Michele Hewitson Interview: David Bellamy

David Bellamy, a familiar face here in the 1980s, is back to take us on another nature ramble. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Anyone of a certain age will remember Dr David Bellamy, the lisping, bearded Botanic Man of the telly. He was always popping up here, being photographed peering through bushes, waving his arms, exclaiming about our fauna.

He looks exactly the same: as though he's been happily dragged through a bush backwards. He was very famous, then he seemed to pretty much vanish, so when he opens the door to his hotel room, it's a bit like being greeted by a genial dinosaur. He probably won't mind that description.

He once told a story about a radio station phoning to say they'd seen a picture of him and that they'd thought he was dead. When I remind him of this (it's that he told this story that interests me), he says, "no, no, that was a lady on a train ... She said, 'are you David Bellamy?' I said, 'I am'. And she said, 'I thought you were dead'."

Is that a sad story? "What? Not being on television?"

People thinking he's dead. "Well, they should do the research. I wasn't." So perhaps he minds a bit.

He is 76 and looking very fit. He says he's lost a stone by doing exercises, rather strange ones which he demonstrates: going on tiptoes, then down again, 100 times a day. I don't know how tall he is. I asked and he said, "4ft 6, unless I've shrunk". He has always shuffled and mumbled into his beard, and no change there.

He didn't hear some of my questions - he might be a bit deaf - and I didn't hear some of his answers. That lisp, and the beard, tend to eat words, so my transcript has segments where I've given up and typed: mumble, mumble, mumble.

His career was once described as one long nature ramble. I didn't so much have an interview with him as a longish ramble, which was fine by me. He is given to digressions, some of which, like long rambles, seemed to have no point except the pleasure of the rambling.

He's here for Whirinaki 25, a celebration of the quarter-century since conservationists, including him, won the right to protect native trees within Whirinaki Forest Park. He dubbed the park The Dinosaur Forest. He seems to have an enduring love affair with the country. I wondered whether it was with us or with our plants and he gave a typically Bellamy answer.

"Well, when I was a boy, my uncle was the secretary of the High Commissioner of New Zealand in London and once he let me carry his briefcase down to the bank. And he told me there was £1 million in bonds in the briefcase! And he took me to see ... two ships moored in London and you know, that's where my family came from and there was one, carrying, I think, cement, from New Zealand, and I think it rather clicked."

Cement doesn't sound very ... romantic. "No, but he also gave me a stamp of Tane Mahuta, and he gave me my first pedal car!" Then he got up and left the room, muttering. I said, for want of any better response, that I'd put the jug on for the cup of tea he'd vaguely mentioned wanting.

He came back with a large, laminated copy of the Tane Mahuta stamp. The dates read: 1840-1940. "There you are," he said, pointing at the former date, "I'm not that old! Ha, ha, ha."

I said: "I've put the jug on."

"Super, oh super! I'm sure that made me a botanist," he said, looking at Tane Mahuta and ignoring me pointing at the jug. He said, "I wanted to be a ballet dancer."

He always says this, but it seems too daft to be true. So, really? "Yes, I was damn good and I still am the patron of the West Midlands Ballet and I've written a ballet all about the creepy-crawlies in Buckingham Palace gardens. I wrote a book about the Buckingham Palace gardens a long time ago and I was going to call it The Queen's Weeds, but the Queen said no."

How silly of her. "No, no. I'm a great royalist." He's a socialist royalist who is great friends with Prince Philip. "I am." Isn't Prince Philip a terrible man? "Oh, no." He's always putting his foot in his mouth. "Yes, I rather like that. So do I! Oh, I enjoy it. I played rugby, you see. I do enjoy a punch-up."

He is not friends with Prince Charles. "Oh, I was great friends with Charles until he became a global warmer!"

What he thinks about global warming is: "Poppycock". He believes it is largely a natural phenomenon, all about cycles, and, he wrote recently, just look at the Romans. "They were growing very good red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland."

But in 1995 a Guardian columnist went for him over some figures he used to prove this. These figures, about glaciers, came from a publication written by an ex-con who has also claimed that Henry Kissinger is a commie agent, and that the British royal family runs an international drug syndicate. Bellamy the Bearded Bungler, read a Guardian headline.

