David Attenborough

Sir David Frederick Attenborough (/ˈætənbərə/; born 8 May 1926)[2][3] is an English broadcaster and natural historian. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural history documentary series forming the Life collection that together constitute a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth. He is 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, 3D and 4K.[4][5] In 2018 and 2019, he received Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Narrator.[6][7] He considers his 2020 documentary film, David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, his personal witness statement of his life and the future.[8]

For the Antarctic research vessel, see RRS Sir David Attenborough.

Sir

David Attenborough

OM GCMG CH CVO CBE FRS FRSB FRSA FLS FZS FSA FRSGS
Attenborough at the opening of the Weston Library in March 2015
Born
David Frederick Attenborough

(1926-05-08) 8 May 1926
Isleworth, Middlesex, England
NationalityBritish
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA) , London School of Economics
Occupation
Years active1951–present
TitleController of BBC2 (1965–1969)
President of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation (1991–1996)
Spouse(s)
Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel
​
​
(m. 1950; died 1997)​
Children2
Parent(s)
Relatives
Awards
Signature

Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in the UK, although he himself does not like the term.[9][10][11] In 2002, he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide poll for the BBC.[12] He is the younger brother of the late director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough,[13] and older brother of the late motor executive John Attenborough.

Early life and family

Attenborough was born in Isleworth, Middlesex (now part of west London), and grew up in College House on the campus of the University College, Leicester, where his father, Frederick, was principal.[14] He is the middle of three long-lived sons; his elder brother, Richard (died in 2014), became an actor and director, and his younger brother, John (died in 2012), was an executive at Italian car manufacturer Alfa Romeo.[15] During the Second World War, through a British volunteer network known as the Refugee Children's Movement, his parents also fostered two Jewish refugee girls from Germany.[16]

Attenborough spent his childhood collecting fossils, stones, and natural specimens.[17] He received encouragement aged seven, when a young Jacquetta Hawkes admired his "museum". He also spent much 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 through his father to supply for 3d each. The source, which he did not reveal at the time, was a pond less than five metres from the department.[18] A few years later, one of his adoptive sisters gave him a piece of amber containing prehistoric creatures; some fifty years later, it would be the focus of his programme The Amber Time Machine.

In 1936, Attenborough and his brother Richard attended a lecture by Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney) 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." In 1999, Richard directed a biopic of Belaney entitled Grey Owl.[19]

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.[20] 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; she died in 1997. The couple had two children, Robert and Susan.[21] Robert is a senior lecturer in bioanthropology for the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.[22][23] Susan is a former primary school headmistress.[24]

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 (factual broadcasting) 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.[25] 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,[26] 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.[26]

Attenborough's association with natural history programmes began when he produced and presented the three-part series Animal Patterns. 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.[27]

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,[28] which allowed him to continue to front Zoo Quest as well as produce other documentaries, notably the Travellers' Tales and Adventure series.[28]

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.[29] However, he accepted an invitation to return to the BBC as controller of BBC Two before he could finish the degree.[30]

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 had been 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, Match of the Day, The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Money Programme.[31]

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 (also commissioned by Attenborough), 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.

While in charge of BBC Two, Attenborough turned down Terry Wogan's job application to be a presenter on the channel, stating that there weren't any suitable vacancies. The channel already had an Irish announcer, with Attenborough reflecting in 2016: "To have had two Irishmen presenting on BBC Two would have looked ridiculous. This is no comment whatsoever on Terry Wogan's talents."[32] Attenborough has also acknowledged that he sanctioned the wiping of programmes during this period to cut costs, including sketches by Alan Bennett, which he later regretted.[33]

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.[17]

Return to broadcasting
Attenborough filming commentary for a documentary at Kennedy Space Center

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 Quest 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 (The Tribal Eye, 1975) and another on the voyages of discovery (The Explorers, 1975). He also presented a BBC children's series about cryptozoology entitled Fabulous Animals (1975), which featured mythical creatures such as the griffin and kraken.[34] Eventually the BBC signed a co-production deal with Turner Broadcasting and Life on Earth moved into production in 1976.

