Uncle to the nation

It was only when David Attenborough’s autobiography arrived for review that I realised I had been dodging his television programmes for years. Nothing personal; it was just that a pigeon on the pavement is more interesting to me than a bird of paradise on a television screen, a peep-show, that seems to push me further from ‘nature’, not nearer. This perhaps snooty self-revelation is only intended to highlight the way, when I came to open his book, I found myself laughing delightedly, and greatly warming to him.

He is just a jobbing tellyman after all, a ‘programme-maker’, with all the compromises that entails, and he fell into it by accident. Bored with a job in educational publishing, he applied for a place on a BBC training course (Sound) and was turned down. His rejected application was seen by someone at the television part of the BBC, which was just getting going again after the war, and he was invited to apply again.