Back from threat of extinction, Sir David and his furry friends

In what could be the greatest triumph in his sparkling, 50-year career, Sir David Attenborough returns to British television screens later this month with a new series The Life of Mammals.

It is billed as an epic tale of endurance, a textbook example of the survival of the fittest in the Darwinian struggle to succeed – a fitting description of Sir David's own life in the corridors of the BBC.

Mammals have a winning body design that has allowed them to inhabit the coldest, hottest, wettest and driest corners of the planet, adaptations that make them perfect subjects for a wildlife documentary.

"Warm bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth. The warm-blooded, furry, mammalian body, in all its multitudinous variations, really is a winning design," Sir David said yesterday.

The 10-part series, starting on BBC1 on 20 November, crowns a brilliant career which began in the days when television cameras were confined to the studio and all transmissions had to be live.

During the past 50 years Sir David has become a national institution who has probably done more than any single individual to inspire generations of schoolchildren to study and respect the natural environment.

His award-winning programmes began with Zoo Quest in the 1950s, where he set out on intrepid overseas trips to capture unusual animals on 16mm film, considered then to be a medium for amateurs.

Twenty years ago he presented his landmark series, Life on Earth, and went on to make a number of other highly esteemed documentaries such as Life of Birds and Blue Planet.

Sir David said that although many people were familiar with mammals, the new series was still able to present a few surprises with the help of technological innovations, such as star-light filming at night when most mammals are active.

He fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when, for the first time, he was able to film the Australian duck-billed platypus nurturing a tiny, naked baby just a few days after giving birth in her underground burrow.

"Just one zoo managed to breed a platypus, and they quite rightly were very nervous about interfering with their successful female. So we said, 'Let's see if we can do it by underground methods in the wild'," Sir David said.

Using a radio tag, the camera crew followed the egg-laying animal – a prehistoric link with reptiles – through underground burrows until it stopped in its nest. They then carefully drilled through the earth to put an optical probe and small video camera inside the nest to view a baby platypus.

"That was a real first, it was a very exciting thing to do, to see this tiny, little grub-like creature," Sir David said.

Other firsts include a film sequence of muscrats "paying rent" to a family of beavers by bringing fresh reeds to line the inside of their beaver lodge with the owners apparently undisturbed by the muscrats' presence.

The Life of Mammals also captures capuchin monkeys rubbing leaves over the bodies to act as a herbal insect repellent, and herds of mouse bats crawling through leaf litter on a mass hunting expedition for insects.

In one of the most dramatic scenes from the series, Sir David is seen in a motor boat watching the tail of a blue whale, the largest animal on earth, glide gracefully below. Seconds later, the creature breaks through the water's surface to take a breath.

It took £8m to film the world's strangest mammals. A third of the cost came from the BBC licence fee, a third from BBC Worldwide and a third from the Discovery Channel.

"I would hope that the overall effect of natural history programmes is that people are more aware of the value, the beauty and the importance of the natural world,and be more alarmed when it appears to be damaged," Sir David said.

In the last programme in the series, Sir David has a message for the most incredible mammal of all: man. "Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should try and control the population to ensure the survival of our environment," he said.

* BBC1's The Life of Mammals begins on 20 November.