20 Questions with Sir David Attenborough

With a career spanning six decades, Sir David Attenborough is the face of natural history documentaries. He’s been behind some of Britain’s most beloved nature programmes including Life, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet. As Controller of BBC2 in the sixties, he gave the go-ahead to Monty Python’s Flying Circus and helped oversee the introduction of colour TV to Britain. Essentially, Attenborough is one of the most significant broadcasters and naturalists of the century.

1. What is your earliest memory?
Sitting halfway up a flight of stairs, looking out of a window.

2. If your life didn’t revolve around the natural world, what would you be doing?
Trying to make my life revolve around the natural world.

3. What’s the strangest local delicacy you’ve sampled on your travels?
Toasted caterpillars.

4. What’s the worst illness you’ve ever contracted abroad?
Malaria, combined with amoebic hepatitis and a broken rib.

5. What would you never go travelling without?
My front door key.

6. Do you think that one day, many years from now, there will be a documentary made called ‘Life: On Other Planets’?
No.

7. Does travel ever lose its appeal?
Airports do – travel doesn’t.

8. On a planet where the natural world is being slowly eroded away, are you for or against zoos?
For.

9. Why?
Because they try to educate, research and provide a long stop against extinction.

10. Do you believe technology is man’s greatest achievement or greatest threat?
Homosapiens could not exist without technology.

11. What’s your all time favourite fact about nature?
That all life is related.

12. If someone were to narrate a typical day in the life of you, what would they say?
“Why doesn’t he get up and DO something?”

13. A glass of wine, or a pint of British beer?
Wine.

14. You’re considered the face and voice of natural history programs, but does the natural world projected in your documentaries ever surprise you?
Of course, it can’t be contained in a documentary.

15. You won the title of Greatest Living British Icon, voted for by viewers of BBC Two’s The Culture Show, but who is your hero?
Sir Peter Scott.

16. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever overheard on your travels?
Spirits talking through entranced girls in Bali.

17. Are there any maxims that inspire you?
“Do as you would be done by.”

18. Which extinct animal would you like to see reintroduced to the world’s population?
The dodo.

19. If you could sum up your CV in a sentence, what would it say?
Spent 60 years travelling the natural world with a Natural Science degree, a cameraman and other people’s money.

20. What’s in store for your next project?
The Galapagos in 3D.