Life series
See also: The Life Collection

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 time on 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" title 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 was The Private Life of Plants (1995), which showed plants as dynamic organisms by using time-lapse photography to speed up their growth, and went on to earn a Peabody Award.[35]

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 (1998) on the theme of behaviour. The documentary series won a second Peabody Award the following year.[36] The order of the remaining "Life" series was dictated by developments in camera technology. For The Life of Mammals (2002), 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.[37]

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."[38]

Other documentaries
Attenborough at a special screening of Great Barrier Reef in 2015

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 that 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.[39] He has also narrated over 50 episodes of Natural World, BBC Two's flagship wildlife series. (Its forerunner, The World About Us, was created by Attenborough in 1969, as a vehicle for colour television.[40]) 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, Attenborough 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 (2001), the Unit's first comprehensive series on marine life. He decided not to use an on-screen presenter due to difficulties in speaking to a camera through diving apparatus, but asked Attenborough to narrate the films. The same team reunited for Planet Earth (2006), the biggest nature documentary ever made for television and the first BBC wildlife series to be shot in high definition. In 2009, he co-wrote and narrated Life, a ten-part series focussing on extraordinary animal behaviour,[41] and narrated Nature's Great Events, which showed how seasonal changes trigger major natural spectacles.[42] 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. Attenborough introduced and narrated the Unit's first 4K production Life Story. For Planet Earth II (2016), Attenborough returned as narrator and presenter, with the main theme music composed by Hans Zimmer.[43][44]

In October 2014, the corporation announced a trio of new one-off Attenborough documentaries as part of a raft of new natural history programmes. "Attenborough's Paradise Birds" and "Attenborough's Big Birds" was shown on BBC Two and "Waking Giants", which follows the discovery of giant dinosaur bones in South America, aired on BBC One.[45] The BBC also commissioned Atlantic Productions to make a three-part, Attenborough-fronted series Great Barrier Reef in 2015. The series marked the 10th project for Attenborough and Atlantic, and saw him returning to a location he first filmed at in 1957.[46][47]

By the turn of the millennium, Attenborough's authored documentaries were adopting a more overtly environmentalist stance. In State of the Planet (2000), 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 (The Truth about Climate Change, 2006) and human population growth (How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?, 2009). 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.[48]

Attenborough also forged a 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.[49] A second film, The Bachelor King 3D, followed a year later. His next 3D project, Conquest of the Skies, made by the team behind the BAFTA-winning David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive, aired on Sky 3D at Christmas 2014.

Attenborough has narrated three series of David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities for UKTV channel Watch, with the third series showing in 2015. He has also narrated A majestic celebration: Wild Karnataka, India's first blue-chip natural history film, directed by Kalyan Varma and Amoghavarsha.[50]

More recent projects

On radio, Attenborough has continued as one of the presenters of BBC Radio 4's Tweet of the Day, which began a second series in September 2014.[51]

Blue Planet II was broadcast in 2017, with Attenborough returning as presenter.[52] The series was critically acclaimed[53] and gained the highest UK viewing figure for 2017, 14.1 million.[54] Attenborough narrates the 2018 five part series Dynasties, each episode dealing with one species in particular.[55][56]

In 2019, Attenborough narrated Our Planet, an eight-part documentary series, for Netflix.[57] He will also narrate Wild Karnataka, a documentary about the Karnataka forest area.[58] In March 2019, It was announced that Attenborough is to present an "urgent" one-off film documentary about climate change for BBC One called Climate Change – The Facts.[59] This will be followed by a 2020 BBC One documentary on the human-driven sixth mass extinction, Extinction:The Facts, also presented by Attenborough, which is partly based on the 2019 IPBES report on the decline of biodiversity.[60][61]

In October 2020, Attenborough began filming in Cambridge for the upcoming series The Green Planet.[62]

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.[63]

In May 2005, Attenborough was appointed as patron of the UK's Blood Pressure Association, which provides information and support to people with hypertension.[64] 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 on Friday nights.[65] Part of Radio 4's A Point of View strand, the talks are also available as podcasts.[66]

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" (after which he was "shot" by Rory Bremner, who was playing the gun). In 2009, he also became a patron of Population Matters (formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust),[67] a UK charity advocating sustainable human populations.[68]

He is also a patron of the Friends of Richmond Park[69] 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.

