We actually found 99 facts about Sir David Attenborough you don’t know
Want to know more about Sir David Attenborough? You're in the right place.
Broadcaster, naturalist, and national treasure – although don’t let him hear you say that last one. Sir David Attenborough is an undeniable British icon.
Yet despite being beloved the world over, you have to ask yourself, ‘How much do you really know about the best documentarian in the business?’
After all, despite being on our TV screens since the 1950s, he’s gone out of his way to put the natural world front and centre, not himself.
Well, then, as we’re celebrating David’s 99th birthday, we thought we’d pull the spotlight back on the man once labelled the most trusted celebrity in Britain.
To do so, we’ve gone to the ends of the Earth to bring you a list of 99 facts – one for each year of his life –about the great man, leaving no stone unturned in our quest for Attenborough trivia.
So get your best khakis on and get ready for an adventure into the unknown…
1. David Frederick Attenborough was born on May 8, 1926 in Isleworth, Middlesex, the same year as Queen Elizabeth II.
2. His father, Frederick Attenborough, was the principal of University College, Leicester, while his mother, Mary, was a suffragette and philanthropist who helped Basque refugee children relocate out of bombed cities.
3. Sir David grew up in College House on the campus of the University of Leicester, where he developed an interest in the natural world at an early age.
4. Nature wasn’t the only thing that interested David, though. As a young boy, he used to supply the university’s zoology department with newts for the low, low cost of 3d (76p) a newt.
5. Sir David has two brothers. His elder brother Richard became a famous actor, who you may have seen in Jurassic Park, while his younger brother John worked for Alfa Romeo.
6. He also has two adopted sisters, Helga and Irene, who were Jewish refugees his parents fostered during the war.
7. Sir David won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge in 1945, where he studied natural sciences.
8. In 1947, Sir David was called up for national service and spent two years in the Royal Navy.
9. After leaving the navy, Sir David took a job as an editor working on children’s textbooks, but he left as he found the work boring.
First job at the BBC Althouhg the BBC didn’t hire him right away (Photo by Ron Case/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)10. In 1950, Sir David was rejected from a job at the BBC.
11. However, he was later hired to work on a fledgling new medium called ‘television’… it’ll never catch on.
12. Sir David had only seen one television programme when he was hired to work at the Beeb and, like most Brits at the time, didn’t even own a TV.
13. Sir David initially expressed interest in presenting but was told by his bosses that his big teeth made that an unlikely career path.
14. His first programme, called Coelacanth, looked at the rediscovery of the ancient fish coelacanth.
14. David’s first big break came when he produced the three-part series Animal Patterns.
15. Following that, he was asked to help produce a new show called Zoo Quest, which would follow zoos as they tracked down animals to add to their collections.
16. Sir David only got the job presenting that show, though, when the original presenter, Jack Lester, fell ill.
17. Despite loving natural history, Sir David actually refused to join the BBC Natural History Unit; instead, he started his own department, Travel and Exploration Unit, which meant he could keep making Zoo Quest.
18. Eventually, Sir David quit the BBC so he could get a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Head of BBC 2 Sir David nearly rose to become the Director General (Picture: Mirrorpix)19. Sir David never finished that degree as he was offered a job as controller of BBC Two.
20. Despite his love of animals, one of his first executive acts was to ‘kill off’ the BBC 2 mascots Hullabaloo and Custard – two cartoon kangaroos.
21. Sir David had a special clause in his contract that gave him special privileges, most notably, he was allowed to keep making documentaries.
22. Documentaries like A Blank on the Map, which saw him come face to face with a hitherto uncontacted tribe of people.
23. The same tribe was reportedly cannibalistic, but that didn’t bother Sir David, who infamously greeted them with a handshake and a ‘good afternoon’.
24. During his time as the BBC 2 controller, he greenlit some of the most famous programmes in the channel’s history, most notably Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Match of the Day.
25. He also commissioned the famous music series The Old Grey Whistle Test, but he’s apparently never watched it.
26. He also took advantage of the new invention, colour television, to put snooker on the telly. The resulting show, Pot Black, is part of the reason the show’s so popular in the UK.
27. Not content with giving the world snooker, Sir David is also the reason tennis balls are green. It was his idea to show Wimbledon in colour, and the ball had to be neon green so viewers at home could see it as it was flung around the court.
