Missing out on family time has been hard to bear says Sir David
He said: “Well, there used to be family jokes. You know, ‘You were never there. You don’t remember that, Father, do you, because you weren’t there.’
“But you can’t have it all, can you? I damned near did.”
Asked if he had any plans to stop working, he explained: “No, I don’t – except to keep doing what I want to do. And if people ask, well, it’s perfectly simple: If I wanted to put my feet up and sit in the corner and slobber, then I could.
“But I mean, who wouldn’t be grateful for people coming up and saying, ‘Would you like to go to Trinidad?’ I say, ‘Yes, what will it cost?’ ‘No, no,’ they reply, ‘we’ll pay you!’ Really? Lucky old me.”
Sir David said his appeal is down to putting the animals and the wildlife in the spotlight. “My stock in trade is appreciated by kids of seven and professors of 70 and everything in between,” he said.
“All I have to do is not get in between the animal and the camera too often.”
He also revealed he thinks about his mortality “all the time”, adding: “Well, you’ve got no choice. But I mean, you don’t think about that when you’re 30.”
Asked if we needed to worry about global warming, he said: “We should be very, very worried about it. And it’s not just one species, it’s whole ecosystems that are going west.
“If you just look at the oceans, an awful lot of changes are taking place.
“Coral reefs are disappearing and about half the world’s fish, at some stage or another, live or depend on the coral reef.”
But he added: “I’m not saying that the oceans are going to become barren overnight Sir David travelled the world for his famous wildlife shows but humanity is becoming more and more dependent upon the seas for food.
“The land is being scorched, deserts are spreading and the seas are warming – all those factors cause great changes in our fortunes, and will do.”
He added: “Population, of course, lies at the base of a lot of our problems.
“Why are all these people coming across to Europe at the moment? Partly it’s political problems, that’s perfectly true, but also because living is very, very hard.”