Sir David Frederick Attenborough OM CH CVO
CBE FRS FZS FSA is an English broadcaster
and naturalist.
His career as the face and voice of natural
history programmes has endured for 60 years.
He is best known for writing and presenting
the nine Life series, in conjunction with
the BBC Natural History Unit, which collectively
form a comprehensive survey of all life on
the planet. He is also a former senior manager
at the BBC, having served as controller of
BBC Two and director of programming for BBC
Television in the 1960s and 1970s. He is the
only person to have won BAFTAs for programmes
in each of black and white, colour, HD, and
3D.
Attenborough is widely considered a national
treasure in Britain, although he himself does
not like the term. In 2002 he was named among
the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide
vote. He is a younger brother of the director,
producer, and actor Richard Attenborough.
Early life and family
Attenborough was born in Isleworth, west London,
but grew up in College House on the campus
of the University College, Leicester, where
his father, Frederick, was principal. He is
the middle of three sons. During World War
II, through a British government initiative
known as Kindertransport, his parents also
fostered two Jewish refugee girls from Europe.
Attenborough spent his childhood collecting
fossils, stones and other natural specimens.
He received encouragement in this pursuit
at age seven, when a young Jacquetta Hawkes
admired his "museum." He also spent a considerable
amount of his time in the grounds of the university
and aged 11 he heard that the zoology department
needed a large supply of newts which he offered
via his father to supply for 3d a newt. The
source, which wasn't revealed at the time,
was a pond less than 5 metres from the department.
A few years later, one of his adoptive sisters
gave him a piece of amber filled with prehistoric
creatures; some 50 years later, it would be
the focus of his programme The Amber Time
Machine.
In 1936, David and his brother Richard attended
a lecture by Grey Owl at De Montfort Hall,
Leicester, and were influenced by his advocacy
of conservation. According to Richard, David
was "bowled over by the man's determination
to save the beaver, by his profound knowledge
of the flora and fauna of the Canadian wilderness
and by his warnings of ecological disaster
should the delicate balance between them be
destroyed. The idea that mankind was endangering
nature by recklessly despoiling and plundering
its riches was unheard of at the time, but
it is one that has remained part of Dave's
own credo to this day."
Attenborough was educated at Wyggeston Grammar
School for Boys in Leicester and then won
a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge
in 1945, where he studied geology and zoology
and obtained a degree in natural sciences.
In 1947 he was called up for national service
in the Royal Navy and spent two years stationed
in North Wales and the Firth of Forth.
In 1950 Attenborough married Jane Elizabeth
Ebsworth Oriel; the marriage lasted until
her death in 1997. The couple had two children,
Robert and Susan. Robert is a senior lecturer
in bioanthropology for the School of Archaeology
and Anthropology at the Australian National
University in Canberra.
First years at the BBC
After leaving the Navy, Attenborough took
a position editing children's science textbooks
for a publishing company. He soon became disillusioned
with the work and in 1950 applied for a job
as a radio talk producer with the BBC. Although
he was rejected for this job, his CV later
attracted the interest of Mary Adams, head
of the Talks department of the BBC's fledgling
television service. Attenborough, like most
Britons at that time, did not own a television,
and he had seen only one programme in his
life. However, he accepted Adams' offer of
a three-month training course, and in 1952
he joined the BBC full-time. Initially discouraged
from appearing on camera because Adams thought
his teeth were too big, he became a producer
for the Talks department, which handled all
non-fiction broadcasts. His early projects
included the quiz show Animal, Vegetable,
Mineral? and Song Hunter, a series about folk
music presented by Alan Lomax.
Attenborough's association with natural history
programmes began when he produced and presented
the three-part series The Pattern of Animals.
The studio-bound programme featured animals
from London Zoo, with the naturalist Julian
Huxley discussing their use of camouflage,
aposematism and courtship displays. Through
this programme, Attenborough met Jack Lester,
the curator of the zoo's reptile house, and
they decided to make a series about an animal-collecting
expedition. The result was Zoo Quest, first
broadcast in 1954, where Attenborough became
the presenter at short notice due to Lester
being taken ill.
In 1957 the BBC Natural History Unit was formally
established in Bristol. Attenborough was asked
to join it, but declined, not wishing to move
from London where he and his young family
were settled. Instead, he formed his own department,
the Travel and Exploration Unit, which allowed
him to continue to front Zoo Quest as well
as produce other documentaries, notably the
Travellers' Tales and Adventure series.
In the early 1960s, Attenborough resigned
from the permanent staff of the BBC to study
for a postgraduate degree in social anthropology
at the London School of Economics, interweaving
his study with further filming. However, he
accepted an invitation to return to the BBC
as controller of BBC Two before he could finish
the degree.
BBC administration
Attenborough became the controller of BBC
Two in March 1965, but had a clause inserted
in his contract that would allow him to continue
making programmes on an occasional basis.