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"[70] and "the greatest broadcaster of our time."[71] 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.[72]

Honorary titles

By January 2013, Attenborough had collected 32 honorary degrees from British universities,[73] more than any other person.[74][75] 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 degrees from Durham University (1982)[76] and the University of Cambridge (1984)[77] and an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford (1988).[77] 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."[78] 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 2013, he was made an Honorary Freeman of the City of Bristol.[79] In 2010, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and Nottingham Trent University.[80]

Attenborough has received the title Honorary Fellow from Clare College, Cambridge (1980), the Zoological Society of London (1998), the Linnean Society (1999), the Institute of Biology (Now the Royal Society of Biology) (2000) and the Society of Antiquaries (2007). He is Honorary Patron of the North American Native Plant Society[81] and was elected as a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science.[82]

Recognition
University of Oxford librarian Richard Ovenden, Professor Stephen Hawking and David Attenborough at the official opening of the Weston Library, Oxford in March 2015. Ovenden awarded the Bodley Medal to Attenborough and Hawking as part of the ceremony

Attenborough has been featured as the subject of a number of BBC television programmes. Life on Air (2002) examined the legacy of his work and Attenborough the Controller (2002) focused on his time in charge of BBC Two. He was also featured prominently in The Way We Went Wild (2004), a series about natural history television presenters, and 100 Years of Wildlife Films (2007), 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 the most trusted celebrity in the UK in a 2006 Reader's Digest poll,[83] and in 2007 he won The Culture Show's Living Icon Award.[84] 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.[85]

In September 2009, London's Natural History Museum opened the Attenborough Studio, part of its Darwin Centre development.[86] In December 2013, he was awarded the freedom of the city of Bristol.[87]

In 2012, Attenborough was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life.[88] The same year, Attenborough featured in the BBC Radio 4 series The New Elizabethans to mark the diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. A panel of seven academics, journalists and historians named him among the group of people in the UK "whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands".[89]

In May 2016, it was announced that a new British polar research ship will be named RRS Sir David Attenborough in his honour. While an Internet poll suggesting the name of the ship had the most votes for Boaty McBoatface, Science Minister Jo Johnson said there were "more suitable names", and the official name was eventually picked up from one of the more favoured choices. However, one of its research subs was named "Boaty" in recognition of the public vote.[90]

Species named in Attenborough's honour
Trigonopterus attenboroughi

At least 20 species and genera, both living and extinct, have been named in Attenborough's honour.[91] Plants named after him include an alpine hawkweed (Hieracium attenboroughianum) discovered in the Brecon Beacons,[92] a species of Ecuadorian flowering tree (Blakea attenboroughi), one of the world's largest-pitchered carnivorous plants (Nepenthes attenboroughii), along with a genus of flowering plants (Sirdavidia).[93] Arthropods named after Attenborough include a butterfly, Attenborough's black-eyed satyr (Euptychia attenboroughi),[94] a dragonfly, Attenborough's pintail (Acisoma attenboroughi),[95] a millimetre-long goblin spider (Prethopalpus attenboroughi), an ornate Caribbean smiley-faced spider (Spintharus davidattenboroughi),[96][97] an Indonesian flightless weevil (Trigonopterus attenboroughi),[98][99] a Madagascan ghost shrimp (Ctenocheloides attenboroughi), and a soil snail (Palaina attenboroughi).[100] The Monogenean Cichlidogyrus attenboroughi, a parasite from a deep-sea fish in the Lake Tanganyika, is probably the only parasite species named after him.[101] Vertebrates have also been named after Attenborough, including a Namibian lizard (Platysaurus attenboroughi),[102] a bird (Polioptila attenboroughi),[102] a Peruvian frog (Pristimantis attenboroughi),[103] a Madagascan stump-toed frog (Stumpffia davidattenboroughi),[104] and one of only four species of long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi).[105]

