DAVID FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH, THE VOICE OF THE BBC

Sir David Attenborough

Today, The Grandma is in Barcelona again. After spending some amazing weeks in Tuscany, she wants to relax and return to her normal life of readings and leisure.

She wants to celebrate the 93th anniversary of Sir David Attenborough, a legend as a broadcaster at the BBC and one of the most famous natural historians. The Grandma loves Attenborough's works and she wants to homage them talking about their creator and director.

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 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.

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 poll for the BBC. He is the younger brother of the director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough, and older brother of the motor executive John Attenborough.

Sir David Attenborough

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. 

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 Europe. 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'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.

More information: BBC

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.

Sir David Attenborough

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.

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.

More information: Vox

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.

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.

Sir David Attenborough

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. Eventually the BBC signed a co-production deal with Turner Broadcasting and Life on Earth moved into production in 1976.

More information: The Guardian

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.

Sir David Attenborough

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, The Private Life of Plants (1995), showed plants as dynamic organisms by using time-lapse photography to speed up their growth.

More information: Time

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 Peabody Award the following year. The order of the remaining Life series was dictated by developments in camera technology.

Sir David Attenborough

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.

More information: Spiegel

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.

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. 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.

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.

Sir David Attenborough

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. 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.

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.

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.

More information: World Economic Forum

It seems to me that the natural world is 

the greatest source of excitement; 

the greatest source of visual beauty; 

the greatest source of intellectual interest. 

It is the greatest source of so much in life

that makes life worth living.

David Attenborough