David Attenborough

At 97 years old, David Attenborough has this physical status:

Sir David Frederick Attenborough (born 8 May 1926) 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 that together form a comprehensive study of plant and animal life on Earth.

He has served as the BBC Two's controller and director of BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s.

He is the only person to have won BAFTA awards for programmes in any of black and white, colour, HD, 3D, and 4K.

He received Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Narrator in 2018 and 2019, although he does not like the term.

Following a national survey for the BBC, he was named one of the 100 Greatest Britons in 2002.

He is the younger brother of the director, producer, and actor Richard Attenborough, Baron Attenborough, as well as the older brother of motor executive John Attenborough.

Life and family

Attenborough was born in Isleworth, Middlesex, on May 8th, 1926, and he grew up in College House on the University of Leicester's campus, where his father, Frederick, was principal. He is the middle of three sons; Richard (died in 2014) became an actor and director, and his younger brother, John (died in 2012), was an executive at Italian automaker Alfa Romeo. His parents fostered two Jewish refugee children from Germany during the Second World War, through the Refugee Children's Movement in the United Kingdom.

Attenborough spent his childhood collecting fossils, stones, and natural specimens. As a boy Jacquetta Hawkes adored his collection, he was encouraged. He spent a long time in the university's grounds. Around 11, he discovered that the zoology department needed a large supply of newts, which he supplied to supply for 3d each. The source, who did not reveal it at the time, was a pond right next to the department. Marianne, his adoptive brother, gave him a piece of amber that contained prehistoric animals a year later; sixty years later, it would be the focus of his program The Amber Time Machine.

Attenborough and his brother Richard attended a Grey Owl (Archibald Belaney) lecture at De Montfort Hall, Leicester, in 1936, and were inspired by his conservation activism. According to Richard, David was "bowled over by the man's insistence on saving the beaver, as well as his warnings of environmental disaster in case the fragile balance between them be destroyed. Humans were endangering nature by recklessly despoiling and plundering its riches, but it is one that has remained a part of Dave's personal credo to this day." Richard produced Grey Owl, a Belaney biopic.

Attenborough was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester. In 1945, he received a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, to study geology and zoology, earning a degree in natural sciences. He was called up for national service in the Royal Navy in 1947 and spent two years in North Wales and the Firth of Forth. Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel was married in 1950 by Attenborough. Robert and Susan, the couple's two children, had two children. Jane was born in 1997. Robert is a senior lecturer in bioanthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Susan is a former headmistress of a primary school.

In June 2013, Attenborough received a pacemaker as well as a a double knee replacement in 2015. "If I was earning my money by hewing coal, I would be very happy to stop." However, I'm not. I'm swanning around the world looking at the most fascinating things. Such good fortune.

Source

Career

Attenborough, who left the Navy, took on the challenge of editing children's science textbooks for a publishing house. He soon became dissatisfied with the work and applied for a radio talk show producer with the BBC in 1950. Despite being turned down for this career, Mary Adams' CV caught the attention of the BBC's fledgling television service's Talks (factual broadcasting) department. Attenborough, like many Britons at the time, did not have a television and had only watched one show in his life. However, he accepted Adams' three-month apprenticeship course, and in 1952, he joined the BBC full time. Adams was initially refused to appear on camera because his teeth were too wide, so he became a producer for the Talks department, which handled all non-fiction broadcasts. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? was one of his early projects. Alan Lomax's collection Song Hunter, a collection of folk songs.

When Attenborough created and presented the three-part series Animal Patterns, he began his involvement with natural history programs. Animals from London Zoo were on display in the studio, with naturalist Julian Huxley discussing their use of camouflage, aposematism, and courtship exhibits. Attenborough met Jack Lester, curator of the zoo's reptile house, and they decided to create a series about an animal-collecting expedition through this program. The result was Zoo Quest, the first television show in 1954, where Attenborough was the presenter on short notice due to Lester's sickness.

The BBC Natural History Unit was first established in Bristol in 1957. Attenborough was invited to participate in the event but declined, not wanting to move from London, where he and his young family were settled. Rather, he formed the Travel and Exploration Unit, which allowed him to sit front row on Zoo Quest as well as other documentaries, including the Traveller's Tales and Adventure series. Attenborough resigned from permanent service of the BBC in the early 1960s to study for a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, interweaving his research with further filming. However, he accepted an invitation to return to BBC Two as the programme's controller before he could complete the course.

