He was a profound believer in the importance of learning and the intellectual life.
He was a son of a shopkeeper in Stapleford not far from Attenborough,
so he came from very humble beginnings and he believed profoundly in the importance of education,
at all levels and of the accessibility of education to people of all strands of society.
So his friends and therefore the family friends were all academics really.
One of the closest of them was a young botanist
who became one of the great botanists of the inter-war period, professor Harry Godwin,
I got a letter from Harry after one series that I'd done
in which he said that he felt that I was an educationalist just as much as my father had been.
That warmed my heart more than I can say.
And I did think that my father did think that I had remained true to the traditions that had motivated him
in that education and knowledge was the right and inheritance of every kind and class of people,
and that their lives were enriched the greater their education, and that everybody should have access to it.
And that television properly used could provide just that and that was in the area that I was working,
and so I think he approved of what I did
