ATTENBOROUGH EDUCATION

1926 Born in 1926, Attenborough is raised in College House on the campus of the University College, Leicester, where his father, Frederick, is principal.

1938 - 45 Educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester.

1945 Wins scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge and studies geology and zoology. Obtains a degree in Natural Sciences.

1947 Attenborough is called up for national service in the Royal Navy and spends two years stationed in North Wales and the Firth of Forth.

1936 Attends a lecture by Archibald Belaney at De Montfort Hall, Leicester, which turns him and his brother Richard onto conservation.

A Transparent Medium

‘The thing about David is he prefers animals to humans,’ says another person who has worked with Attenborough for years. I ask him if the coronavirus situation will accelerate change. Again, he is careful: ‘I don’t know about that. On the one hand, I can see that our skies are emptier now and that’s very welcome. I suppose the extent to which the aviation sector will return will depend on the price points the airlines come up with.’

I suspect that some of his reluctance to be drawn into detailed discussion is that he doesn’t wish to claim undue expertise on areas outside his competence. There’s an admirable discipline at work, alongside a refusal to please.

Bewilderingly honoured – Attenborough has a BAFTA fellowship, a knighthood, a Descartes Prize, among many others – he has learned that the only proper response to fame is self-discipline. At his level of celebrity – up there with prime ministers and presidents but with a greater dose of the public’s love than is usually accorded to either – he is continually invited for comment, and has learned when to demur.

‘I am sometimes asked about the wellknown people I’ve come across in this life – the presidents and the royalty

I’ve been lucky enough to meet,’ he says. ‘I say, “Look, if you saw my documentary with Barack Obama then you know him as well as I do.” Television is very intimate like that. My job is to create transparency.’

So instead of what one half-hopes for –backstage anecdotes at the White House or Buckingham Palace – one returns time and again to the climate crisis. This is the prism through which everything is seen, and our failure to follow his example, he says, shall ultimately be to our shame.

1949 - Early 1960s After leaving the Navy, Attenborough takes a position editing children's science textbooks for a publishing company. He soon becomes disillusioned with the work and in 1950 applies for a job as a radio talk producer with the BBC. Although he is rejected for this job, his CV later attracts the interest of Mary Adams, head of the Talks (factual broadcasting) department of the BBC's fledgling television service. This is his foot in the door.

He will not be drawn into negative comment on Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. Instead, he says: ‘Overall, I’m optimistic. All I can say is we have to encourage our political leaders to do something urgently about the climate situation. We have to all work hard to do something about this.’

The Fruits of Longevity

For Attenborough everything has been boiled down to raw essentials. And yet his career exhibits flexibility: his success must be attributed to open-mindedness about a young medium when others might have thought it beneath them. It would be too much to call him a visionary but he was in the vanguard of those who saw TV’s possibilities. Fascinated by wildlife as a child, he rose to become controller at BBC Two and director of programming at the BBC in the 1960s and 70s. ‘Television didn’t exist when I was a young man, and I have spent my life in a medium I couldn’t have imagined. It has been a wonderful experience,’ he says. The very successful glimpse the shape of the world to come, seize that possibility and enlarge it into something definite, which they then appropriate and live by. What advice does he have for the young starting out? ‘My working life has taken place in television and I don’t know how we will see that change over the coming years as a result of what’s happened. Communication has proliferated into so many forms and it is very difficult to get the single mass audience, which I had something to do with creating, thirty or forty years ago.’ than

Early 1960s Attenborough resigns 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. Accepts an invitation to return to the BBC as controller of BBC Two before he can finish the degree.

1984 Receives honorary Doctor of Science award from University of Oxford. Other doctorates include Doctor of Science at the University of Oxford (1988), and Distinguished Honorary Fellow of the University of Leicester (2006).

There is an element of well-deserved pride about this: Attenborough’s original commissions at BBC2 –everything from Match of the Day to Call My Bluff and Monty Python’s Flying Circus – were so wide-ranging that one can almost convince oneself that he was a BBC man first and an ecologist second: ‘The world has become very divided in a way,’ he continues. ‘It’s sometimes said that we prepare for a world when we’re young that’s gone by the time we arrive in it.

2010 Attenborough is awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan and Nottingham Trent University.

2020 It is announced after the outbreak of coronavirus that Attenborough will teach geography as part of a BBC education initiative.

To that I say, ‘It depends what your life expectancy is!’

But all along it was nature that thrilled and animated him. Attenborough is one of those high achievers who compound success with longevity. His is a voice that speaks to us out of superior experience – he has seen more of the planet than any of us. He speaks with a rare authority at the very edge of doom – his own personal decline, as well as the planet’s.

Urgent Warnings

He says: ‘Whatever young people choose to do with their life they must remember that they’re a part of life on this planet and we have a responsibility to those who will come after us to take care of it.’

I ask him what we should be doing to amend our lives and again he offers a simple thought: ‘We’ve all got to look to our consciences. Inevitably, some will do more than others.’

He sounds at such times very close to washing his hands of the human race. But then everyone in their nineties is inevitably about to do just that.

What Attenborough has achieved seems so considerable that one wishes to ask him how he has managed it. ‘I am sometimes asked about how I manage to do so much, but I don’t particularly think of it like that. I just reply to the requests that come my way: you can accomplish a lot by just doing one thing after the other.’

Again, the simplicity of the answer has a certain bare poetry to it: Attenborough is reminding us that life is as simple as we want to make it. Interviewing him at this stage in his life is like reading a novel by Muriel Spark: no adjectives, no frills, just the plain truth.

In his curtness is a lesson: there is no time for him now for delay, but then nor should there be for us. We must do our bit – and not tomorrow, now.

He is interested in Finito World and very supportive of our new endeavour: ‘This is a time when the circulations of magazines and newspapers appear to be falling. A lot of newspapers are aware of the climate emergency and the way in which we disseminate ideas has diversified.’

A thought occurs to me that stems from my lockdown time with my son, where we have been in our gardens like never before. Should gardening take its place on the national curriculum? ‘It’s obviously very important,’ he says, although he also adds – as he does frequently during our conversation – that he knows little about the topic. (Opposite, we have looked into the matter for him.)

Hello, Goodbye

I will not forget this interview with a man whose voice will always be with us. Part of Attenborough's power is that he continues to warn us in spite of ourselves: he deems us sufficiently worthwhile to continually renew his energy on our behalf.

I mention that we watch his programmes with our four-year-old in preference to the usual cartoons on Netflix when possible.

At that point, perhaps due to the mention of my young son, he sounds warm: ‘Thank you very much, sir. It does mean a lot when people say that.’

It’s a mantra in journalism not to meet your heroes. Attenborough in extreme old age is brisk and sometimes even monosyllabic. This in itself tells you something: the world is full of the canonised but in reality saints are rare. Conversely, I have met those whose reputations could hardly have been lower, but who turned out to be generous beyond expectation. We should never be disappointed when the world isn’t as it has been portrayed: it is an aspect of the richness of experience to meet continually with surprise.

But age will come to us all and if it finds me in half as fine fettle as David Attenborough I shall be lucky indeed. Furthermore, if it finds me on a habitable planet at all that shall also be something I shall owe in part to him. ‘Good luck,’ he says as he puts the phone down and though this isn’t the man I expected to meet, I can just about persuade myself that he means it.

‘David prefers animals to humans’. Afterwards, it occurs to me that I have been all along not so much an individual, but a dim representative of that foolish ape: man. I wonder if, while Attenborough has been acquiring hundreds of millions of viewers, what he really wanted – and urgently required – was listeners.