Still a legend: David Attenborough at 90

He has a dinosaur and an echidna named after him, is the most travelled man on the planet and, as he turns 90, Sir David Attenborough has no intention of slowing down. William Langley is beguiled by Britain’s most popular TV star.

AFTER A LATE night, an early morning and a long day, Sir David Attenborough is hitting his stride. Half-man, half-teddy bear, the venerable broadcaster remains a bundle of curiosity and wonder, his enthusiasm for the natural world undiminished by all that he has seen and done.

Early this month, he turned 90. The Queen beat him to it by a couple of weeks and he appears grateful to have had his thunder stolen. Munching ruefully on a custard cream biscuit, he tells me there are “absolutely no advantages” to growing old. Wisdom? Experience? “Humph,” he says. “Depends on what you do with them. Believe me, it is far better to be young.”

Sir David’s way around the age problem is to keep working as hard as he can, in the belief that his work has a value to the planet he cherishes and fears for. “It’s never been more important,” he says, “because we are rapidly wrecking the world we are dependent upon and if we are ever going to start caring for it, people need to change their behaviour. One way we can encourage them to do that is show them how nature works. And that’s what television can do.”

It is tempting to see a deeper element in his determination to stay busy. His beloved wife, Jane, whom he met when they were both university students in the 1940s, died 19 years ago after collapsing with a brain haemorrhage. David was lming in New Zealand and ew straight home to nd her alive, but in a coma. The doctors suggested she might recognise him if he spoke to her and held her hand.

In his memoir, Life On Air, he wrote, “She did and gave my hand a squeeze.” He stayed by her side until she died the next morning. “The focus of my life, the anchor, was gone ... now I was lost.”

Sir David still lives in the beautiful Edwardian house they shared in south-west London and admits that avoiding loneliness may be part of what keeps him going.

“Perhaps I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but, look, putting your feet up may be ne for some people, but for me it would simply be boring. What would I actually do moping around the house all day?” He says Jane’s presence is always with him and he has never thought of moving out.

“It is very much her house, too, and I find that comforting. These things are important.”

The house once featured a minimenagerie, with gibbons, snakes, hummingbirds, chameleons and a colony of bush babies, collected on David’s travels, but the animals have gone and life at home is quieter now.

“It’s perfectly okay,” he says. “I’m not alone. My daughter [Susan, a retired schoolteacher] lives with me, and people come to see us and, anyway, I’m out and about doing things most of the time.”

Sir David is estimated to be the most travelled human in history. To film the 1998 The Life Of Birds series alone, he notched up 420,000 kilometres of air travel and has been criss-crossing continents at a barely less prodigious pace for more than half a century. Today, he confides glumly, his doctors want him to ration long-haul flights.

“It’s depressing, but I don’t want to tempt providence, so it may be that I won’t get back to Australia again.”

His three-part series on the Great Barrier Reef, screened in Australia earlier this year, came almost 60 years after his first visit to the reef in 1957. “The rise of human development in Australia since then is astonishing,” he says, “but that is manageable, as long as people look after the place.”

Astonishing, too, has been the rise to global stardom of this cherubic-faced, one-time schoolboy newt collector, who joined the BBC in the early 1950s to escape a dull job in publishing. Today, there is a giant dinosaur named after him – the 160 million-year-old Attenborosaurus – along with an echidna, the Zaglossus attenboroughi, from the rainforests of New Guinea, and an entire genus of Ecuadorean mountain flowers. He has more university doctorates than anyone else alive, receives hundreds of fan letters a week and is shown in polls to be second only to the Queen as Britain’s most admired figure.

When I ask if he enjoys the fame, however, the first hint of a squall crosses the benign countenance. “I wouldn’t have thought so,” he huffs. “What is there to enjoy about it? You can’t misbehave, for a start. I think a lot of the problems we have in society arise from the worship of fame. I’ve never craved it and I don’t think it has been particularly important in my life. Fame, in any case, fades very quickly. I’m appalled to think that my own conservationist heroes, people like Peter Scott and Hans Hass, the Austrian underwater explorer, are barely remembered now. I expect I will be forgotten in the same way.”

David was born not far from where he is now sitting, in a genteel suburb beside the River Thames, but he grew up on the campus of the University of Leicester, where his father, Frederick, was the Principal.

It was a happy, adventurous childhood, filled with the kind of freedoms that have largely vanished from modern family life.

When he was 13, David set off alone on his bicycle to the Lake District in northern England to look for fossils. The trip took three weeks and his parents had no idea where he was. “I doubt if many children would be allowed to do that now,” he says.

He sold newts for a few pennies a time to the university’s Zoology Department and used the money to fund his growing passion for the living world. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have that passion,” he says. “I think it is common to all children, but sometimes when we grow up, we lose it and in doing so we lose something precious. I’m very fortunate that I have retained mine.”

