‘The greatest ambassador for life on Earth’: Tributes paid to David Attenborough on his 100th birthday

Attenborough holding a Bafta award in 2014. Photograph: Jonathan Short/Invision/AP

Attenborough is recognised as a consummate storyteller, whose sparse narrative, dramatic timing and sense of humour connect viewers to ecosystems from the Amazon and the Atlantic to the Arctic and the African savannah. He is a passionate advocate for the natural world.

Thanks to the ubiquity of television and the groundbreaking work of the BBC Natural History Unit, Attenborough is arguably humanity’s most trusted interpreter of other species. He is certainly one of the most popular Britons, according to polls.

Alastair Fothergill, of the production company Silverback Films, said: “Working with David over the decades has been one of the great privileges of my life. Before him, wildlife television was often seen as niche or educational programming, but David brought the wonders of the planet into people’s living rooms in a completely new way.

“Suddenly, audiences everywhere cared about places and animals they’d never seen before. Not only did he bring a unique sense of wonder and emotion to these stories, he also gave audiences a huge sense of responsibility towards the planet.”

Attenborough was born in Isleworth, west London, in 1926 and brought up near Leicester, roaming the countryside in his childhood, cycling for miles to reach woodlands where he could find fossils under rocks.

After stints in the navy and publishing, he applied for a job at the BBC in 1950 and was soon making nonfiction factual programmes, including a series from London zoo. He rose rapidly inside the institution and was appointed controller of BBC2 in 1965, a post from which he later commissioned the first episodes of programmes such as The Old Grey Whistle Test, as well as developing the landmark documentary series Civilisation.

But his primary interest was in wildlife and documentary film-making, leading in 1979 to the 13-part series Life on Earth. In one acclaimed episode, he had an unexpectedly close encounter with an adult male gorilla in Rwanda. In an unruffled monologue, he reminded viewers: “It seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise everything that is aggressive and violent, when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not – and that we are.”

At a citizens’ assembly on climate change in Birmingham in January 2020. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/PA

From this moment on, he became a celebrated and influential figure, though some said he did not do enough to highlight climate breakdown. The writer George Monbiot has said he was “astonished by Attenborough’s consistent failure to mount a coherent, truthful and effective defence of the living world he loves”.

Many others defended the film-maker’s approach, while Attenborough himself said he often raised environmental alarms, including in several entire series, such as 2000’s State of the Planet, but that too many dire warnings could be a “turn-off”.

In recent years, Attenborough has drawn even more attention to the damage being done to the natural world. He told the Guardian in 2018 that his goal was to make people care enough to do something; to draw people in and then, at the end of a programme or series, to hit them with an environmental message. This was particularly successful with Blue Planet, which sparked a global campaign against plastics.

Attenborough took to the stage at UN climate talks in Poland in December 2018 to warn of an existential crisis. “Right now we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

Three years later, he told a younger generation at Cop26 in Glasgow: “In my lifetime I have witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.”