Life on Earth: Sir David Attenborough at 100
This week marks the 100th birthday of someone who, for many of us, has been a constant presence throughout our entire lives. Sir David Attenborough is not merely a broadcaster. He is a trusted companion, a teacher, a witness to both the splendour and the fragility of the natural world. Grandparents watched him in black and white. We watched him in colour in the 1970s. Children today stream him on their phones. And somehow, through every technological revolution, the essential magic has remained unchanged.
I wanted to mark the occasion by focusing on one particular achievement, the landmark 1979 series Life on Earth, which featured prominently in my own 70s TV childhood and changed natural history filmmaking forever.
David Attenborough was born in 1926 in Leicester, and from an early age displayed the curiosity that would define his life. He collected fossils, explored, observed, and asked questions. After serving in the Royal Navy and studying natural sciences at Cambridge, he joined the BBC in the early 1950s, initially as a producer, before stepping in front of the camera for Zoo Quest almost by accident when the regular presenter fell ill. Britain discovered David Attenborough, and television was never quite the same again.
What surprises many people is that before he became the world’s most beloved natural history broadcaster, he was one of the BBC’s most powerful executives, serving as controller of BBC Two and then controller of programming for both channels. He helped champion colour television and backed ambitious arts programming. He helped shape modern British television itself. But the obvious truth remained: he belonged in the field.
The ambition behind Life on Earth was almost absurd. To tell the entire story of evolution in a single television series, filming across the planet over three years, before lightweight digital equipment, before drones, before satellite communications. Film stock was expensive. Cameras were heavy. Crews often had no way of checking footage until it was developed back home. It required extraordinary skill, experience, and nerves of steel.
The series produced some of the most memorable television I can recall from my childhood. Above all, the sequence with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, Attenborough sitting quietly amongst them, a young gorilla playing gently beside him. At a time when popular culture still portrayed gorillas as monstrous, here was something completely different. Gentleness, family bonds, playfulness. Not monsters at all, but something closer to distant relatives.
Life on Earth arrived in 1979 into a Britain that was economically troubled and politically tense. Into that uncertain atmosphere came this extraordinary journey through our shared evolution, reminding viewers they belonged to something vastly larger than the daily headlines. I remember my parents getting the coffee table book the following Christmas. It sat on our coffee table for years.
At 100 years old, Sir David Attenborough remains one of the great communicators in British cultural history. That same curiosity shown by a boy collecting fossils in Leicester nearly a century ago has changed the world and the way it sees itself.
Happy 100th birthday, Sir David, and thank you.
Do you have memories of Life on Earth or Sir David Attenborough? I’d love to hear from you, so leave a comment below or join the conversation in our Facebook group. And if you’d like to get your hands on our My 70s TV Childhood theme tune quiz game, add your name to the waitlist right here.
Take care, Oliver
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