David Attenborough has made it to his century. I’ve always believed that if you manage to make it to your 90s then you kind of deserve to make it to your 100s as well, but obviously once you do make it to 90s the chances of you then making to 100 become a lot narrower. So I think a lot of us have worried about Sir Dave in recent times not making it, with the world being what it is that would’ve been hard to take. But here we are, he’s racked up his century, and though the world is still what it is, that’s a point of light worth being happy about.
Mind you, standing that close to an erupting volcano doesn’t necessarily help your chances… I mean, I watched that clip and he said they weren’t in any danger, but still. I got that picture from this Guardian piece, which offers a useful reminder that, on top of his own productions, Attenborough was controller of BBC2 (and later director of programmes for both BBC TV channels), in which capacity he introduced colour TV to the UK and commissioned shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus; it also offers the interesting trivia that his first actual on-screen appearance was a game show in 1953. But the ABC article linked at the top offers an even better story of how he initially tried to get into radio but failed:
Then, someone else from the BBC called and asked if he was interested in a television role:
“I had to confess that I hadn’t actually seen much television. I had once watched a television play in my wife’s parents’ house, but they were the only people I knew with a set, and I certainly had not got one myself.”
Sir David took a chance, quit his job and underwent a three-month BBC traineeship with no guarantee of employment at the end.
Clearly he did something right. Happy hundredth, Sir David.
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