A Hundred Years of David Attenborough
Already known as a naturalist, a broadcaster, a writer, a campaigner, and such a flat-out, all-encompassing gentleman that he hobnobs with gorillas, David Attenborough has added one more string to his bow: he is now a centenarian. Attenborough was born on May 8, 1926—that is to say, three and a half weeks before Marilyn Monroe. She has passed into legend, so much so that she barely seems real, and her movies are treasured as historical artifacts, whereas Attenborough, as real and as eager as a meerkat, has a new show on the BBC.
“Secret Garden” is a five-part delve into the domestic wildlife of the United Kingdom. The first episode aired on April 5th. There was Attenborough at the start of the program, hale and kindly, addressing us head on; and there was his voice, mellowed but un-degraded by the years, still telling us things as if he were confiding a secret and egging us on to share it. Mayflies, we learned, “are the only winged insects to undergo a second adult moult.” As for a grass snake, “its forked tongue can smell in stereo.” At the climax of the episode, two kingfishers sported over a stream, a dazzling dogfight of orange and blue.
To say that we have lived through the era of Attenborough would be tempting but incorrect, because an era—as he himself, a fervent fossil hunter from childhood, would be the first to point out—is a hefty unit of geochronological time. The Mesozoic era lasted some hundred and eighty-six million years. The Carboniferous period dragged on for sixty million. Even the Middle Jurassic epoch, which was happy hour if you were an ammonite, lingered for more than thirteen million years. What is so special, then, about the Attenborovian age, given that it’s measured in mere decades? In the grand scheme of things, that is the blink of a marmoset’s eye.
Attenborough matters because, for generations of TV viewers, in scores of countries, he has been regarded as the person who best understands one crucial purpose of the medium—who has made the most fruitful use of what television, uniquely, can be for. So promptly and so narcotically does it feed into our brains that we tend to neglect its capacity to edify or to amaze. Like the sitcom, the soap, and the live-sports broadcast, the natural-history documentary is a perfect fit for the small screen. Attenborough, more than anybody, has established the link between the patch of glass in our living rooms and the wide world beyond—which, thanks to him, is revealed to be wider, weirder, and more combative than anyone could have conceived.
One series that Attenborough presented, “The Trials of Life” (1990), showed orcas deliberately beaching themselves on a Patagonian shore so that they could snatch a sea lion and retreat to the open sea. But they didn’t immediately eat their prey. They tossed it around for a lark, “exulting in triumph,” as Attenborough said. So, now we knew: killer whales could be player whales, too. The sequence left us pondering our pet cats and, for good measure, our worst selves.
The Attenborough filmography, which is vast, is headed by a series of series: the “Life” collection, as it is known, which began with “Life on Earth,” a thirteen-part odyssey that was broadcast in 1979, followed by “The Living Planet,” “The Trials of Life,” “Life in the Freezer,” “The Private Life of Plants,” “The Life of Birds,” “The Life of Mammals,” “Life in the Undergrowth,” and, finally, “Life in Cold Blood,” in 2008. In short, all nonhuman life is there. Many of us might never have bothered with such bountifulness, or thought ourselves likely candidates to be gripped by it, were it not for the single human who brought it to our attention. If we discovered existence to be a many-splendored thing—from chimps that chase and tear apart a colobus monkey, say, to a quick-stepping bird of paradise—it was not through Attenborough’s eyes, for the dominant eye was always that of the camera, but under his tutelage. As happens with all the best teachers, we were barely aware of being taught. We just wanted to be in class.
David Attenborough grew up largely in Leicester, in the center of England, where his father was the principal of a university. David was the middle child of three sons. His elder brother, Richard, went on to be the director of “A Bridge Too Far” and “Gandhi.” In later life, Richard was honored as Lord Attenborough, and David became a knight of the realm. Not bad for one family. During the Second World War, the Attenboroughs took in two Jewish sisters, who had come to Britain on the Kindertransport—the humanitarian scheme, devised after Kristallnacht, in 1938, for sending Jewish children, unaccompanied, to a safe haven. David remembers his mother saying to the boys after war had been declared, “Well, here are the girls. They are going to be your sisters until the war is over.”
