of her wings so she

couldn't fly. Her name was Cocky, very original. I had it for a long

time, I brought it back to my home, and she was a lovely bird. But she

was a coward. We used to put her out on the wisteria at the back of the

house, and when a butterfly would come up, she would go... And she had

screamed. I mean, she did drive the neighbours nuts. I was fond of her.

The neighbours had more than they could take. Eventually, I discovered

there was a lady who was more crazy about cockatoos than I was, and it

went on to her. And that lady, I know she has died since then, but

cockatoos can live for 100 years, a long time. So I do not know where

Copy is now, I am afraid. It is a lovely picture, take it with you. We

might need the frame! All the photos that people keep sending in! On we

go, when you buy a property, certain checks are carried out by your

solicitor to make sure the land you are buying is safe, secure and debt

free. But for the visitors of a small town on the outskirts of

Glasgow, things have not turned out as planned and they have been left

with whopping bills to pay through no fault of their own. Tony has been

to see how much each house pose. -- owes.

My house, ?43,000. This house, ?14,000. ?60,000, ?25,000, ?69,000.

?109,000. This is one of 13 homeowners in Blanefield facing

staggering bills to remove contamination from their land. We

are not at fault, but we are being asked to basics and rebound ?33,000.

I have personally a ?43,000 bill. -- 630 ?3000. Howdy you sleep at night?

-- how do you. With difficulty. Through no fault of their own, many

residents here face financial ruin thanks to the legacy of a factory

built down there back in the 19th century.

The picturesque village of Blanefield was home to a huge calico

printing works which, at its peak, employed up to 500 men, women and

children. Mary is a local historian. What kind of things did

they do in the factory? It was calico cloth, they were bleached,

watched, bleached. It was quite a process. The big problem was the

refuse from the operation. It was put into the Blaine here. It killed

the fish and vegetation. 100 years later, it still contaminates the

land in the village. It only came to light when in 2012, under recent

law, Stirling Council tested the soil and found potentially dangerous

levels of arsenic and lead that they say has to be cleaned up. But the

firms who bought the print works and the developers who build the homes

have long since vanished into the mists of time. With no-one left to

take responsibility for the contamination, UK law says

homeowners must pay. Martin is one of the people facing ruin. How much

will this cost you? The estimated bill, including the landfill tax,

will be ?69,000. In terms of our ability to pay, we have no ability

to pay, it is a vast amount of money. If we catch everything in, we

put everything into the deposit for the house, and it is virtually

worthless. It is a stressful situation, for all of us, 12

neighbours. Adding insult to injury is the fact that most of the costs

are made up of a landfill tax. It is about 67% of the total bill, and

that is administered by the Treasury. And that landfill tax was

designed to be no lies people, companies, who pollute the land. It

was never designed ordinary families. -- designed to Pina lies

people. Money aside, the knowledge that the house is built on

contaminated land has meant changes to the way that they live. Exposure

to arsenic can lead to higher rates of cancer. We cannot grow fruit or

vegetables. We restrict what he does out here. It is a case of shoes off

at the door, wash your hands. Developed in the 1950s, the homes

here were built before the 1990 Environmental Protect Act. It is

only since then that developers are required by law to remediate

contaminated land. Before then, there were fewer controls. There is

an estimated 325,000 potentially contaminated sites in the UK, and

with a greater push to build on brown field sites, should homeowners

be worried? Is there anything you can do to check? The best people to

speak to the local authority, who have historical data on the site and

the work that has been done to develop the site. But if you are

worried, speak to your surveyor to see if they can afford you

additional advice. Residents here have been lobbying the UK and

Scottish Governments for help. The Scottish Government will take

control in 2015 of landfill tax, and they have made a commitment to look

at residents affected by the tax. Ultimately, it is still in council

who is responsible to ensure that the land is remediating by the

landowner, and while they have pledged ?125,000 towards the final

bill, the residents are facing huge bills.

That is an unbelievable worry for the residents. Lucy is here now, a

big percentage of the cost they have to pay out is going to go towards

landfill tax. Can you explain that. Let's look at poor Fiona, the bill

is over ?30,000. It only costs ?17,000 to remove the soil, but

there is ?18,000 in landfill tax and then VAT. Landfill tax is basically

something that we have kind of inherited, because we have always

mined in the UK, we did the pits, and then we fill them with rubbish.