Later the same year, he filmed elephants in
Tanzania, and in 1969, he made a three-part
series on the cultural history of the Indonesian
island of Bali. For the 1971 film A Blank
on the Map, he joined the first Western expedition
to a remote highland valley in New Guinea
to seek out a lost tribe.
BBC Two was launched in 1964, but had struggled
to capture the public's imagination. When
Attenborough arrived as controller, he quickly
abolished the channel's quirky kangaroo mascot
and shook up the schedule. With a mission
to make BBC Two's output diverse and different
from that offered by other networks, he began
to establish a portfolio of programmes that
defined the channel's identity for decades
to come. Under his tenure, music, the arts,
entertainment, archaeology, experimental comedy,
travel, drama, sport, business, science and
natural history all found a place in the weekly
schedules. Often, an eclectic mix was offered
within a single evening's viewing. Programmes
he commissioned included Man Alive, Call My
Bluff, Chronicle, Life, One Pair of Eyes,
The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python's
Flying Circus and The Money Programme. When
BBC Two became the first British channel to
broadcast in colour in 1967, Attenborough
took advantage by introducing televised snooker,
as well as bringing rugby league to British
television on a regular basis via the BBC2
Floodlit Trophy.
One of his most significant decisions was
to order a 13-part series on the history of
Western art, to show off the quality of the
new UHF colour television service that BBC
Two offered. Broadcast to universal acclaim
in 1969, Civilisation set the blueprint for
landmark authored documentaries, which were
informally known as "tombstone" or "sledgehammer"
projects. Others followed, including Jacob
Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, and Alistair
Cooke's America. Attenborough thought that
the story of evolution would be a natural
subject for such a series. He shared his idea
with Chris Parsons, a producer at the Natural
History Unit, who came up with the title Life
on Earth and returned to Bristol to start
planning the series. Attenborough harboured
a strong desire to present the series himself,
but this would not be possible so long as
he remained in a management post.
In 1969 Attenborough was promoted to director
of programmes, making him responsible for
the output of both BBC channels. His tasks,
which included agreeing budgets, attending
board meetings and firing staff were now far
removed from the business of filming programmes.
When Attenborough's name was being suggested
as a candidate for the position of Director
General of the BBC in 1972 he phoned his brother
Richard to confess that he had no appetite
for the job. Early the following year, he
left his post to return to full-time programme-making,
leaving him free to write and present the
planned natural history epic.
Return to broadcasting
After his resignation, Attenborough became
a freelance broadcaster and immediately started
work on his next project, a pre-arranged trip
to Indonesia with a crew from the Natural
History Unit. It resulted in the 1973 series
Eastwards with Attenborough, which was similar
in tone to the earlier Zoo Quests but without
the animal-collecting element.
After his return, he began to work on the
scripts for Life on Earth. Due to the scale
of his ambition, the BBC decided to partner
with an American network to secure the necessary
funding. While the negotiations were proceeding
he worked on a number of other television
projects. He presented a series on tribal
art and another on the voyages of discovery.
He also presented a BBC children's series
about cryptozoology entitled Fabulous Animals,
which featured mythical creatures such as
the griffin and kraken. Eventually, the BBC
signed a co-production deal with Turner Broadcasting
and Life on Earth moved into production in
1976.
Life series
Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough
set about creating a body of work which became
a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making
and influenced a generation of documentary
film-makers. The series also established many
of the hallmarks of the BBC's natural history
output. By treating his subject seriously
and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough
and his production team gained the trust of
scientists, who responded by allowing him
to feature their subjects in his programmes.
In Rwanda, for example, Attenborough and his
crew were granted privileged access to film
Dian Fossey's research group of mountain gorillas.
Innovation was another factor in Life on Earth's
success: new film-making techniques were devised
to get the shots Attenborough wanted, with
a focus on events and animals that were hitherto
unfilmed. Computerised airline schedules,
which had only recently been introduced, enabled
the series to be elaborately devised so that
Attenborough visited several locations around
the globe in each episode, sometimes even
changing continents mid-sentence. Although
appearing as the on-screen presenter, he consciously
restricted his pieces to camera to give his
subjects top billing.
The success of Life on Earth prompted the
BBC to consider a follow-up, and five years
later, The Living Planet was screened. This
time, Attenborough built his series around
the theme of ecology, the adaptations of living
things to their environment. It was another
critical and commercial success, generating
huge international sales for the BBC. In 1990
The Trials of Life completed the original
Life trilogy, looking at animal behaviour
through the different stages of life. The
series drew strong reactions from the viewing
public for its sequences of killer whales
hunting sea lions on a Patagonian beach and
chimpanzees hunting and violently killing
a colobus monkey.
In the 1990s, Attenborough continued to use
the "Life" moniker for a succession of authored
documentaries. In 1993 he presented Life in
the Freezer, the first television series to
survey the natural history of Antarctica.
