David Attenborough

Fossils, refugee sisters and a rejection letter

David Attenborough was born on 8 May 1926 in Isleworth, Middlesex, and grew up in Leicester, where his father, Frederick, was principal of University College. He was the middle of three sons; Richard became an actor and film director, and John an executive at Alfa Romeo. David collected fossils and stones, and sold newts from a pond to the college’s zoology department. In 1939 his parents took in two German Jewish girls who had come to Britain on the Kindertransport, Irene and Helga Bejach, then 13 and 11. They stayed seven years. In a 2020 talk for the Association of Jewish Refugees he recalled his mother telling the boys, when war was declared: “Well now we are one family. Irene and Helga will be your sisters until such time as the war is over.”

From Wyggeston Grammar School he won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, in 1945 and took a natural sciences degree in geology and zoology. Two years of national service in the Royal Navy followed from 1947. He married Jane Oriel in 1950 and took a job editing children’s science textbooks, which bored him. BBC radio turned down his application to be a talks producer, but Mary Adams, head of television talks, noticed it, and he joined BBC television full-time in 1952. By the usual account, Adams thought his teeth were too big for him to appear on screen. He was hired to make programmes, not to present them.

Snooker, Civilisation and colour

In March 1965 Attenborough succeeded Michael Peacock as controller of BBC Two, which had launched the year before and was short of programmes. On 1 July 1967 the channel showed Wimbledon in colour, the first colour service in Europe, and the full colour service began on 2 December 1967. Colour needed programmes that showed it off. Snooker, a game in which you have to tell coloured balls apart, became Pot Black, first shown on BBC Two on 23 July 1969 and credited to Attenborough’s idea; in a 1986 TV-am interview he explained that snooker filled hours of colour airtime. In a 1967 government film interview, since digitised by the BFI, he called himself a “television man” and spoke of BBC Two’s audience as “individual human beings”, not a mass. He defended minority-interest programmes, from motoring to jazz, and conceded that rugby league was “a minority interest in this country”.

The prestige piece was Civilisation. Attenborough wanted a series on great paintings to be the “standard-bearer for colour television” and wanted Kenneth Clark to present it; Clark said it was Attenborough’s word “civilisation” that persuaded him. Thirteen 50-minute films, directed by Michael Gill and Peter Montagnon, ran from 23 February to 18 May 1969, and Attenborough spread the cost by showing each episode twice. They were shot on 35mm because, he told the BBC’s oral-history project in 1997, “we didn’t dare shoot Civilisation on 16.” Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973) followed the same pattern. Attenborough traced the idea back to the part-works of his childhood, such as H. G. Wells’s Outline of History: weekly instalments you bound up into a history of your own.

In 1969 he became director of programmes, in charge of both channels. Monty Python’s Flying Circus began on BBC One on 5 October 1969, under his directorship. Barry Took had brought the team to the BBC and the head of comedy, Michael Mills, gave it the go-ahead; the common claim that Attenborough commissioned it personally goes further than the evidence. By 1972 he was spoken of as a possible director-general. He told his brother Richard he had no appetite for it, and in 1997 he gave the BBC archive his reason: “I didn’t think I was really very good at it.” The coming job, as he saw it, was “technological and financial and business things”. He had kept a right to leave every eighteen months to make a programme, and he timed his resignation in early 1973 to fall just before a booked two-month shoot in Indonesia, Eastward with Attenborough.