There are lots of environmental issues around that, so the tax was

for companies, really, to discourage them from throwing waste away in

that way and get them to recycle and all that sort of thing. The tax goes

up every year. It was never intended for people like the owner, and that

is one of the tragedies of this situation. Meant for companies, not

individuals. I hope the residents are watching tonight, because you

have got some news. Yes, we have tracked down Danny Alexander, who

was out on Treasury business today, and we asked him what he could do

for the Blanefield residence, and this is what he said. So the

Treasury will offer a grant of ?225,000 to help the residents deal

with the problems. It is a grant, because that is the quickest way to

deal with the problems, rather than tax relief, which is complicated and

would take a long period of time. We now need the Scottish Government to

make available a similar sum of money so we can meet all the costs

required and make sure the problems are dealt with as quickly as

possible. Massive news! We have not managed to tell the residence yet,

so they will have their calculator is out, I am sure. This could

potentially be a lifeline, because my reckoning they had 125,000 in the

pot from the council, 255,000 from Danny Alexander, but we do need the

Scottish Government to match that for them to clear their bill. We

would like to hear from them! They are at home watching the One Show.

Tomorrow, yes, fingers crossed. That would be amazing.

Over the past few weeks, we have all seen how the British coastline has

been ravaged by storms. But it is not all bad news, as Angellica has

been finding out on the north Norfolk coast. The coastal storms

have actually been helping. The beast and flooding is just the

latest extreme weather events to hit the UK this winter. -- the recent.

Back in December, the worst tidal flood for 60 years battered the

Norfolk coastline. This stretch of beach in Norfolk was badly hit. You

have to try and imagine the sea coming over and breaking through

that shingle barrier, completely covering this marshland and coming

all the way up here to this coastal road, where it flooded many homes

and businesses. The sea broke through the shingle wall, allowing

water to reach the coastal road and houses. Kevin manages the marshland,

which is an important habitat for wildlife here. It caused a lot of

damage to property, a lot of damage to the infrastructure. It puts salt

water into the freshwater systems, so the main feeds into the marshes

became completely safe line, so that causes a huge amount of damage to

plants and wildlife that uses the freshwater. -- saline. This is one

of the places where it punched through the shingle bank, and it is

on the old Greek system that you can see from aerial photographs. This is

obviously a weak point where it used to go out to sea, and that is where

it reached and pushed through. Since that time, they have actually

started to heal themselves, and the sea has started bringing in this

material. It was a raging torrent one month ago with water completely

in free exchange with the marshes and the sea. The cost to fix the

gaps was estimated at ?60,000 and would have been part of the managed

retreat policy for this stretch of coast. Not all local residents are

happy with the policy. Peter and as you think it is important that

drainage is maintained. We must keep the dikes and natural drainage clean

at all times, because they must be kept clear so that any tide coming

in can flow. At the moment, it cannot flow, so we are in danger of

being flooded again. Do you think people will have to move from the

village? I think you will see the village slowly die, yeah. I think it

will slowly go. I do not think there is an easy answer to it, really. You

cannot spend millions and millions on a village like this. In this

case, like I said, we have been very fortunate that they have self

repaired. It was a little bit of weight and see and hope, and that

was the Environment Agency attitude towards it, let's wait and see, and

luckily for us and for the reserve, that is what has happened, you know,

a huge tonnage of shingle has been pushed back in by the sea, which

would have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to do it

mechanically. Every cloud! Yeah, they were

fortunate in that part of the world, but other areas have not been. Your

new series, Sir David, starts tonight on Watch, it is called

Natural Curiosities. You compare two animals that you would not normally

put together, is that how you would describe it? That is incidental. The

thing about the series, actually, is that it looks at animals sometimes

from an historical point of view, how do we understand them and

discover them? Sometimes it is individual animals that have

extraordinary histories. And we look at all kinds of odd things, and in

this particular instance, quite a recent discovery. Everybody knows, a

lot of people know about the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard in the

world, ten or 12 feet long. But perhaps everybody does not realise

that recently there has been a scientific discovery that the Komodo

dragon, females, can produce young without any help from males, virgin

birth, parthenogenesis. You may say, what does that link with any

other animal? Amazingly, it links with an animal that you will be

familiar with if you have a garden, the greenfly. The green flies do the

same thing. That is the nice thing about the series. You link it with

animals that we would be familiar with. I watched that episode of

virgin births with my six-year-old son, and of course, it does raise a

lot of questions. But as soon as you put it into the theatre, you can go

out into the garden and experience it yourself, and it becomes very

real. The first time I saw a female aphid, you can look at it through

the lens, because they have transparent bodies, and I could see

there was a baby inside. If you have a powerful lens, you can see that

inside the baby is another baby, like Russian dolls! You have three

babies all in one. And they are all just like the mother. That's right.