When I remind him of this, he mumble-mumbles away, a bit grumpily, about how he never reads the Guardian. He still somehow knows it to be "to the right of Attila the Hun", a peculiar and peculiarly Bellamy sort of assessment. Then he perks up and says, "do you know what the derivation of poppycock is? It's soft shit!"

Who knows what the point of this is. Perhaps he just likes saying poppycock.

I was trying to get him to talk about whether he'd cocked up his telly career by being a crank. "No, no, you see, if you have a machine, it can't work without a crank!"

He says he was banned by the BBC for his presumably cranky campaign against wind farms. He's done dottier things. Perhaps the dottiest was to stand for Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party against the then Prime Minister, John Major. Goldsmith believed Britain was in the grip of a socialist conspiracy. Bellamy is a lifelong socialist. But apparently they had a nice lunch together. Despite standing for Parliament, he has never voted. Why not? "So you can't blame me for anything." Now, that is poppycock.

"Absolutely, and you can recycle it!"

He was famous. He did an ad here for carpet. He did one in Britain for baked beans. I asked whether he might have damaged his reputation as a serious scientist. He said, "I stopped synthetic carpets coming to New Zealand for about seven years and I can still go around and meet all the farmers and they buy me a pint of beer. I've had lots of pints of beer!"

But baked beans? "Oh, I like baked beans. I've been eating baked beans all my life."

He is accomplished at plugging things and he slips in one for his hosts DoC, about how fabulous they are, and another about Air New Zealand, who flew him here, about how fabulous they are.

I said, "you're very good at that", of his plugging. He said, eyes twinkling, "I've been doing it a long time."

A long time ago, in 1982, he was in the Listener wearing a shirt that read: Long Live Tmesipteris, a fossil fern found only here and in South America. He loves that plant. "I do! It's very old and a big survivor. Like me!"

He had a takahe chick on Tiritiri Matangi named after him. He remembers that. "I certainly do." He was, and remains, absolutely chuffed. "I actually saw it and it sat on my foot." The Herald ran a cartoon of Bellamy as a very round, bearded takahe.

He really was very famous. "Well, I still am! Ha, ha."

I'm happy to agree - despite the lady on the train - it's just that what he's famous for now is being hated by Greenies. He went to jail in Australia in 1983 for trying to stop a dam on a river in Tasmania. But he tells me when he went back (the date was eaten by the beard) for a reunion, those he'd stood on a picket line with wouldn't speak to him. "No, because I don't believe in global warming."

That did seem a bit sad. He has gone from being much loved to much reviled, I say. But he says, "I don't think reviled at all. I haven't been spat at for a long time."

He likes being famous. "Well, it can get you into trouble." He likes getting into trouble which, along with the willingness to ham it up and the boundless enthusiasm, makes him sounds rather jolly, doesn't it?

Yet he once said he could entertain people but couldn't relate to them. "Who said that?" he says. He did. "Oh. No, I'd rather talk to plants and animals because they can't answer you back. Ha, ha."

According to him, he's autistic. He said: "You define to me the word autistic."

He said it; he can define it. "I'm not on the same plane as certain people."

And that means? "I find it difficult to communicate with certain types of people."

Which is as clear as a mangrove swamp. What people? "Umm, mathematicians."

That would make most of the population autistic, I said, possibly shouting just a bit. "Aah! Perhaps you've hit the nail right on the head ... Vast amounts of people have been brainwashed into believing they're all going to die of global warming."

I put my head in my hands and groaned. "Oh, what fun!" he said.

It's hard work being fun all the time. "Ding! I can sort of put it on," he says, and does, giving a very good parody of himself, throwing his arms about.

Then he says, "it is very, very difficult being in that persona. So I do turn around and have a cry now and then".

He looks, in the photographs taken during the interview when he wasn't putting it on, a slightly melancholy figure - the clown between shows. But he said he had a good time; that he does like a good argument. I didn't think we had much of an argument. I just tried to keep up with the ramble. But I do like a good crank.

So I was happy for him to have the last word. You can guess what it was.