The Attenboroughs were a highachieving bunch. Frederick wrote a heavyweight work on medieval law; his wife, Mary, co-founded Britain’s Marriage Guidance Council; Richard, their eldest son, went on to become an Oscar-winning film director and actor; and their youngest, John, was a successful businessman in the motor industry. Yet David could easily have been lost to anonymity. After leaving Cambridge University, he took a lowly editing job at a publishing company.

“It was fantastically boring,” he says. “Basically, I sat at a desk and moved commas around, and waited for the day to end.”

Had he stuck at it, he might have risen to have a respectable career in the book world, but the grind weighed upon him and, one day, he spotted an advertisement for a job as a radio producer at the BBC.

He didn’t get it, but made enough of an impression for the BBC to call him back and invite him to train for its fledgling TV service. In 1952, a time when only 14 per cent of British households even owned a TV, he became a junior employee and remains – in the best sense – a living fossil, left over from the days when BBC chaps spoke in fruity, clubroom voices and wore dinner jackets to read the news.

At first, David was discouraged from appearing on screen, on the bizarre grounds that his teeth were too big, but when the presenter of Zoo Quest, an early travelling wildlife show, fell ill, David took over. He was soon proving his mettle. “It is important to grab the python’s tail at the same time as the head,” he intoned from the depths of the Indonesian jungle. “Or he’ll wrap his coils around you and give you a very nasty squeeze.”

All that experience continues to come in useful. The previous evening, at the recording of a starstudded tribute to his career, a man had emerged from the wings and draped an enormous, writhing snake around David’s neck. The stage guests recoiled and a shudder ran through the audience, but David was instantly in his element. “Ah, a Burmese python,” he murmured, “a beautiful thing ... ”, and for a moment he was quietly lost in pleasure.

He says he has never been frightened by a wild animal (“It’s only humans that scare me”) and that it isn’t difficult to know when a creature accepts or resents your presence. He isn’t keen on rats, though, and wouldn’t like

“What is there to enjoy about fame? You can’t misbehave, for a start.”

to meet a king cobra, but would definitely fancy an underwater encounter with a giant squid.

The fear element, David suspects, comes from our increasing detachment from nature. “Over 50 per cent of the world’s population is now urbanised,” he says, “which means that fewer and fewer of us have any real connection with the natural world, certainly in the way that, say, my great-grandfather, who worked in the fields and lived according to the seasons, had that connection. Yet, here’s the paradox: we actually know far more about the natural world than we ever have before and that is something television can take credit for.”

Despite our worst efforts, the world, he says, “is still unimaginably varied … beyond comprehension and certainly full of enough things to see me out.”

Ever quick to enthuse, he tells me of his next program, Light On Earth, about bioluminescence, the natural light created by creatures such as fire-flies, deep-sea fish and glow worms, the footage for which, he promises, will be “mind-blowing”.

There are occasionally suggestions that the BBC, much as it treasures the Attenborough brand, would secretly like him to set an end date. The worry being that he will try to carry on for longer than he should and that no one will be brave enough to tell him to stop. Meanwhile, in the best evolutionary tradition, he simply adapts to changing conditions.

He claims that being 90 “feels no different to being 80” and to sit in his wise, sparkling, if occasionally gruff presence is to be astonished by his bounce and mental energy. He now has two artificial knees, which he says have a made a huge difference to his mobility.

“When I see film of myself from eight or nine years ago,” he says, “I can’t believe that crooked old bloke hobbling around the place is actually me. I get around far better these days.”

He has also had a pacemaker fitted, not because his heart is in a particularly bad shape, but because his insurers refused to let him take off on the Great Barrier Reef project without one.

“They said they wouldn’t insure me to go on a long flight unless I had something to monitor my heart to make sure it didn’t do funny things,” he explained recently. “So they give you this thing, it’s called a pacemaker. And all it does, if your heart suddenly decides it’s going to skip a beat or something, it kicks in. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. And I don’t think it has.”

David doesn’t pay much attention to landmarks and says his first thought was to spend his 90th birthday “hiding under the bed”, but eventually settled for a family dinner at home.

I ask if he has exchanged notes on being 90 with the Queen (whose Christmas broadcasts he used to produce), but he dodges the question with a smile and diplomatically offers the view that “the Queen is ageless”.

He wants to carry on because the natural world needs all the help it can get. And while he tries not to be a doom-monger, he fears our chances of saving the planet are slipping away.

“Well, you can’t say, ‘It’s already too late’, because what would that mean? That you sit back and do nothing? We can’t stop sea levels rising and we probably can’t stop many species of animals from becoming extinct.

“The natural world is going to be hit very hard, unfortunately. Yet there are obvious things we can do, like reducing carbons and finding cleaner energy sources, and cutting down on waste.

“Life on earth has never been a bed of roses,” he concludes. “Human beings are highly adaptable and I hope we will find solutions.

“It is certainly our duty to look for them. I don’t want my grandchildren to think I knew what was happening and did nothing to stop it.”

“I don’t want my grandchildren to think I did nothing to stop it.”