Although past normal retirement age, he then
embarked on a number of more specialised surveys
of the natural world, beginning with plants.
They proved a difficult subject for his producers,
who had to deliver five hours of television
featuring what are essentially immobile objects.
The result, The Private Life of Plants, showed
plants as dynamic organisms by using time-lapse
photography to speed up their growth.
Prompted by an enthusiastic ornithologist
at the BBC Natural History Unit, Attenborough
then turned his attention to the animal kingdom
and in particular, birds. As he was neither
an obsessive twitcher, nor a bird expert,
he decided he was better qualified to make
The Life of Birds on the theme of behaviour.
The order of the remaining "Life" series was
dictated by developments in camera technology.
For The Life of Mammals, low-light and infrared
cameras were deployed to reveal the behaviour
of nocturnal mammals. The series contains
a number of memorable two shots of Attenborough
and his subjects, which included chimpanzees,
a blue whale and a grizzly bear. Advances
in macro photography made it possible to capture
natural behaviour of very small creatures
for the first time, and in 2005, Life in the
Undergrowth introduced audiences to the world
of invertebrates.
At this point, Attenborough realised that
he had spent 20 years unconsciously assembling
a collection of programmes on all the major
groups of terrestrial animals and plants – only
reptiles and amphibians were missing. When
Life in Cold Blood was broadcast in 2008,
he had the satisfaction of completing the
set, brought together in a DVD encyclopaedia
called Life on Land. In an interview that
year, Attenborough was asked to sum up his
achievement, and responded:
The evolutionary history is finished. The
endeavour is complete. If you'd asked me 20
years ago whether we'd be attempting such
a mammoth task, I'd have said "Don't be ridiculous!"
These programmes tell a particular story and
I'm sure others will come along and tell it
much better than I did, but I do hope that
if people watch it in 50 years' time, it will
still have something to say about the world
we live in.
However, in 2010 Attenborough asserted that
his First Life — dealing with evolutionary
history before Life on Earth — should also
be included within the "Life" series. In the
documentary Attenborough's Journey he stated,
"This series, to a degree which I really didn't
fully appreciate until I started working on
it, really completes the set."
Other documentaries
Alongside the "Life" series, Attenborough
has continued to work on other television
documentaries, mainly in the natural history
genre. He wrote and presented a series on
man's influence on the natural history of
the Mediterranean basin, The First Eden, in
1987. Two years later, he demonstrated his
passion for fossils in Lost Worlds Vanished
Lives.
Attenborough narrated every episode of Wildlife
on One, a BBC One wildlife series which ran
for 253 episodes between 1977 and 2005. At
its peak, it drew a weekly audience of eight
to ten million, and the 1987 episode "Meerkats
United" was voted the best wildlife documentary
of all time by BBC viewers. He has also narrated
over 50 episodes of Natural World, BBC Two's
flagship wildlife series. In 1997 he narrated
the BBC Wildlife Specials, each focussing
on a charismatic species, and screened to
mark the Natural History Unit's 40th anniversary.
As a writer and narrator, he continued to
collaborate with the BBC Natural History Unit
in the new millennium. Alastair Fothergill,
a senior producer with whom Attenborough had
worked on The Trials of Life and Life in the
Freezer, was making The Blue Planet, the Unit's
first comprehensive series on marine life.
He decided not to use an on-screen presenter
due to difficulties in speaking to camera
through diving apparatus, but asked Attenborough
to narrate the films. The same team reunited
for Planet Earth, the biggest nature documentary
ever made for television and the first BBC
wildlife series to be shot in high definition.
In 2011 Fothergill gave Attenborough a more
prominent role in Frozen Planet, a major series
on the natural history of the polar regions.
Attenborough appeared on screen and authored
the final episode, in addition to performing
voiceover duties.
In 2009 he co-wrote and narrated Life, a ten-part
series focussing on extraordinary animal behaviour,
and narrated Nature's Great Events, which
showed how seasonal changes trigger major
natural spectacles.
By the turn of the millennium, Attenborough's
authored documentaries were adopting a more
overtly environmentalist stance. In State
of the Planet, he used the latest scientific
evidence and interviews with leading scientists
and conservationists to assess the impact
of man's activities on the natural world.
He later turned to the issues of global warming
and human population growth. He also contributed
a programme which highlighted the plight of
endangered species to the BBC's Saving Planet
Earth project in 2007, the 50th anniversary
of the Natural History Unit.
Attenborough is also forging a new partnership
with Sky, working on documentaries for the
broadcaster's new 3D network, Sky 3D. Their
first collaboration was Flying Monsters 3D,
a film about pterosaurs which debuted on Christmas
Day of 2010. A second film, The Bachelor King
3D, followed a year later, and further collaborations
are planned.