David and Richard were close, and there are pleasing junctures at which their careers locked together like a ball and socket. As an actor, for instance, Richard played the benign resurrector of dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” while David, in a 2016 documentary, “Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur,” brought news of a titanosaur—a placid vegetarian from Argentina, and perhaps the largest animal that has ever moseyed upon the Earth. We dutifully gawp at Spielberg’s movie, yet the simple scene in which David compares the length of his own thigh bone with that of the titanosaur’s, which resembles a medieval battering ram, is no less of a marvel. The whole sequence takes about thirty seconds.
Attenborough was educated at Cambridge. Having done his national service in the Royal Navy, he went into publishing, got stuck, applied for a job in radio at the BBC, and was surprised to be offered a trainee position in something called “television”— a medium of which he knew almost nothing. As he confesses in a memoir, “Life on Air,” he certainly didn’t own a TV. In the United States, NBC, ABC, and CBS were up and running by 1948, but, when Attenborough entered the fray of British broadcasting, in 1952, there was only one channel. Evening programs were introduced by a man in a tuxedo, or a woman in equally formal garb, and rounded off by the playing of the national anthem. The BBC being a public service, nothing as vulgar as an advertisement was there to spoil the soirée.
Given a chance to appear on camera, Attenborough consented, though at first to no great effect. Decades later, he dug up a memo from the person who had overseen his initiation: “David Attenborough is intelligent and promising and may well be producer material, but he is not to be used again as an interviewer. His teeth are too big.” So that’s why no walrus has ever hosted a talk show. Despite this handicap, further opportunities arose for the young Attenborough, and his break came with the series “Zoo Quest,” in which a small crew flew to remote patches of the world, filmed and captured rare animals, and brought them back to London Zoo—an adventure that, as Attenborough admits, was founded on the assumption, as yet unquestioned, that “there was an unlimited supply of exhibits in the wild.”
In the London studio, some of the kidnapped creatures were shown to the public on live TV, with clips from the expedition spliced into the program. The clips were shot on 16-mm. film, using a clockwork camera. The first season of “Zoo Quest,” in six episodes, took Attenborough and three colleagues to Sierra Leone, in search of Picathartes gymnocephalus, or the white-necked rockfowl, a bird of notoriously secretive habits. When the designated presenter—Jack Lester, the curator of reptiles at London Zoo—fell ill, it was Attenborough who took the helm, at no extra pay. On the brink of the final episode, with the main goal still unattained, he found himself being driven down a street in central London, in a convertible. By his own account, he was spotted by a nearby bus driver. “ ’Ere, Dave,” he said. “Are you going to catch that Picafartees gymno-bloody-cephalus or aren’t you?”
Two conclusions can be drawn from this greeting. First, it demonstrates that factual broadcasts, as much as drama, can benefit from a feathering of suspense; Attenborough has grown ever more skilled in the careful meting out of information. (To behold an Australian lyrebird imitating its woodland neighbors, including a kookaburra, in the 1998 series “The Life of Birds,” was startling enough; to hear it parrot a camera’s shutter, and its motor drive, made you fall off the couch.) Second, given that “Zoo Quest” kicked off in 1954, Attenborough has been appearing on British screens, and thus staking a modest claim in the public consciousness, for more than seventy years, a reign yet more enduring than that of Queen Elizabeth II, who was his senior by less than a month.
On several occasions, indeed, starting in 1986, Attenborough was the producer of the Queen’s Christmas broadcast to the nation—an annual custom, televised since 1957. For a veteran of “Life on Earth,” I guess, who was quite content in the company of damselflies, mudskippers, yapoks, quolls, and star-nosed moles, even a species as rare as Regina britanniarum will have held few, if any, terrors. Such is the trust and affection that Attenborough enjoys in his native land that, were the monarchy to be abolished tomorrow and a President of the United Kingdom required in a rush, Attenborough would be the prime candidate. No one else would come close. What is equally certain is that he would turn down the post with alacrity.