28. It wasn’t just the world of sport that Sir David worked on, though. He also commissioned the seminal documentary series Civilisation, which revolutionised the format and is widely considered one of the most important TV shows of our time.
29. While head of the BBC, Sir David refused to hire a young up-and-coming 27-year-old called Terry Wogan.
30. The BBC wanted Sir David to become the Director-General, but he refused so he could work on his true passion: documentaries
Sir David Attenborough documentary facts His true passion though, was filmmaking and nature (Picture: BBC Picture Archive)31. He always wears a blue shirt and khaki pants to help with continuity when filming months and sometimes thousands of miles apart.
32. Sir David doesn’t like to appear on camera too much because he believes his films should be carried by the animals, not the presenter.
33. Life on Earth was a mammoth undertaking. It cost an eye-watering £1 million and was filmed over three years, in hundreds of different locations all over the world by a team of 30 people with the help of 500 scientists.
34. The most challenging part of filming The Living Planet was shooting the red-breasted geese. The birds had to be hand-reared from chicks so they would follow their ‘mother’ (someone in a car) and be filmed flying alongside them.
35. The Trials of Life was the first time a killer whale had been photographed attacking and playing with the bodies of dead seals. They don’t call them ‘killer’ for fun!
36. Attenborough once joked he made The Private Life of Plants as an excuse to visit Mount Roraima, a place he’d always dreamed of visiting.
37. While filming The Life of Birds, David’s wife died. Despite the shock, he refused to abandon the series and continued to work on it. Later in life, he was quoted as saying, ‘There was a lot of work that I had to do—and I was grateful that this was so.’
Taht’s got him into some ‘hairy’ situations at times (Picture: BBC Picture Archives)38. Sir David almost died filming dolphins in the Bahamas for The Trials of Life. According to producer Alastair Fothergill, he was knocked under a dive platform by a wave, and there was ‘blood everywhere’.
39. Sir David narrated 253 episodes (that’s every one) of Wildlife on One between 1977 and 2005.
40. While making his 2001 film The Blue Planet his team managed to film the hairy angler fish and the Dumbo octopus. This was the first time they’d ever been seen on camera.
41. While filming The Living Planet, his balloon crash-landed in Scotland. When he finally found a rescue, his rescuer said he would only help if he wished his daughter a happy birthday.
42. Sigourney Weaver and Oprah Winfrey replaced him as narrator on the US versions of Planet Earth and Life.
43. Life in the Undergrowth was apparently a nightmare to film due to the unpredictable nature of insects.
44. Sir David is the only person to have won BAFTA Awards in black and white, colour, high-definition, 3D, and 4K resolution.
Awards and honours By the mid-2010s, he had turned 90 and was awarded a second Knighthood (Picture: PA)45. Despite being the very definition of a national treasure, he baulks at the description and doesn’t like it when people call him it.
46. Sir David has been given 32 honorary degrees from universities around the world, which is more than anyone else on the planet.
47. His most notable honorary degrees include an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Cambridge and Durham University. He’s also got an honorary philosophy degree from Oxford.
48. He’s not been forgotten by his hometown either. The University of Leicester made him a Distinguished Honorary Fellow in recognition of his ‘distinguished service to the university’.
49. He was also made an honorary Freeman of the City of Leicester in 1990.
He’s arguably the most well-respected broadcaster on all of British TV (Picture: Karwai Tang/WireImage)50. In a 2006 Reader’s Digest poll, he was named the UK’s most trusted celebrity.
51. That same year, he won the title of Greatest Living British Icon, voted for by viewers of BBC Two’s The Culture Show,
52. A 2002 BBC poll named him one of the hundred greatest Britons.
53. Meanwhile, he came second in a YouGov poll to find the person who people had the most positive opinion of, only narrowly losing out to Albert Einstein.
54. The Guinness World Records officially recognises him as the longest-serving natural historian and presenter on television.
55. Over 40 species, both living and extinct, have been named after Sir David.
A lot of animals now share his name (Picture: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)56. The most notable include the Nepenthes attenboroughii, a plant that can gobble down rats and mice whole.