And that is why, overnight, your roses could be covered in tens of

thousands of aphids, because they reproduce at that speed. Sir David,

we have seen you all over the world, covering all sorts of species. What

remains for you? What are you passionate about making a film about

next, that maybe isn't connected to the animal world? I determine got

time. I make films about things that interest me. I will be leaving for

Borneo very soon, and there we will be filming a series in 3D, about

flight, about how flight developed in the animal world. That flight

first developed in insects, of course, in dragonflies, for about 50

million years. Then you have animals that blinded, then dinosaur things,

things which have skinny wings. Then you had birds, then you had bats.

All of those involved over the period of prehistoric life, and that

is what we are filming. A little bird told me that you are into

tribal art as well. Me? Yes, I once made a series along time ago, back

in the 70s, a long time ago. We had a great time. I am very interested

in African sculpture and that sort of thing. If you are curious about

the animal world, David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities

will be on Watch to night. Now, a case of honour, fraud and deception.

One in which the truth only emerged because evidence was planted at the

scene of the crime. The Hebridean island of rum. It was

in this peaceful wilderness that an audacious forgery was uncovered in

1848, not in the world of art all publishing, but in botany. It

involved hidden manuscripts and undercover missions, a very British

case of fakery. The story of a respected botanist who went to a --

to extreme lengths to be the first to prove a theory. Professor John

Heslop Harrison was a talented botanist who had an extraordinary

theory that the iron of Brom had escaped the last ice age. -- the

island of Rum. All he needed to do was to prove his theory. Ian

MacDonald isn't expert on Paes's plants. -- Rum's plants. He knew the

area very well. He knew that Rum had a rare read -- a varied geology, and

had lots of plants on it. By the 1840s, Heslop Harrison began to make

a number of botanical discoveries that appeared to prove his theory.

But they were so regular and so extraordinary that they began to

arouse the suspicions of his peers. The botany Department of Cambridge

University hatched a plan to send someone to investigate. John Raven

was the perfect candidate to pose as an impressionable student on one of

Heslop Harrison's field trips. This is John Raven's son. What did he

think of Heslop Harrison? He would have been aware of him, because he

was a well-known botanist. He would have been aware of his theories, and

that is what piqued his curiosity about going to have a look at it. Do

you know what his thoughts were before he set foot on Rum? He was

there partly through subterfuge. He did not tell Heslop Harrison why he

was there. Once Raven had arrived on Rum, he saw for himself the

astonishing species who supposedly grew there. As has not Harrison

toured around the island with his students, Raven noticed something

extraordinary, writing later: One plant looked that it had -- looks

precisely as if it had been faring -- fairly recently planted. He also

noted that five plants were accompanied by weeds associated

primarily with gardens. To prove his theory, Heslop Harrison needed

evidence of plants that were not native to Britain. So in secret, he

planted plants like this one, things that have come from places much

colder than this, to prove what he genuinely believed - that Rum's

plants had survived and could not have come from anywhere else. The

suspicions of Cambridge University proved to be true. To find five new

species to the British Isles on one hill on one island, it is a bit like

you or I winning the National Lottery five times. I guess he got a

little bit too ambitious, little bit too greedy. Having seen the impostor

plants first-hand, Raven concluded that Heslop Harrison must have grown

them in his garden. What is more, the established foreign plants on

Rum suggested that Heslop Harrison had been planting these home-grown

variations for years. Raven filed his report on his return to

Cambridge, exposing has not Harrison is a fraud, but its contents would

not come to light for another 50 years. He didn't want the report to

be publicised until his Paris and had died. Why? He did not want to

disgrace him. He did not want to embarrass him. In 1967, Heslop

Harrison's records were quietly removed from the botanical archives.

