Bill Bailey on his hero Alfred Russel Wallace
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bill Bailey has not just travelled in naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace's footsteps, he's crazy about him too. "I love him, I really do." Wallace is best known for what used to be known as the Wallace-Darwin theory of evolution. When he died in 1913, the New York Times called him the last of the 'giants belonging to that wonderful group of intellectuals ... whose daring investigations revolutionised and evolutionised the thought of the century." Born in 1823, Wallace was a collector, a writer, a keen conservationist, and Bill has been to Borneo to see Wallace's famous flying frog. With Sandy Knapp of the Natural History Museum, and presented by Matthew Parris. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.
Transcript
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| 0:46.0 | Bill, can we have some words just for level, please? |
| 0:48.0 | Yes, Bill Bailey talking on the microphone about Alfred Russell Wallace. He was a great adventurer. He was a botanist, a biologist, |
| 0:58.5 | a founder of an entirely new field of science bioography, and along with Charles Darwin he was the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution. |
| 1:09.0 | His whole life really was about trying to unravel the mysteries of the natural world. |
| 1:17.0 | And I do actually love him. I love his energy, his passion, his enthusiasm for the natural world, which was sort of undimmed over his whole life. |
| 1:30.0 | Today's guest is better known as a comedian than as a naturalist. Bill Bailey can often be found doing lovely |
| 1:36.3 | stage shows or on hugely popular television programs such as Black Books, but his Twitter |
| 1:42.2 | feed is as full of joyful images of penguins as it is of photos of his excitable hair. |
| 1:49.0 | When did you first become interested in the natural world? |
| 1:52.2 | When I was a kid growing up in the West Country, |
| 1:55.0 | I would often go out on my bike |
| 1:58.0 | and explore the lanes around Kainchum, |
... |
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