In March 1965, Attenborough became the Controller of BBC 2, replacing Michael Peacock. He had a clause in his deal that would allow him to continue making programmes on a regular basis. In the following year, he film elephants in Tanzania, and in 1969, he created a three-part series on the cultural heritage of the Indonesian island of Bali. He was a member of A Blank on the Map, 1971, and he was the first Western explorer to a remote highland valley in New Guinea to seek out a lost tribe.

BBC Two was launched in 1964, but it had failed to capture the public's imagination. When Attenborough took over as controller, he quickly shook up the channel's quirky kangaroo mascot and ended the line. He started off on a quest to make BBC Two's output unique and different from that offered by other networks, and he began to develop a library of programs that would have influenced the channel's identity for decades to come. Music, the arts, entertainment, archaeology, experimental comedy, travel, drama, sport, science, and natural history have all found a place in the weekly schedules under their tenure. Often, an eclectic collection was presented in a single evening's viewing. Man Alive, Call My Bluff, Chronicle, Match of the Day, Match of the Day, The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and The Money Programme were among the programs he commissioned. Attenborough brought snooker to the BBC to show the benefits of the format, since the sport uses colored balls. Pot Black, a theatrical performance, was later credited with the sport's revival in the 1980s.

One of his most memorable decisions was to order a 13-part series on Western art to highlight the quality of the BBC Two's latest UHF color television service. Civilization, which were more commonly known as "sledgehammer" projects, were praised to universal acclaim in 1969. Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (also sponsored by Attenborough), and Alistair Cooke's America followed suit. Attenborough felt that the tale of evolution would be a natural subject for such a tale. Christopher Parsons, a producer at the Natural History Unit, opened Life on Earth and returned to Bristol to start planning the series, sharing his idea with him. Attenborough had a keen desire to appear in the series himself, but it would not be possible as long as he remained in a management role.

Attenborough turned down Terry Wogan's offer to be a host on the channel because there were no open positions, despite being in possession of BBC Two. "To have two Irishmen presenting on BBC Two would have been ridiculous," Attenborough said in 2016. This is in no way an analysis of Terry Wogan's abilities. Attenborough has also admitted that during this period he authorised television production wiping to reduce costs, including a series by Alan Bennett that he later regretted. Attenborough was promoted to director of programs in 1969, making him responsible for the output of both BBC channels. His responsibilities, which included deciding on budgets, attending board meetings, and firing employees, had been long removed from filming operations. When Attenborough was being considered a candidate for the post of Director-General of the BBC in 1972, he called his brother Richard to admit that he had no desire for the position. Early next year, he converted his blog to full-time programming, leaving him free to write and present the awaited natural history epic.

Attenborough resigned as a journalist and began working on his next project, a trip to Indonesia with a team from the Natural History Unit, after his departure. It resulted in the production of the 1973 film Eastwards, which was similar in tone to earlier Zoo Quest; the main difference was the introduction of colour. Attenborough said he wanted to work in Asia because previous nature documentaries had mostly concentrated on Africa. Attenborough was invited to speak at the Royal Institution's Christmas Lecture on Animal Languages this year. He began to work on Life on Earth's scripts after his time as an Eastwards with Attenborough. Due to the size of his ambition, the BBC decided to partner with an American network in order to obtain the necessary funding. When the talks were ongoing, he worked on a variety of other television shows. He created a series on tribal art (The Tribal Eye, 1975) and another on the voyages of discovery (The Explorers, 1975). Fabulous Animals (1975), a BBC children's series about cryptozoology, also included mythical animals such as mermaids and unicorns. In 1976, the BBC and Life on Earth went into production in a co-production agreement.

Attenborough, who began with Life on Earth in 1979, set about creating a body of work that would be a benchmark of excellence in wildlife filmmaking, and inspired a generation of documentary film-makers. Many of the BBC's natural history series's key elements were introduced in the series. Attenborough and his production staff gained scientists' confidence by treating his subject deeply and examining the latest findings, who responded by encouraging him to include their subjects in their productions. Innovation was also a factor in Life on Earth's success: new film-making techniques were invented to get the shots Attenborough wanted, with a focus on events and animals that weren't yet unfilmed. The series was able to be produced by international air travel so that Attenborough explored many locations around the world in each episode, with some even changing continents in a sequence. Despite being on-screen host, he limited his time on camera to ensure more time to his subjects.