Current projects
Attenborough celebrated his 60th year in broadcasting
in 2012 and continues to work on a number
of television, film and radio projects. In
the fall of 2013 he returned to BBC television
for a two-part series on the origins of vertebrates,
entitled Rise of Animals, a follow-up to the
2010 series First Life. Later in the year
David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities returned
to Eden for a second series, this time with
an extended run of ten episodes.
He continues to work in partnership with Colossus
Productions on 3D documentaries, with their
latest series Micro Monsters 3D which launched
on Sky 3D and Sky1 on 15 June 2013. Two further
collaborations have been completed, both written
and presented by Attenborough. Natural History
Museum Adventure aired in December 2013 and
Conquest of the Skies followed in 2014.
Other television projects include a collaboration
with Björk for the Channel 4 documentary
When Björk Met Attenborough, and a new BBC
landmark natural history series "on the scale
of Planet Earth and Frozen Planet".
On radio, Attenborough has recently contributed
to BBC Radio 4's "Tweet of the Day", a series
of short guides to 265 British birds through
their songs and calls. A third series of David
Attenborough's Life Stories has also been
commissioned by the station.
Other work
From 1983 Attenborough worked on two environmentally
themed musicals with the WWF and writers Peter
Rose and Anne Conlon. Yanomamo was the first,
about the Amazon rainforest, and the second,
Ocean World, premiered at the Royal Festival
Hall in 1991. They were both narrated by Attenborough
on their national tour, and recorded on to
audio cassette. Ocean World was also filmed
for Channel 4 and later released.
In 1990 he highlighted the case of Mahjoub
Sharif as part of the BBC's Prisoners of Conscience
series.
In May 2005 Attenborough was appointed as
patron of the UK's Blood Pressure Association,
which provides information and support to
people with hypertension.
In January 2009 the BBC commissioned Attenborough
to provide a series of 20 ten-minute monologues
covering the history of nature. Entitled David
Attenborough's Life Stories, they are broadcast
on Radio 4 in the Friday night slot vacated
by Alistair Cooke's Letter from America. Part
of Radio 4's A Point of View strand, the talks
are also available as podcasts.
He appeared in the 2009 Children's Prom at
the BBC Promenade Concerts and in the Last
Night of the Proms on 12 September 2009, playing
a floor polisher in Sir Malcolm Arnold's "A
Grand, Grand Overture".
In 2009 he also became a patron of Population
Matters, a UK charity advocating sustainable
human populations.
He is also a patron of the Friends of Richmond
Park and serves on the advisory board of BBC
Wildlife magazine.
Attenborough is also an honorary member of
BSES Expeditions, a youth development charity
that operates challenging scientific research
expeditions to remote wilderness environments.
In 2013, Attenborough joined Queen's guitarist
and animal rights activist Brian May in opposing
the cull of badgers in the UK by participating
in a song dedicated to badgers.
Achievements, awards and recognition
Attenborough's contribution to broadcasting
and wildlife film-making has brought him international
recognition. He has been called "the great
communicator, the peerless educator" and "the
greatest broadcaster of our time." His programmes
are often cited as an example of what public
service broadcasting should be, even by critics
of the BBC, and have influenced a generation
of wildlife film-makers.
Honorary titles
By January 2013 Attenborough had collected
31 honorary degrees from British universities,
more than any other person. In 1980 he was
honoured by the Open University with whom
he has had a close association throughout
his career. He also has honorary Doctor of
Science awards from the University of Cambridge
and University of Oxford. In 2006 the two
eldest Attenborough brothers returned to their
home city to receive the title of Distinguished
Honorary Fellows of the University of Leicester,
"in recognition of a record of continuing
distinguished service to the University."
David Attenborough was previously awarded
an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the
university in 1970, and was made an honorary
Freeman of the City of Leicester in 1990.
In 2010 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate
from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University,
his first in Africa.
Attenborough has received the title Honorary
Fellow from Clare College, Cambridge, the
Zoological Society of London, the Linnean
Society, the Institute of Biology and the
Society of Antiquaries. He is the Honorary
Patron of the North American Native Plant
Society.
Recognition
Attenborough has been featured as the subject
of a number of BBC television programmes.
Life on Air examined the legacy of his work
and Attenborough the Controller focused on
his time in charge of BBC Two. He was also
featured prominently in The Way We Went Wild,
a series about natural history television
presenters, and 100 Years of Wildlife Films,
a special programme marking the centenary
of the nature documentary. In 2006 British
television viewers were asked to vote for
their Favourite Attenborough Moments for a
UKTV poll to coincide with the broadcaster's
80th birthday. The winning clip showed Attenborough
observing the mimicry skills of the superb
lyrebird.
Attenborough was named as the most trusted
celebrity in Britain in a 2006 Reader's Digest
poll,. and the following year he won The Culture
Show's Living Icon Award. He has also been
named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a
2002 BBC poll and is one of the top ten "Heroes
of Our Time" according to New Statesman magazine.