57. The first known animal predator, the 560-million-year-old Auroralumina attenboroughii was also named after him.
58. It’s not just animals that are named after him, either. In 2018, a newly-discovered species of plankton, ‘Syracosphaera azureaplaneta’ was named after his Blue Planet documentary series.
59. Surely, though his greatest honour was when a British polar research ship was named RRS Sir David Attenborough in his honour… even if it was meant to be called Boaty McBoatface.
60. In 2020, he and Prince Williams created the Earthshot Prize, which awards five people each year for environmentalism.
61. In 2023, he was declared the UK’s Favourite TV Presenter of All Time.
62. He was awarded the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005.
Sir David Attenborough and Animals David loves nature but doesn’t think of himself as an animal lover (Picture: BBC)63. Despite loving the natural world, Sir David doesn’t think of himself as an animal lover. He told Metro ‘I’m not an animal lover if that means you think things are nice if you can pat them, but I am intoxicated by animals.’
64. He once claimed that he thinks humans have a bad habit of overlooking invertebrate animals. That might not sound too bad at first until you learn most animal species are invertebrates.
65. When asked on Reddit what his favourite amphibian was, he replied, ‘The poison tree frog, because it has very interesting mating behaviour’.
66. Another time, when asked what animal he could bring any animal back from extinction, he chose the Quetzal Coatlus- a giant pterosaur with an 11 metre wingspan.
67. Supposedly, the only animals he actually dislikes are rats.
68. When asked what the rarest animal he’s ever seen was, he said it was the Pinta Island Tortoise, which was the last of its kind.
69. While making Gorillas Revisited, he was grabbed by a mountain gorilla, but don’t panic, the ape just wanted to give him a clean.
70. Sir David can do a wolf howl so convincing that other wolves will respond to it.
Sir David Attenborough’s personal life He’s been knighted… twice! (Picture: Getty/Hulton Archive)71. Sir David was married for 47 years to Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel, whom he met when he finished his national service with the Royal Navy.
72. The couple had two children, Robert and Susan
73. Robert is a bioanthropologist, and Susan is a former primary school headmistress.
74. Sir David was knighted in 1985 for his work on highlighting the natural world in TV shows and his campaigns to protect it.
75. Despite being an avowed environmentalist, Sir David isn’t a vegetarian or a vegan, although he is trying to cut back on meat.
76. Sir David remains in good health, but in 2013, he was fitted for a pacemaker and had a double knee replacement in 2015.
77. Sir David is estimated to be worth around £30 million.
78. Attenborough considers himself an agnostic and is a firm believer in evolution.
79. Sir David has opposed the teaching of creationism in schools.
80. When asked about his political beliefs, he once described himself as a standard boring left-wing liberal.
81. He previously endorsed the former leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas.
82. Sir David once described humans as a ‘plague on the Earth’ and is an advocate for population control.
83. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is also a firm supporter of the BBC and the Television license.
84. Sir David once claimed his biggest fear is being a burden to his children.
The weird and wonderful life of Sir David Attenborough He’s one of the best-travelled people in the world (Picture: Sky UK Ltd)85. When asked about his inspirations, he regularly credits the wildlife artist and explorer Ernest Thompson Seton, whose books he read as a kid.
86. Never one to avoid danger, Sir David once used his shirt to catch a crocodile in the Borneo swamps.
87. Sir David gave the world’s biggest flowering plant its name.
88. He doesn’t own a car, which makes sense as he never passed his driving test.
89. Sir David once claimed that if he could time travel, he’d go back to the late Cretaceous period, because it was the last stage of the dinosaurs.
90. He’s thought to be one of the most well-travelled people on the planet and reached the North Pole at the age of 83.
91. Sir David has been to every continent on Earth.
92. For The Life of Birds, he travelled 256,000 miles, that’s roughly the equivalent of travelling around the world ten times.
93. Sir David dislikes crowds, claiming that he finds being surrounded by lots of people quite intimidating.
94. Sir David was once asked which animal he’d like to be. He chose a sloth.
95. He once fought off a pickpocket while travelling in Jakarta.
96. Sir David Attenborough once joined the rock guitarists Brian May and Slash in a song condemning badger culling in the UK.
97. The skull of a 132-year-old murder victim was discovered in his back garden.
98. He’sbeen knighted twice.
99. He’s credited with writing a film called Island of the Vampire Birds, which isn’t as exciting as it sounds.
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