Most of “Zoo Quest” has survived (there is even color footage, which could not be transmitted at the time), enabling us to set Attenborough the greenhorn, as skinny as a schoolboy, beside the Attenborough of riper years. His accent has softened in the interim, losing its clipped poshness—the Queen, too, underwent the same transformation—but the essential, easy zeal of his delivery, sometimes hushed, never hectoring, was in play from the outset. The joke is that this globally recognized figure has borne, from first to last, so unmistakable a stamp of Englishness. Nobody is more alive to the comic incongruity than the man himself. On YouTube, you will find him commenting on footage of his encounter with an Indigenous tribe in Papua New Guinea in 1957. In a high valley, a troop of men hastened in his direction, carrying axes and long knives. As he recalls, “I simply couldn’t think of what to do, except to go toward them and stick out my hand and say, ‘Good afternoon.’ ”
One drawback of success is that, whether you like it or not, efforts will be made to haul you up the ladder, dragging you away from what you love doing and hoisting you into a position of authority from which you are meant to tell other people what to do. After “Zoo Quest” and other engaging documentaries, Attenborough was appointed controller of a new channel, BBC2, in 1965. To make things trickier still, he turned out to be good at the job, cursed as he was with diplomatic dexterity. His remit, unlike “Zoo Quest,” was firmly biped-based, and under his aegis the channel broadcast live recordings of Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten; monumental series such as “Civilisation” and “The Ascent of Man”; and, noblest of all, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” When color television finally came to the U.K., in 1967—once more in the distant wake of America—its arrival was heralded, on BBC2, by coverage of the first day of Wimbledon.
To much of the British population, it could be said, Attenborough pretty much is the BBC. The principles laid down in 1922 by its first director general, Lord Reith—that it should “inform, educate, and entertain”—sound ridiculously stiff and starched until you realize that, in Attenborough’s hands, they make perfect practical sense. The only proviso is that he should be free to get those hands dirty. Hence, in the nineteen-seventies, the visit that he paid to his brother Richard late one night, in a bind and a panic. “I’m likely to be asked to be the new director general,” he said. Richard wisely told him to refuse any such proposal and to carry on doing what he enjoyed. Thus liberated, Attenborough went on to make “Life on Earth,” which he both wrote and presented. Why slump behind a desk when you can stroll along the rim of a volcano?
Watching “Life on Earth” again, forty-seven years after it aired, I was struck by something I had failed to notice at the time. The series is not just a chronicle of the planet’s wonders but a specific act of historical homage. Two minutes into the first episode, we find Attenborough in a South American rain forest, peering up at howler monkeys through binoculars. Without ado, he plunges into the mystery of the multitude that surrounds him.“Different organisms must have appeared at different times,” he says. “But which came first, and why should there be such an immense variety?” Attenborough approaches the camera as if he were meeting a friend in the street, and continues, “Such questions obsessed a young twenty-four-year-old Englishman who came to these forests in 1832. His name was”—a tiny pause, no more than a quaver’s beat—“Charles Darwin, and he was enthralled almost to the point of ecstasy by the richness of life that he found here.”
Attenborough is right. The timbre of his predecessor’s reports does indeed verge on the ecstatic. “The day has passed delightfully. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has been wandering by himself in a Brazilian forest,” Darwin wrote in February, 1832. “The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end.” That passage appears in “The Voyage of the Beagle,” which was published in 1839. Darwin and Attenborough, in other words, were on a similar mission. They were spirited, Cambridge-schooled enthusiasts, urging the public to join them in the joy of their exploring as they ventured forth and, in the process, traced the tree of life down to its roots.
