Sir David Attenborough Turns 100 Just Weeks After The Queen’s Centenary
Sir David Attenborough turns 100 this Friday, May 8. A whole century of that voice telling us why the planet is worth fighting for, why a beetle is fascinating, why we should care what happens to a coral reef thousands of kilometres from our living rooms.
It is a strange thing to sit with, because Queen Elizabeth II would have just turned 100 herself, on April 21. The two of them were born in the same year, only weeks apart, and shared the kind of shorthand that comes from being shaped by the same long stretch of history.
Their easy rapport was real, and it gave us one of the loveliest hours of British television in years.
The palace garden moment we keep going back to
The Queen’s Green Planet aired on ITV on April 16, 2018. It followed Sir David and Her Majesty as they walked the gardens of Buckingham Palace, talking about trees, sunlight and the Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy initiative. They bantered. She pointed to a tree and gave him its history. He marvelled.
There is a famous moment about a sundial that still makes people grin. It was two of the most famous people on the planet acting like two old mates with a shared interest in horticulture, and it was, frankly, perfect.
Watching it again now, knowing she would be gone within four years, it lands a little differently. Two centenarians-in-waiting, both born in 1926, both still working into their nineties, both with that same dry British humour. You don’t get scenes like that twice.
A career that outlived a few formats
Sir David started at the BBC in 1952. He launched the modern nature documentary with Life On Earth in 1979, was knighted in 1985, and earned the Order of Merit in 2005. Across more than seven decades, he has presented or narrated dozens of landmark series, from The Blue Planet to Planet Earth to Frozen Planet to his most recent feature, Ocean, released around his 99th birthday last year.
He is the only person to have won BAFTAs for programs in black and white, colour, HD, 3D and 4K. The technology kept changing. He kept going.
The quieter reason we love him at DNA
What we love about Sir David is harder to put into a stat. He has spent his life pointing a camera at every corner of the wild, and what he has shown us is that nature is extravagant. Penguins pair up in same-sex couples and raise chicks together. Bonobos do everything with everyone.
Male giraffes neck each other in ways that have very little to do with rivalry. He has never edited any of that out. He has shown the full picture, with the same calm wonder.
You could argue that simply telling the truth about how life on Earth actually behaves is its own quiet form of inclusion. He has reminded a lot of viewers, over a lot of years, that the natural world does not come in one model. That feels worth saying as he hits the century mark.
To Sir David, then
A hundred years. A voice that has lived in our heads since we were kids on the floor in front of the telly. A man who walked through a palace garden with a queen and made it look like the most ordinary thing in the world.
Many happy returns, Sir David. Save us a slice.
