Britain can sometimes feel like it’s no country for old men. Our elderly folk get a hard time; they’re blamed for society’s woes, accused of messing up the planet for younger people and hogging houses which families struggling to get on the ladder could never afford.
How is Attenborough, who joined the BBC in the 1950s, still making breathtaking television eight decades later?
This ageist stereotyping, and the narrative of intergenerational unfairness which puts the blame on older people for anything that younger people don’t like, has pitted generations against each other, but is it as fair as we think?
A national treasure who turns 99 today is a one-man defiance of all the ‘selfish oldie’ stereotypes. With his energy, social awareness, and natural kindness, the impish David Attenborough is an example to everyone younger than him – almost everyone on the planet.
People often become more conservative as they get older, but Attenborough’s taken a more radical shift during his nineties. As recently as 2018, George Monbiot had a pop at Attenborough, writing in the Guardian that he’d “betrayed the living world he loves” and that his BBC shows had “knowingly” created a “false impression of the world” by “downplaying our environmental crisis” and doing us a “grave disservice”.
But over the past four years, Attenborough has spoken up more about climate. Having spent a lifetime showing us nature in all its glory, he has joined the struggle to protect it.
“If we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies,” he said in the 2021 series Climate Change – The Facts.
Speaking at Cop26, he called on world leaders to reduce emissions for the benefit of the planet.
“We are already in trouble,” he said. “Today, those who’ve done the least to cause this problem, are being the hardest hit.” Far from trying to draw a dividing a line between his generation and the young, he said that “young people can give us the impetus we need to rewrite our story”.
Flexitarian diets are very trendy among the young but Attenborough’s followed one for a while. He cut back on his meat intake and pointed out that “if we all ate only plants, we’d need only half the land we use at the moment”. He says he hopes his latest, cinema-length film, Ocean, will play a critical role in saving biodiversity and protecting the planet from climate change.
Television is one of the most fickle industries and virtually all of its talent is unceremoniously dumped after a disappointingly short time in the spotlight. So how is Attenborough, who joined the BBC in the 1950s, still making breathtaking television eight decades later?
Part of the answer is that he’s an almost uniquely gifted broadcaster but, as I discovered when I wrote a book about him – The Wit and Wisdom of David Attenborough – his boyish enthusiasm has never left him, even as he enters his 100th year.
Interviewers describe him as “thoughtful and twinkly”. A colleague noted that, even after Attenborough had worked in wildlife filmmaking for six decades, his eyes would “light up like a toddler at the zoo” if he was presented with a new story about, say, a rarely-seen poison dart frog.
Another colleague noted the “pop star adulation” the broadcaster was greeted with, yet remarkably it hasn’t gone to his head.
Where younger generations engage in “humble bragging” on social media, Attenborough personifies the genuine humility that’s more common in his generation. “I can’t believe I’ve been as lucky as I have,” he said of his fame and success. “I just point at things.”
Even as his energy, diet and social awareness defy his advanced years, Attenborough has never been one to pretend to be any younger than he is. Asked once what single thing would improve the quality of his life, he replied: “Good, workable knees.” Workable or otherwise, may they carry you for many more years, Sir David.
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