The life of Sir David Attenborough

He spent his life sharing his passion for nature and telling the world about its fragile beauty.   This is the life of Sir David Attenborough.

Transcript

00:00The natural world is just full, full of wonders.

00:21Well, it's what I've been spending my life really trying to do,

00:25making clear what the natural world is,

00:28how complicated it is and how it works,

00:30and how it affects the way in which we live.

00:59I used to spend a lot of time looking for fossils

01:03and then watching foxes and rabbits and birds.

01:28And now I'm looking for fossils.

01:55Two of the shows that we have running at the moment

01:57on BBC Two, these are both available and supplied in colour.

02:01It started making programmes with clockwork cameras, you know, way back 50 years ago.

02:29And now I've gone all through, through HD and through colour and so on,

02:34and now I'm in 3D.

02:36So it's very nice to have been there for the whole history of television picture making.

02:59I really felt that this was the greatest compliment

03:25that I'd ever been paid by anybody or anything,

03:28that they trusted us and were friendly enough to us to come and do that.

03:34It was just breathtaking.

03:51Congratulations.

03:52I was going to say these things are heavy, but you know that

03:55because you have vast experience of collecting these BAFTA awards.

03:59In fact, it's almost 50 years, sir, since you first collected a BAFTA award.

04:04And how do you feel about this track record that you have set

04:08and which I dare say will never be equaled or surpassed?

04:12Older.

04:25I feel pretty good about that.

04:35I mean, what?

04:36You know, there was a thing called Attenborough,

04:38so it's giving a tyrannosaurus a bad time.

04:41That's good.

04:42I like that.

04:56We are now interfering with the natural world in such a wholesale way

05:02that we are risking the fertility of the world.

05:06We are risking the continued existence of this Earth as a fertile planet.

05:13There are more and more people.

05:35Every day there are more and more people on Earth.

05:38Every day the problem becomes bigger.

05:40So every day we have to work to keep the solution,

05:43and we are not at the moment even keeping pace.

05:46But if we can manage to solve some of these problems about fuel supply,

05:52energy and so on, then maybe we'll keep up.

05:55But my suspicion is that it's going to get tougher.