Sitana attenboroughii

In 1993, after discovering that the Mesozoic reptile Plesiosaurus conybeari did not belong to the genus Plesiosaurus, the palaeontologist Robert Bakker renamed the species Attenborosaurus conybeari.[106] A fossilised armoured fish discovered in Western Australia in 2008 was named Materpiscis attenboroughi, after Attenborough had filmed at the site and highlighted its scientific importance in Life on Earth.[107] The Materpiscis fossil is believed to be the earliest organism capable of internal fertilisation. A miniature marsupial lion, Microleo attenboroughi, was named in his honour in 2016.[108][109] The fossil grasshopper Electrotettix attenboroughi was named after Attenborough. In March 2017, a 430 million year old tiny crustacean was named after him. Called Cascolus ravitis, the first word is a Latin translation of the root meaning of "Attenborough", and the second is based on a description of him in Latin.[110][111] In July 2017, the Caribbean bat Myotis attenboroughi was named after him.[112] A new species of fan-throated lizard from coastal Kerala in southern India was named Sitana attenboroughii in his honour when it was described in 2018.[113]

In 2018, a new species of phytoplankton, Syracosphaera azureaplaneta, was named to honour The Blue Planet, the TV documentary presented by Attenborough, and to recognise his contribution to promoting understanding of the oceanic environment.[114] The same year, Attenborough was also commemorated in the name of the scarab beetle Sylvicanthon attenboroughi.[115]

Awards
Sir David Attenborough in 2018 receiving an honorary award for his sustainability work from Bergen Business Council and Fana Sparebank
Attenborough receiving the Landscape Institute Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and becoming an Honorary Fellow of the Landscape Institute in 2019

Lectures

In 1973, Attenborough was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on The Language of Animals.

Views and advocacy

Environment
Attenborough in 2003 at the launch of ARKive – a global initiative with the mission of "promoting the conservation of the world's threatened species, through the power of wildlife imagery".

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.[142][143]

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.[144] He gave public support to WWF's campaign to have 220,000 square kilometres of Borneo's rainforest designated a protected area.[145] 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,[146] 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.[147] 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.[148]

Attenborough again took up the topic of population in an episode of Horizon entitled, How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? 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.[149]

In a January 2013 interview with the Radio Times, Attenborough described humans as a "plague on the Earth",[150][151] and criticised the act of sending food to famine-stricken countries while overlooking population control.[152] In May 2015, United States President Barack Obama interviewed Attenborough at the White House in Washington D.C. Together, they discussed the future of the planet, their passion for nature and what measures can be taken to protect the environment.[153]

In July 2020, Attenborough advocated on behalf of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and its conservation efforts, which have been impacted by the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. He said: "London and Whipsnade [zoos] are home to over 20,000 animals, many of which are endangered in the wild, from tiny dart frogs to majestic tigers and everything in between. The Zoological Society of London now faces its toughest challenge to date. Put bluntly, the national institution is now itself at risk of extinction."[154]

In his 2020 documentary film David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, Attenborough advocates for people to adopt a vegetarian diet or to reduce meat consumption in order to save wildlife, noting that "the planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters."[155]

In October 2020, Attenborough was named as a member of the Earthshot Prize Council,[156] an initiative of Prince William to find solutions to environmental issues.[157][158]

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.[159] 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'.[160]

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."[161] He has also said "It never really occurred to me to believe in God".[162]

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.[163] 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."[164]

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."[71] 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".[71]

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."[165]

Attenborough has joined the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and other top scientists in signing a campaign statement co-ordinated by the British Humanist Association (BHA). The statement calls for "creationism to be banned from the school science curriculum and for evolution to be taught more widely in schools."[166]

BBC and public service broadcasting

Attenborough is a lifelong supporter of the BBC, public service broadcasting and the television licence. He has said that public service broadcasting "is one of the things that distinguishes this country and makes me want to live here",[167] and believes that it is not reducible to individual programmes, but "can only effectively operate as a network [...] that measures its success not only by its audience size but by the range of its schedule".[168]