He has the distinction of having a number
of newly discovered species and fossils being
named in his honour. In 1993 after discovering
that the Mesozoic reptile Plesiosaurus conybeari
had not, in fact, been a true plesiosaur,
the palaeontologist Robert Bakker renamed
the species Attenborosaurus conybeari. A fossilised
armoured fish discovered at the Gogo Formation
in Western Australia in 2008 was given the
name Materpiscis attenboroughi, after Attenborough
had filmed at the site and highlighted its
scientific importance in Life on Earth. The
Materpiscis fossil is believed to be the earliest
organism capable of internal fertilisation.
He has also lent his name to a species of
Ecuadorian flowering tree, one of the world's
largest-pitchered carnivorous plants, a Madagascan
ghost shrimp, the millimetre-long Attenborough's
goblin spider and one of only four species
of long-beaked echidna, the critically endangered
Zaglossus attenboroughi, discovered by explorer
and zoologist Tim Flannery in the Cyclops
Mountains of New Guinea in 1998.
In September 2009 London's Natural History
Museum opened the Attenborough Studio, part
of its Darwin Centre development. In December
2013, he was awarded the freedom of the city
of Bristol.
Awards
1970: BAFTA Desmond Davis Award
1972: Royal Geographical Society's Cherry
Kearton Medal and Award
1974: Commander of the Order of the British
Empire
1980: BAFTA Fellowship
1981: Kalinga Prize for the Popularization
of Science from UNESCO
1983: Fellow of the Royal Society
1985: Knighthood
1991: Commander of the Royal Victorian Order
for producing Queen Elizabeth II's Christmas
broadcast for a number of years from 1986
1991: Foreign Honorary Member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences
1996: Companion of Honour for services to
nature broadcasting
1997: Honorary Degree awarded by Ghent University
1998: International Cosmos Prize
2003: Michael Faraday Prize awarded by the
Royal Society
2004: Descartes Prize for Outstanding Science
Communication Actions
2004: Caird Medal of the National Maritime
Museum
2004: José Vasconcelos World Award of Education
awarded by the World Cultural Council
2005: Order of Merit
2005: Nierenberg Prize for Science in the
Public Interest
2006: National Television Awards Special Recognition
Award
2006: Institute of Ecology and Environmental
Management - Institute Medal in recognition
of his outstanding contribution to the public
perception and understanding of ecology
2006: The Culture Show British Icon Award
2007: British Naturalists' Association Peter
Scott Memorial Award
2008 The Royal Photographic Society awarded
Attenborough its Progress medal and Honorary
Fellowship in recognition of any invention,
research, publication or other contribution
which has resulted in an important advance
in the scientific or technological development
of photography or imaging in the widest sense.
2009: Prince of Asturias Award
2010: Fonseca Prize
2010: Queensland Museum Medal
2011: Society for the History of Natural History
Founders' Medal
2011 Association for International Broadcasting
AIB International TV Personality of the year
2012: IUCN Phillips Memorial Medal for outstanding
service in international conservation
Date unknown: RSPB Medal
Lectures
In 1973 he was invited to deliver the Royal
Institution Christmas Lecture on The Language
of Animals.
Views and advocacy
Environment
Attenborough's programmes have often included
references to the impact of human society
on the natural world. The last episode of
The Living Planet, for example, focuses almost
entirely on humans' destruction of the environment
and ways that it could be stopped or reversed.
Despite this, he has been criticised for not
giving enough prominence to environmental
messages. Some environmentalists feel that
programmes like Attenborough's give a false
picture of idyllic wilderness and do not do
enough to acknowledge that such areas are
increasingly encroached upon by humans.
However, his closing message from State of
the Planet was forthright:
The future of life on earth depends on our
ability to take action. Many individuals are
doing what they can, but real success can
only come if there's a change in our societies
and our economics and in our politics. I've
been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the
greatest spectacles that the natural world
has to offer. Surely we have a responsibility
to leave for future generations a planet that
is healthy, inhabitable by all species.
His closing message from The Life of Mammals
adopted the topic of human population:
Three and a half million years separate the
individual who left these footprints in the
sands of Africa from the one who left them
on the moon. A mere blink in the eye of evolution.
Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most
successful of all mammals has exploited the
environment to produce food for an ever-increasing
population. In spite of disasters when civilisations
have over-reached themselves, that process
has continued, indeed accelerated, even today.
Now mankind is looking for food, not just
on this planet but on others. Perhaps the
time has now come to put that process into
reverse. Instead of controlling the environment
for the benefit of the population, perhaps
it's time we control the population to allow
the survival of the environment."
Attenborough has subsequently become more
vocal in his support of environmental causes.