The Living Planet, five years after Life on Earth's triumph, was released by the BBC. Attenborough created his series around the subject of ecology, or the adaptations of living things to their environment. It was another critical and commercial success, with the BBC generating significant international sales. The Trials of Life, a 1990 publication by The Trials of Life, explored animal behavior through life's various stages.

Attenborough continued to use the word "Life" for a number of written documentaries in the 1990s. He hosted Life in the Freezer, Antarctica's first television series to investigate Antarctica's natural history. Despite being past retirement age, he began working on a number of more specialized studies of the natural world, beginning with plants. They were a difficult sell for his designers, who had to produce hours of television containing what amounts to immobile objects. The result was The Private Life of Plants (1995), which showed plants as living organisms by using time-lapse photography to accelerate their expansion, and went on to receive a Peabody Award.

Attenborough, England, was first prompted by an enthusiastic ornithologist at the BBC Natural History Unit, and he later switched to birds. He was neither an birdwatcher nor a bird expert, so he felt he was more qualified to make The Life of Birds (1998), which was based on behavior. The documentary series was nominated for a second Peabody Award the following year. The sequence of the remaining "Life" series was dictated by advances in camera technology. To discover nocturnal mammals' behavior, The Life of Mammals (2002) featured low-light and infrared cameras. The series includes a series of memorable two shots of Attenborough and his subjects, including chimpanzees, a blue whale, and a grizzly bear. For the first time, advances in macro photography enabled the capture of very small animals' natural behavior, and Life in the Undergrowth introduced audiences to the world of invertebrates in 2005.

Attenborough realized that he had been unconsciously assembling a series of terrestrial animal and plant species, but only reptiles and amphibians were missing. When Life in Cold Blood was broadcast in 2008, he enjoyed the challenge of completing the task, which was brought together in a DVD encyclopedia titled Life on Land. "The evolutionary history is over," He said. The project is ongoing. I'd have said 'Don't be ridiculous!' if you asked me 20 years ago if we'd be taking on such a mammoth challenge.' These programs tell a particular tale, and I'm sure some will come along and talk 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, Attenborough said in 2010 that his First Life – dealing with evolutionary history before Life on Earth – should be included in the "Life" series. "This series, to a degree that I didn't fully appreciate before I started working on it," Attenborough wrote in Attenborough's Journey.

Attenborough continued to work on other television documentaries, mainly in the natural history genre, alongside the "Life" series. In 1987, he wrote and published a book on man's influence on the Mediterranean Basin's natural history. The First Eden was founded by a man. In Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives, two years later, he displayed his passion for fossils. He appeared on the BBC's Prisoners of Conscience series in 1990, where he emphasized Mahjoub Sharif's case. Every episode of Wildlife on One, a BBC One wildlife drama that aired from 1977 to 2005, was narrated by Attenborough. The show "Meerkats United" broadcast in 1987 was voted the best wildlife documentary of all time by BBC viewers at its peak. Over 50 episodes of Natural World, BBC Two's flagship wildlife series, have been narrated. Its forerunner, The World About Us, was launched in 1969 as a way of advancing color television. He narrated the BBC Wildlife Specials in 1997, each focusing on a charismatic species, and screened to celebrate the Natural History Unit's 40th anniversary.

In the new millennium, Attenborough, both a writer and narrator, began to work with the BBC Natural History Unit as a writer and narrator. Alastair Fothergill, a senior producer for Attenborough on The Trials of Life and Life in the Freezer, was producing The Blue Planet (2001), the Unit's first comprehensive compilation of marine life. He decided not to use an on-screen presenter due to issues with speaking to a camera through a diving device, but Attenborough was narrating the films. Both teams reunited on Earth (2006), the first fully rendered nature documentary ever shot on 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 focusing on extraordinary animal behavior, and narrated Nature's Great Events, which showed how seasonal changes lead to major natural spectacles. The BBC commissioned Attenborough to produce a series of 20 ten-minute monologues on the history of nature in January 2009. They were broadcast on Radio 4 on Friday nights as titled David Attenborough's Life Stories.