It is an extraordinary story of Jane -- of fraud, concluded in the most

gentlemanly fashion. The list of the rarest wild animals

cited in Britain has just come out. The pine Martin and the Golden Eagle

are in the top three. You can appreciate the second one, the pine

marten. Yes, you have to be extremely lucky, because it lives

high up in pine trees. They are very rare. I have seen them in captivity.

The One Show cameras managed once, didn't we? Mike saw them. Where was

it? It was up in Scotland. Somewhere in Scotland, but we know the secret

spot, so if you would like us to tell you, we can. Wild? Yes. Can you

believe that one in four people have never seen a hedgehog in the wild? I

am surprised about that, because many have seen them squashed flat on

the road! Perhaps that doesn't count. Something happened on Sunday.

Yes, the sun came out! And wasn't it nice to see it. It is always better

when the sunshine is. Here is Martin with the science behind what makes

sunsets and sunrises are so beautiful.

It is 6:15am, and first light is breaking over the West Coast of

Scotland. Why am I here at the crack of dawn? I am going to explore the

science behind the sunrise and sunset. These are the times of day

that photographers call the magic hour, when the landscape is bathed

in colour, and landscapes -- and the skies are brilliant colours of gold

and red hues. But what is going on up there is not magic, it is

science. Graham McFarlane is an award-winning photographer, who

specialises in shooting at dawn and dusk. That is a fabulous place.

Fantastic. When you come here first thing in the morning, what are you

looking for? I am looking for the castle being front lit, the sun

coming up from the east behind me, picking up the detail on the castle.

You get a reflection, and that lovely warm home to the castle. It

picks it up against the backdrop of the mountains. At dawn, the sun

lights up the clouds with subtle pinks. Oranges and golds follow as

it rises above the horizon. But these are not the sun's true

colours. This is a weather balloon. If I let it go, it will just go up

and up and up. Eventually, it ascends to the upper reaches of the

Earth's atmosphere, where a NASA photograph shows that the sun is

brilliant white. But white light isn't just white. If you shine a

beam of light through a prism, as Newton showed, you can split the

white light into all the colours of the rainbow, each with its own

wavelength. Blue light, for example, has a very short wavelength, whereas

red light has a much longer wavelength. Each wavelength behaves

differently when passing through our atmosphere. When we see the rising

and setting sun we are mostly seeing the longer wavelengths, yellows,

oranges and reds. What has happened to the blue light? The atmosphere is

full of particles, gases, moisture and pollution. Imagine that the

water in this fish tank is the water up -- is the atmosphere above us.

This light is the sun. Blue light, with its shorter wavelength, has

more energy, so it interacts with the particles more vigorously, and

is more easily scattered than the rest of the spectrum. All the water

has a blue tinge now, and this is why the sky is blue, because the

sunlight is being scattered down, but only the blue part. It is why we

see the sun as yellow. It is what remains of the white light when the

blue light has been scattered by the atmosphere. As the sunsets, the sun

comes in at a shallow angle, so it has to pass through more of the

atmosphere, which tends to contain more particles at the end of the

day, because of a build up of moisture and pollution. If I add a

little bit more... As the light has to pass through more particles, more

wavelengths and colours are scattered. None of the blue light

campaign trek through, leaving just the oranges and reds that give us

the sunset colours. You can't beat the real thing, though, which is why

Graham is back at the castle, hoping for a break in the rather ominous

looking clouds. What makes a particularly good sunset photo?

Ideally we would have sums -- some clouds in the sky. We want some

scattering of light onto the clouds. I like the silhouette. Today, we

were unlucky. The cloud was too thick for a really dramatic sunset,

but the spectacle of the sun going down is the most photographed of all

natural events. An astronomer once said, it does no harm to the romance

of a sunset to know a little bit about it. I would go further, and

say it only enhances our appreciation.

I would agree! Lovely pictures. That's it for tonight. David

Attenborough's Natural Curiosities starts tonight at 8pm on Watch. Sir

David, thank you so much for coming in. Tomorrow, the three stars of I'm

Sorry I Haven't A Clue will be here. Alex is off to the Philippines for

the next few days, so tomorrow I'll be joined by Gabby Logan. We will

see you at 7pm.