In 2005 and 2006 he backed a BirdLife International
project to stop the killing of albatross by
longline fishing boats. He gave public support
to WWF's campaign to have 220,000 square
kilometres of Borneo's rainforest designated
a protected area. He also serves as a vice-president
of BTCV, vice-president of Fauna and Flora
International, president of Butterfly Conservation
and president of Leicestershire and Rutland
Wildlife Trust. In 2003 he launched an appeal
on behalf of the World Land Trust to create
a rainforest reserve in Ecuador in memory
of Christopher Parsons, the producer of Life
on Earth and a personal friend, who had died
the previous year. The same year, he helped
to launch ARKive, a global project instigated
by Parsons to gather together natural history
media into a digital library. ARKive is an
initiative of Wildscreen, of which Attenborough
is a patron. He later became patron of the
World Land Trust, and an active supporter.
He supported Glyndebourne in their successful
application to obtain planning permission
for a wind turbine in an Area of Outstanding
Natural Beauty, and gave evidence at the planning
inquiry arguing in favour of the proposal.
In a 2005 interview with BBC Wildlife magazine,
Attenborough said he considered George W.
Bush to be the era's top "environmental villain".
In 2007 he further elaborated on the USA's
consumption of energy in relation to its population.
When asked if he thought America to be "the
villain of the piece", he responded:
I don't think whole populations are villainous,
but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware
of all kinds of things. If you live in the
middle of that vast continent, with apparently
everything your heart could wish for just
because you were born there, then why worry?
[...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and
understanding of the natural world, they're
going to mistreat it and will not ask their
politicians to care for it.
In 2009, on becoming patron of UK population
concern charity, Population Matters, he commented:
The growth in human numbers is frightening.
I've seen wildlife under mounting human ­pressure
all over the world, and it's not just from
human economy or technology. Behind every
threat is the frightening ­explosion in ­human
numbers. I've never seen a problem that wouldn't
be easier to solve with fewer people – or
harder, and ­ultimately impossible, with
more.
Attenborough again took up the topic of population
in an episode of Horizon entitled, How Many
People Can Live on Planet Earth?
See wikiquote for a selection of quotes from
the programme.
He has written and spoken publicly about the
fact that, despite past scepticism, he believes
the Earth's climate is warming in a way that
is cause for concern, and that this can likely
be attributed to human activity. He summed
up his thoughts at the end of his 2006 documentary
"Can We Save Planet Earth?" as follows:
In the past, we didn't understand the effect
of our actions. Unknowingly, we sowed the
wind and now, literally, we are reaping the
whirlwind. But we no longer have that excuse:
now we do recognise the consequences of our
behaviour. Now surely, we must act to reform
it — individually and collectively, nationally
and internationally — or we doom future
generations to catastrophe.
In 2012 Attenborough was quoted as saying
that the planet has always and will always
look after itself but:
what worries him most about the future of
the natural world is that people are out of
touch with it ... over half the world is urbanised;
some people don't see any real thing except
a rat or a pigeon ... ecosystems are incredibly
complex and you fiddle with them at your peril."
When David Attenborough began his career,
in 1950, Earth's human population was measured
at just 2.5 billion people ... in 2012 he
said:
“We cannot continue to deny the problem.
People have pushed aside the question of population
sustainability and not considered it because
it is too awkward, embarrassing and difficult.
But we have to talk about it.″
In January 2013, while being interviewed by
Radio Times, he said:
“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming
home to roost over the next 50 years or so.
It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer
space, places to grow food for this enormous
horde. Either we limit our population growth
or the natural world will do it for us, and
the natural world is doing it for us right
now,”,
In a Telegraph interview in September 2013
he said:
"What are all these famines in Ethiopia? What
are they about?" / "They're about too many
people for too little land. That's what it's
about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say,
get the United Nations to send them bags of
flour. That's barmy."
Attitude to religion and creationism
In a December 2005 interview with Simon Mayo
on BBC Radio Five Live, Attenborough stated
that he considers himself an agnostic. When
asked whether his observation of the natural
world has given him faith in a creator, he
generally responds with some version of this
story, making reference to the Onchocerca
volvulus parasitic worm:
My response is that when Creationists talk
about God creating every individual species
as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds,
or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things.
But I tend to think instead of a parasitic
worm that is boring through the eye of a boy
sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa,
[a worm] that's going to make him blind. And
[I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the
God you believe in, who you also say is an
all-merciful God, who cares for each one of
us individually, are you saying that God created
this worm that can live in no other way than
in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that
doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God
who's full of mercy'.
He has explained that he feels the evidence
all over the planet clearly shows evolution
to be the best way to explain the diversity
of life, and that "as far as [he's] concerned,
if there is a supreme being then he chose
organic evolution as a way of bringing into
existence the natural world." In a BBC Four
interview with Mark Lawson, he was asked if
he at any time had any religious faith. He
replied simply, "No." He has also said "It
never really occurred to me to believe in
God".