Notice how Attenborough lands on that final word, “here.” It recurs just over a minute later, as he adds, “It was here on these volcanic islands that Darwin’s doubts and puzzles about the creation of species were reawakened.” By now, Attenborough is on a boat, sailing near the rocky coastline of the Galapagos. With one cut, he has leaped a thousand miles or so—a distance that Darwin took three and a half years to traverse. If Darwin was the messenger from There, filing from afar to Victorian England, Attenborough is the grand master of Here. Television functions, for him, as a looking glass through which we are enticed, the better to savor the strangeness of beings infinitely odder, if more resilient, than Humpty Dumpty.
“The Life of Mammals” (2002) is especially dense in variety, and some of the supporting cast retains an ancient air, with deep evolutionary roots. “Here, in the warm, clear waters of the Florida creeks,” Attenborough, wearing a mask and snorkel, says, while a trio of manatees, as big as bathtubs, browse him with their whiskered snouts. “They’re so completely at home in the water that they never leave it.” As the manatees are to the creek, so Attenborough is to the gaze of the camera: completely at home. Needless to say, such ease has been facilitated, as he would swiftly acknowledge, by the loyalty and resourcefulness of his crew members (one of whom once noted, in return, that, when there were equipment bags to be carried, Attenborough would typically grab the heaviest). Many of his later programs have been capped by a coda in which the tricks of the trade are laid bare—no trick being more vital than that of extreme patience, with camera operators waiting days, or even weeks, for the right cub, or pup, or fledgling, or froglet, to show up.
Beyond the affable urgency of his demeanor, there are other reasons for Attenborough’s unfailing appeal. First, he’s a performer—not an actor, like his brother Richard, but a fine mimic, every bit as amused by the interaction of mortals as he is awed by, say, the dimensions of a blue whale. (“Its heart is the size of a car, and some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” And we know who the swimmer would be.) Second, he has heeded the tune of the times. No one could have striven less to be modish—heaven forbid—yet his work has never slipped out of favor or fashion, and his thrill at technological advances is undimmed. “These days, we have ways of speeding things up, visually,” he told us, in “The Private Life of Plants” (1995). “Condense three months into twenty seconds, and the desolation of winter quickly warms into the riot of spring.” Who but Attenborough could make the results of time-lapse photography sound like a burst of Keats?
In recent years, it is climate change, and its corrosive fallout, with which Attenborough has sought to keep pace. Last year, a documentary, “Ocean with David Attenborough,” was even released in cinemas, though the big screen is hardly his natural habitat. There have been murmurs of complaint against this change of moral emphasis, but it’s really not much of a pivot; Attenborough has always been more of an instinctive storyteller than a preacher, and the fragility of the environment has been built into his rhapsodic vision of it from the start. In 1957, for “Zoo Quest,” he journeyed to Raine Island, off the northeast tip of Australia, and observed the green turtles that habitually, and laboriously, haul themselves up the beaches to lay their eggs in the sand. In 2023, “Planet Earth III,” a BBC series narrated by Attenborough, revealed that temperatures on the island had climbed so alarmingly that ninety-nine per cent of the eggs would hatch as females. Such an imbalance could wipe the turtles out, unless another menace gets there first. In Attenborough’s doom-laden words, “If sea levels rise as predicted, within the next thirty years Raine Island will disappear beneath the waves.”
There can’t be many people who have seen more of the world than Attenborough has, and borne witness to more cycles of creation and destruction. It’s hard to imagine a better way to fill a hundred years. Fundamentally, he is still a kid in shorts, splitting a rock in the hope of finding a fossil. How fitting, then, that a primitive predator from five hundred and sixty million years ago, a fossilized example of which was discovered near where the young David grew up, should have been named Auroralumina attenboroughii in his honor. And what about Ctenocheloides attenboroughi, a living species of ghost shrimp less than an inch long? Will that still be haunting the coast of Madagascar when televisions have been thrown away and forgotten? Who knows, maybe the age of Attenborough is just beginning. ♦