Attenborough played a greater part in Frozen Planet in 2011, a major series on the natural history of the polar regions; Attenborough appeared on screen and wrote the final episode, in addition to doing voiceover duties. Attenborough introduced and narrated the unit's first 4K production Life Story. Attenborough performed as the narrator and host for Planet Earth II (2016), with Hans Zimmer's main theme tune.

As part of a series of new natural history programs, the corporation revealed a trio of new one-off Attenborough documentaries in October 2014. On BBC Two and "Waking Giants," which followed the finding of massive dinosaur bones in South America, was shown on BBC Two and "Attenborough's Big Birds." Atlantic Productions was also contracted by the BBC to produce a three-part, Attenborough-fronted series Great Barrier Reef in 2015. This was the 10th project for Attenborough and Atlantic, with him returning to a location he first filmed in 1957. Attenborough has continued to appear on radio as one of BBC Radio 4's Tweet of the Day's Tweet of the Day's Tweet of the Day's, which began as one of the host's on radio, beginning in September 2014. Attenborough formed a partnership with Sky, working on documentaries for the BBC's new 3D network, Sky 3D. Flying Monsters 3D, a film about pterosaurs that premiered on Christmas Day of 2010. A year later, The Penguin King 3D, a sequel, was released. Conquest of the Skies, the BAFTA award-winning Natural History Museum Alive's next 3D exhibition, aired on Sky 3D during Christmas 2014.

For UKTV channel Watch, Attenborough has narrated three series of David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities, with the third series premiering in 2015. He has also narrated A magnificent commemoration: Wild Karnataka, India's first blue-chip natural history film, starring Kalyan Varma and Amoghavarsha. In 2017, Blue Planet II was a television show, with Attenborough as the presenter. The film was critically acclaimed and attracted the most avid audience in the United Kingdom for 2017 at 14.1 million. Plastic pollution's long-term popularity has been reported, as demonstrated by the series, in newspapers, television, and political interest. The 2018 five-part series Dynasties was narrated by Attenborough, with each episode focusing on one species in particular. In 2021, he presented Attenborough's Life in Colour and The Mating Game, a five-part series.

With Dinosaurs, Attenborough returned to prehistoric life: The Final Day and Prehistoric Planet aired in April and May 2022 respectively.

Attenborough's published documentaries were taking a more overtly environmentalist approach by the end of the millennium. In State of the Planet (2000), he used the most recent scientific findings and interviews with leading scientists and conservationists to determine the effects of human activities on the planet. He later turned to global warming (The Truth About Climate Change, 2006), and human population growth (How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth, 2009). In 2007, the Natural History Unit's 50th anniversary of the Natural History Unit, he developed a programme that highlighted the plight of endangered species to the BBC's Saving Planet Earth project.

Attenborough narrated Our Planet, an eight-part documentary film for Netflix in 2019. This series, in contrast to most of his previous work for the BBC, emphasizes the damaging role of human life in the series. He would often note issues in a final section of the report before. Wild Karnataka, a documentary about the Karnataka forest area, was also narrated by him. Climate Change, Attenborough's one-off film documentary about climate change for BBC One launched in 2019; the documentary's tone was much darker than previous BBC One document's. Extinction: The Truth, which is partially based on the 2019 IPBES study on biodiversity decline, is based on Extinction: The Truth, which is partially based on the 2019 IPBES' report on biodiversity decline.

David Attenborough narrated The Life on Our Planet in 2020. Attenborough's testimony film tells about his career as a naturalist and his aspirations for the future. It was announced on Netflix on October 4, 2020. The documentary titled Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet, which was released on June 20,2021, is the latest in Netflix's further work. For The Green Planet, Attenborough began filming in Cambridge in October 2020. Attenborough narrated A Perfect Planet, a five-part earth science film for BBC One in 2021.

Attenborough was a key figure in the build-up to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), and he delivered a speech at the inaugural ceremony. In his address, he said that humans were "the greatest problem solvers to have ever existed on Earth" and expressed his hope for the future, concluding by saying, "I've witnessed a devastating decline in my lifetime." You could and should enjoy a wonderful recovery in yours.

Attenborough was named a Champion of the Earth in 2022 by the United Nations Environment Programme for his contributions to science, documentation, and advocacy for nature's preservation and restoration."

Source