A Hundred Years on Planet Earth
David Attenborough was born on 8 May 1926. To see how much the world has changed in his lifetime, it helps to look at a few simple numbers — the world he was born into, and the world he turns one hundred in today.
Long before the cameras, there was a child on his knees in the grass. He was born on 8 May 1926, in west London, but grew up in Leicester, on the grounds of a college where his father was the principal. From his earliest years he was a collector — of fossils, of curious stones, of birds’ eggs and beetles and anything small enough to carry home. He had two brothers. The eldest, Richard, would grow up to be a famous actor and film director. But David was drawn the other way — not to the human stage, but to the older, quieter theatre of the living world. His mother, Mary, was a kind and busy woman who helped care for child refugees during the wars in Europe, and the family home was always full of life and purpose. When he was about eleven, he heard that the local university needed newts for its science department. So he caught them himself and sold them — a few pennies each — never letting on that the supplier was a schoolboy on a bicycle. It was, in a way, his very first job in natural history. Around the same time, one of his sisters gave him a piece of amber with tiny prehistoric insects trapped inside. He kept it for fifty years; one day it would become the heart of one of his films. He won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he studied geology and zoology, and after graduating he spent two years in the Royal Navy. In 1950 he married Jane Oriel, who would be his wife and the steady centre of his life until her death in 1997. They had two children, Robert and Susan. His start was not smooth. In 1950, at the age of twenty-four, he applied for a job in BBC radio — and was turned down. Two years later he tried television instead, joining the BBC as a trainee at a time when almost no one owned a set and the pictures were flickering and grey. Then came a stroke of luck dressed as bad luck. He had helped plan a new series called Zoo Quest, which would follow an animal-collecting expedition into the wild — something never tried before. The man meant to present it, a zoo curator, fell ill just before filming. At the last minute, the young Attenborough stepped in front of the camera himself. He never really stepped away again. There is a chapter many people forget. Before he was the world’s naturalist, he was a powerful television boss. In 1965 he became the Controller of BBC Two — the person who decided what an entire channel would show. He brought colour television to British screens for the first time, and gave the green light to some surprising things, including the comedy team Monty Python and grand learning series about art and science. He was so good at it that the BBC later offered him its very top job, Director-General. He said no. He did not want to spend his days in meetings, far from the animals and the open air. So he gave up the office, the title and the security — and went back out into the field, where he had always belonged. He could have spent the rest of his life behind a desk, running television. Instead he chose mud, mosquitoes, long flights and far-off forests — and in doing so he changed how the whole world sees nature. To make Life on Earth, beginning in 1976, he and his team set out to tell the whole story of life on our planet. They travelled to forty countries and filmed more than six hundred kinds of creature — and along the way they lived through a small war in the Comoros, gunfire in Rwanda, and a tense stand-off with soldiers in Iraq. In January 1978, he climbed about three thousand metres up the steep, slippery slopes of the Virunga Mountains. He only wanted to film a gorilla’s thumb, to show how apes use their hands. But the gorillas had other ideas. Instead, the camera caught something no one expected: Attenborough lying back in the grass while young mountain gorillas climbed over him, pulled at him, and watched him with calm, gentle curiosity. He did not panic. He kept his head low, made the soft sounds that gorillas make to one another, and simply let them come close. Few human beings have ever travelled as far as David Attenborough. He has set foot on every continent, visited nearly every kind of habitat, and even reached the North Pole — at the age of eighty-three. For just one series about birds, he flew so many miles that it was like going around the world ten times over. He has filmed deep under the ocean, high in the mountains, and deep in rainforests, and once made films about peoples so remote that they had likely never met an outsider before. He never set out to be a campaigner. For most of his life the work simply showed the wonder. But the wonder, he came to feel, could not honestly be shown without also showing the wound. In his later years he grew more and more outspoken, warning that the natural world is in trouble, and linking that damage to how fast our own numbers have grown. Not everyone has agreed with him — his views on human population have drawn real criticism — but he has kept speaking plainly all the same. He has long believed that the planet cannot feed billions of meat-eaters, and that eating more plants and less meat would be gentler on the land. He describes himself, with a smile, as an ordinary left-leaning sort of person, and he is a humanist. Asked once on television whether he had ever held a religious faith, he answered simply: no. It had never really occurred to him to believe in a god. Yet he is just as clear that the evidence of evolution lies everywhere across the planet, in plain sight, for anyone willing to look. When new technology began copying his famous voice without permission, making it say words he had never spoken, he objected firmly. Having spent a lifetime trying to tell the truth, he said, he was deeply troubled to find his identity taken by others to say whatever they wished. The voice, he reminds us, is not a trick. It is a life’s testimony. His work has often reached toward India. He narrated Wild Karnataka, a beautiful film about the forests of southern India — the first Indian wildlife film made on such a grand scale — and he gave his voice to it for free. And the affection runs both ways. In 2018 a newly discovered little fan-throated lizard from the coast of Kerala was named Sitana attenboroughii in his honour — a small, sun-loving reptile carrying the name of a man it will never meet, on a shore he helped the world to notice. At least twenty living and long-extinct species now carry his name. It is a strange and lovely kind of immortality — not a statue standing still, but living families of creatures, breeding and changing, carrying his name quietly forward through deep time. There is even a great polar research ship that bears his name — the RRS Sir David Attenborough — built to carry scientists into the very ice and ocean he has spent his life teaching us to care about. He had hoped, he admitted, to mark his hundredth birthday quietly. The world had other ideas. The day was marked with a grand concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall, which he attended alongside William, Prince of Wales. Among the guests were Sir Michael Palin, Dame Judi Dench, Olivia Colman, Chris Packham, Kirsty Young and the band Sigur Rós — and the whole hall rose to sing “Happy Birthday” to him. The evening was shown on television as David Attenborough’s 100 Years on Planet Earth, with warm messages from Hans Zimmer, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Camila Cabello, and even a visit from Paddington Bear. King Charles sent a filmed letter, offering his and the Queen’s warmest wishes and thanking Attenborough for showing the beauty of nature to the whole world. Elsewhere the celebrations were smaller and sweeter: in Trafalgar Square, fans dressed as lions and tigers and bumblebees gathered around a life-sized cardboard cut-out of him to sing wildlife songs. And the nature reserve he had opened back in 1966 marked his hundredth birthday together with its own sixtieth — among the very wildlife he had spent his life protecting. And finally, a gentle bit of trivia, offered in the spirit he might enjoy. For years, the veteran BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson has been mistaken, by members of the public, for Sir David himself. Simpson has happily admitted that he gets a little extra warmth and kindness from strangers — special treatment, even — simply because, for one hopeful moment, they believe they are in the presence of David Attenborough. It is, perhaps, the truest measure of the man: to be so loved that merely looking a little like him is enough to make the world a kinder place. A hundred years. Two billion neighbours become eight. A television empire built and walked away from. Gorillas, lizards, wasps and ships carrying his name into the far future. And through all of it, that same patient child, still on his knees in the grass — still looking closely, and still, gently, asking us to look too.A boy among the stones
The accidental presenter
The man who ran the channel
The morning he lay down among the gorillas
A passport stamped across the whole Earth
The wonder, and the wound
The seas and forests he lent his voice to
A name written in Latin, amber and steel
The day the world sang to him
So beloved that even resembling him is enough
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