13/05/2026
He applied to join the BBC in 1950 and was rejected. He never passed his driving test. He cannot stand rats. He has traveled to forty countries, narrated over a hundred documentaries, and had more than forty species named after him — including a parasitic wasp named in his honour this week. Today, Sir David Attenborough turns one hundred years old. He is still producing television.
Born on May 8, 1926, he grew up in a world that had no wildlife documentaries. He helped invent the form.
When Life on Earth aired in 1979, it changed wildlife filmmaking forever. A voice so recognisable it became the sound of the natural world itself for generations of viewers across the planet. Creatures that had never been filmed before. Places most people will never go. All of it brought quietly, precisely, into living rooms around the world.
Before television found him, he edited children's science textbooks. He served in the Royal Navy. During the war, his family fostered two Jewish sisters who had fled N**i Germany. His first programme as a BBC trainee was about a fish once thought extinct.
He has never stopped being curious about what is still alive on this earth — and what we stand to lose.
A kakapo in New Zealand bears his name. A constellation. Forty-plus species. And somewhere in the archive, the rejected BBC application that almost kept all of this from happening.
He wrote recently:
"I will not see how that story ends. But I remain convinced that the more people enjoy and understand the natural world, the greater our hope of saving both it and ourselves."
One hundred years old.
Still watching.
Still telling us to pay attention. 🌿