In 2002 Attenborough joined an effort by leading
clerics and scientists to oppose the inclusion
of creationism in the curriculum of UK state-funded
independent schools which receive private
sponsorship, such as the Emmanuel Schools
Foundation. In 2009 he stated that the Book
of Genesis, by saying that the world was there
for people to dominate, had taught generations
that they can "dominate" the environment,
and that this has resulted in the devastation
of vast areas of the environment. He further
explained to the science journal Nature, "That's
why Darwinism, and the fact of evolution,
is of great importance, because it is that
attitude which has led to the devastation
of so much, and we are in the situation that
we are in."
Also in early 2009, the BBC broadcast an Attenborough
one-hour special, Charles Darwin and the Tree
of Life. In reference to the programme, Attenborough
stated that "People write to me that evolution
is only a theory. Well, it is not a theory.
Evolution is as solid a historical fact as
you could conceive. Evidence from every quarter.
What is a theory is whether natural selection
is the mechanism and the only mechanism. That
is a theory. But the historical reality that
dinosaurs led to birds and mammals produced
whales, that's not theory." He strongly opposes
creationism and its offshoot "intelligent
design", saying that a survey that found a
quarter of science teachers in state schools
believe that creationism should be taught
alongside evolution in science lessons was
"really terrible".
In March 2009 Attenborough appeared on Friday
Night with Jonathan Ross. Attenborough stated
that he felt evolution did not rule out the
existence of a God and accepted the title
of agnostic saying, "My view is: I don't know
one way or the other but I don't think that
evolution is against a belief in God."
Attenborough has joined the evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins and other top scientists in
signing a campaign statement coordinated by
the British Humanist Association. The statement
calls for "creationism to be banned from the
school science curriculum and for evolution
to be taught more widely in schools."
BBC and public service broadcasting
Attenborough is a lifelong supporter of the
BBC, public broadcasting and the television
licence. He has said:
PSB, to me, is not about selecting individual
programme strands here or there, financing
them from some outside source and then foisting
them upon commercial networks. Public Service
Broadcasting, watched by a healthy number
of viewers, with programmes financed in proportion
to their intrinsic needs and not the size
of the audience, can only effectively operate
as a network — a network whose aim is to
cater for the broadest possible range of interests,
popular as well as less popular, a network
that measures its success not only by its
audience size but by the range of its schedule.
Public service broadcasting is one of the
things that distinguishes this country and
makes me want to live here. I have spent all
my life in it. I would be very distressed
if public service broadcasting was weakened.
I have been at the BBC since 1952, and know
the BBC is constantly being battered. It is
today.
If you could demonstrate that the BBC was
grossly extravagant there might be a case
for saying OK take it away. But in fact the
BBC per minute in almost every category is
as cheap as you can find anywhere in the world
and produces the best quality. If you take
the money away, which part of the BBC will
you remove? The BBC has gone through swingeing
staff cuts. It has been cut to the bone, if
you divert licence fee money elsewhere, you
cut quality and services. There is always
that threat from politicians who will say
your licence fee is up for grabs. We will
take it. There is a lot of people who want
to see the BBC weakened. They talk of this
terrible tax of the licence fee. Yet it is
the best bargain that is going. Four radio
channels and god knows how many TV channels.
It is piffling.
There have always been politicians or business
people who have wanted to cut the BBC back
or stop it saying the sort of things it says.
There's always been trouble about the licence
and if you dropped your guard you could bet
our bottom dollar there'd be plenty of people
who'd want to take it away. The licence fee
is the basis on which the BBC is based and
if you destroy it, broadcasting... becomes
a wasteland.
Attenborough expressed regret at some of the
changes made to the BBC in the 1990s by its
Director-General, John Birt, who introduced
an internal market at the corporation, slimmed
and even closed some departments and outsourced
much of the corporation’s output to private
production companies, in line with the Broadcasting
Act 1990. He has said:
There is no question but that Birtism... has
had some terrible results. On the other hand,
the BBC had to change. Now it has to produce
programmes no one else can do. Otherwise,
forget the licence fee.
The Bristol Unit has suffered along with the
rest of the BBC from recent staff cuts. Yet
it remains confident in the belief that the
BBC will maintain it, in spite of the vagaries
of fashion, because the Corporation believes
that such programmes deserve a place in the
schedules of any broadcaster with pretensions
of providing a Public Service. In due course,
similar specialist Units were also established
in London, in order to produce programmes
on archaeology and history, on the arts, on
music and on science. They too, at one time,
had their successes. But they have not survived
as well as the Unit in Bristol. The statutory
requirement that a certain percentage of programmes
must come from independent producers has reduced
in-house production and the Units necessarily
shrank proportionately in size. As they dwindled,
so the critical mass of their production expertise
has diminished. The continuity of their archives
has been broken, they have lost the close
touch they once had worldwide with their subjects
and they are no longer regarded internationally
as the centres of innovation and expertise
that they once were.