... the BBC per minute in almost every category is as cheap as you can find anywhere in the world and produces the best quality. [...] 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 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.[167]

Attenborough expressed the view "there have always been politicians or business people who have wanted to cut the BBC back or stop it", adding "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."[169] He 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. Although he said Birt's policies "had some terrible results", Attenborough also acknowledged "the BBC had to change. Now it has to produce programmes no one else can do. Otherwise, forget the licence fee."[170][171] In 2008, he criticised the BBC's television schedules, positing that the two senior networks, BBC One and BBC Two – which Attenborough stated were "first set up as a partnership" – now "schedule simultaneously programmes of identical character, thereby contradicting the very reason that the BBC was given a second network."[168]

Politics

In 1998, Attenborough described himself as "a standard, boring left-wing liberal" and expressed the view that the market economy was "misery".[170]

In 2013, Attenborough joined rock guitarists Brian May and Slash in opposing the government's policy on the cull of badgers in the UK by participating in a song dedicated to badgers.[172]

In August 2014, Attenborough was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.[173]

Prior to the 2015 UK general election, Attenborough was one of several celebrities who endorsed the parliamentary candidacy of the Green Party's Caroline Lucas.[174]

Commenting on the 2016 US presidential election in an interview by Radio Times, Attenborough jokingly commented on the rise of Donald Trump: "Do we have any control or influence over the American elections? Of course we don’t. We could shoot him, it's not a bad idea."[175]

In a 2020 interview, Attenborough criticized excess capitalism as a driver of ecological imbalance, stating "the excesses the capitalist system has brought us, have got to be curbed somehow", and that "greed does not actually lead to joy", although he added "That doesn't mean to say that capitalism is dead".[176] He also lamented the lack of international cooperation on climate change, and said "there should be no dominant nation on this planet."[177]

Health and future plans

Attenborough had a pacemaker fitted in June 2013, as well as a double knee replacement in 2015.[178] In September 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.[179]

Filmography
Main article: David Attenborough filmography

David Attenborough's television credits span eight 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 strand name 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 (1956)
  • Zoo Quest for a Dragon (1957) – republished in 1959 to include an additional 85 pages titled Quest for the Paradise Birds
  • Zoo Quest in Paraguay (1959)
  • Quest in Paradise (1960)
  • People of Paradise (1960)
  • Zoo Quest to Madagascar (1961)
  • Quest Under Capricorn (1963)
  • Fabulous Animals (1975)
  • The Tribal Eye (1976)
  • Life on Earth (1979)
  • Discovering Life on Earth (1981)
  • The Living Planet (1984)
  • The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man (1987)
  • The Atlas of the Living World (1989)
  • The Trials of Life (1990)
  • The Private Life of Plants (1994)
  • The Life of Birds (1998)
  • The Life of Mammals (2002)
  • Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (2002) – autobiography, revised in 2009
  • Life in the Undergrowth (2005)
  • Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery (2007) – with Susan Owens, Martin Clayton and Rea Alexandratos
  • Life in Cold Blood (2007)
  • David Attenborough's Life Stories (2009)
  • David Attenborough's New Life Stories (2011)
  • Drawn From Paradise: The Discovery, Art and Natural History of the Birds of Paradise (2012) – with Errol Fuller
  • Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions (2017)
  • Journeys to the Other Side of the World: Further Adventures of a Young Naturalist (2018)
  • Dynasties: The Rise and Fall of Animal Families with Stephen Moss (BBC Books, 2018) ISBN 978-1-78594-301-0
  • A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future (2020)

Audio recordings

In addition, Attenborough has recorded some of his own works in audiobook form, including Life on Earth, Zoo Quest for a Dragon, his 2010 autobiography Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster and his 2020 book A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future.

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Media offices
Preceded by
Michael Peacock		 Controller of BBC Two
1965–1969		 Succeeded by
Robin Scott
Non-profit organization positions
Preceded by
?		 President of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation
1991–1996		 Succeeded by
?
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