When Birt gets up and says the whole of the
BBC was a creative mess and it was wasteful,
I never saw any evidence of that. I absolutely
know it wasn’t so in my time. Producers
now spend all their time worrying about money,
and the thing has suffered for it.
In 2008 he criticised the BBC’s television
schedules:
I have to say that there are moments when
I wonder — moments when its two senior networks,
first set up as a partnership, schedule simultaneously
programmes of identical character, thereby
contradicting the very reason that the BBC
was given a second network. Then there are
times when both BBC One and BBC Two, intoxicated
by the sudden popularity of a programme genre,
allow that genre to proliferate and run rampant
through the schedules. The result is that
other kinds of programmes are not placed,
simply because of a lack of space. Do we really
require so many gardening programmes, make-over
programmes or celebrity chefs? Is it not a
scandal in this day and age, that there seems
to be no place for continuing series of programmes
about science or serious music or thoughtful
in-depth interviews with people other than
politicians?
In 2009 Attenborough commented on the general
state of British television, describing the
newly introduced product placement on commercial
television as something he considered an "appalling"
idea 20 years earlier:
I think it's in great trouble. The whole system
on which it was built — a limited number
of networks, with adequate funding — is
under threat. That funding is no longer there.
As stations proliferate, so audiences are
reduced. The struggle for audiences becomes
ever greater, while money diminishes. I think
that's a fair recipe for trouble. Inevitably,
this has an impact on the BBC ... Fortunately,
the BBC doesn't think natural history programmes
must compete with Strictly Come Dancing in
terms of audience. The BBC says, 'Make proper,
responsible natural history programmes.'
Health and future plans
Attenborough had a pacemaker fitted in June
2013 ... yet in Sept 2013 he commented:
"If I was earning my money by hewing coal
I would be very glad indeed to stop. But I'm
not. I'm swanning round the world looking
at the most fabulously interesting things.
Such good fortune."
Filmography
David Attenborough's television credits span
seven decades and his association with natural
history programmes dates back to The Pattern
of Animals and Zoo Quest in the early 1950s.
His most influential work, 1979's Life on
Earth, launched a strand of nine authored
documentaries with the BBC Natural History
Unit which shared the Life moniker and spanned
30 years. He narrated every episode of the
long-running BBC series Wildlife on One and
in his later career has voiced several high-profile
BBC wildlife documentaries, among them The
Blue Planet and Planet Earth. He became a
pioneer in the 3D documentary format with
Flying Monsters in 2010.
Books
David Attenborough's work as an author has
strong parallels with his broadcasting career.
In the 1950s and 1960s his published work
included accounts of his animal collecting
expeditions around the world, which became
the Zoo Quest series. He wrote an accompanying
volume to each of his nine Life documentaries,
along with books on tribal art and birds of
paradise. His autobiography, Life on Air,
was published in 2002, revised in 2009 and
is one of a number of his works which is available
as a self-narrated audiobook. Attenborough
has also contributed forewords and introductions
to many other works, notably those accompanying
Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, Africa and other
BBC series he has narrated.
Bibliography
Zoo Quest to Guyana
Zoo Quest for a Dragon - republished in 1959
to include an additional 85 pages titled Quest
for the Paradise Birds
Zoo Quest in Paraguay
Quest in Paradise
People of Paradise
Zoo Quest to Madagascar
Quest Under Capricorn
Fabulous Animals
The Tribal Eye
Life on Earth
Discovering Life on Earth
The Living Planet
The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and
Man
The Atlas of the Living World
The Trials of Life
The Private Life of Plants
The Life of Birds
The Life of Mammals
Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster - autobiography,
revised in 2009
Life in the Undergrowth
Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History
in the Age of Discovery - with Susan Owens,
Martin Clayton and Rea Alexandratos
Life in Cold Blood
David Attenborough's Life Stories
David Attenborough's New Life Stories
Drawn From Paradise: The Discovery, Art and
Natural History of the Birds of Paradise - with
Errol Fuller
Audio recordings
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
Yanomamo by Peter Rose and Anne Conlon; on-stage
narration and published audio recording
Ocean World by Peter Rose and Anne Conlon;
on-stage narration, for audio recording and
video broadcast
Peter and the Wolf for BBC Music Magazine.
In addition, Attenborough has recorded some
of his own works in audiobook form, including
Life on Earth, Zoo Quest for a Dragon and
his autobiography Life on Air: Memoirs of
a Broadcaster.
References
External links
BBC Books David Attenborough website
British Exploring Society
Friends of Richmond Park
Population Matters
David Attenborough at the Internet Movie Database
Wildfilmhistory.org biography
BBC interviews with Attenborough in 1976 and
1998 at the Wayback Machine
PBS interview with Attenborough in 1998
People and Planet: David Attenborough, video
of the 2011 RSA President's Lecture
BBC Wildlife Finder - David Attenborough's
favourite moments
Tribute from the World Land Trust
