BBC PLANS SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO MARK SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH’S 100TH BIRTHDAY
It’s Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday on Friday 8 May and to mark the occasion, a series of new BBC shows are featuring alongside beloved landmark programmes in a week-long celebration of Sir David’s work and legacy. Sir David lives a quiet life in Richmond and has reportedly said he does not want any ‘fuss’ around his big day……..
Here’s just a taste of what to expect…
Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure
In 1976, production began on David Attenborough’s Life on Earth.
No-one had ever attempted a natural history series on this scale before. This is the remarkable story behind one of the BBC’s most famous wildlife blockbusters. A three-year, hair-raising odyssey around the world, travelling to 40 countries, across a million miles, and filming over 600 species.
Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure goes behind-the-scenes on this ground-breaking landmark series, featuring exclusive interviews with David Attenborough and other members of the original crew. With fascinating insights, they reveal the highs and lows of filming the series during a truly exciting moment in television history, when global jet travel and colour filming were still in their infancy.
Along the way, the crew encountered multiple challenges, including a coup in the Comoros, being shot at in Rwanda and threats from Saddam Hussein’s army in Iraq. Broadcast in 1979 and watched by 500 million people worldwide, it confirmed David’s reputation as the most successful and influential wildlife filmmaker of our time. His astonishing encounter with gorillas in the mountains of Rwanda for this series is frequently voted one of the top TV moments of all time.
Secret Garden
In Wild Isles and Wild London, David showed us the remarkable wildlife dramas playing out in the British countryside and on the streets of our capital city. Now, in Secret Garden, he’s turning his attention to Britain’s backyards.
Over five episodes – set in five very different gardens across the UK – David reveals the lives of the often charming, occasionally daring, always secretive animals that inhabit the hidden world right on our doorsteps. Theirs is no cosy existence – even in these beautiful and seemingly genteel surroundings the rules of the wild still operate.
From pine martens in the Western Highlands to dormice in South Wales, swallows in the Lake District to otters in Oxfordshire and blue tits in Bristol, the series reveals not just a rich and surprising diversity of life but also how each species finds its own way to live alongside us.
Through meeting the gardeners that have created these wild oases, we discover how our nation of animal lovers and gardeners can do their bit to save struggling species. Eighty per cent of Britons have access to a garden, and together they cover an area greater than all of our national nature reserves combined – so what we do in our own backyards has an impact not only on the animals that live there, but also on whole populations.
You’ll never look at your garden in the same way again.
David Attenborough’s 100 Years on Planet Earth
To mark Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, Kirsty Young presents a ninety minute special event honouring one of the most influential figures in broadcasting and natural history storytelling.
Broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall in London, jointly staged and produced by BBC Studios Music Productions and Natural History Unit, and in partnership with The Open University, airs on his birthday, Friday 8 May at 8.30pm, on BBC One and iPlayer.
As it brings the nation together to celebrate and honour David’s ground-breaking career, David Attenborough’s 100 Years on Planet Earth will take audiences on an extraordinary journey through a century of exploration and discovery in the natural world, seen through the prism of David’s remarkable life and work.
The evening combines some of the most memorable wildlife moments from the BBC’s natural history archive, with live music drawn from David’s most iconic television series, alongside reflections from public figures and leading voices in conservation and wildlife filmmaking.
As the celebrations unfold, Kirsty will be joined on stage by those who have worked with David and been inspired by his work over the years, including broadcasters Liz Bonnin, Steve Backshall, Chris Packham, and Michael Palin, who will reflect on the impact of David’s work, the legacy he continues to shape and his unique ability to bring the wonders of the natural world into people’s homes.
Accompanied throughout by the BBC Concert Orchestra, the programme will feature iconic music from landmark series including Planet Earth, Blue Planet and Frozen Planet.
The orchestra will perform scores associated with some of television’s most unforgettable sequences, including the dramatic snakes and iguanas chase from Planet Earth II and the powerful wave-washing orcas sequence from Frozen Planet II.
The evening will also feature special performances from music artists who have collaborated on these series. Dan Smith, frontman of Brit Award winning band Bastille, will join the BBC Concert Orchestra to perform the band’s famous track Pompeii, featured in Planet Earth III, while Icelandic band Sigur Rós will perform Hoppípolla. The track was used in the promotion of Planet Earth and Planet Earth II.
Other musical highlights include Sienna Spiro, one of the most exciting new voices in British music, and Paraguayan harpist Francisco Yglesia, who will play the traditional Pajaro Campana, a piece that featured in Zoo Quest.
Bringing together breathtaking wildlife imagery, live orchestral and contemporary music, and contributions from those who have worked alongside David throughout his career and those who feel passionately about the natural world, the programme celebrates not only a broadcasting legend, but a century long relationship between audiences and nature.
To mark his centenary, 100 staff and volunteers from Kew Gardens, Wakehurst and the conservation centre in Madagascar gathered in front of the Palm House to record a birthday message.
Kew’s Director, Richard Deverell, said Sir David’s storytelling had inspired millions to value the natural world, and that his work ‘underscores the urgency of Kew’s mission to document, conserve and protect the world’s plant and fungal diversity’.
In 2005 Sir David planted the gardens’ first Wollemi Pine, a tree thought to have been extinct for two million years until a small population was found in Australia’s Blue Mountains in 1994; fewer than 100 wild specimens are known to survive.
In 2023 he donated a collection of seeds from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to be cultivated in Kew’s tropical nurseries.
Last year, a research team including Kew scientists named a newly discovered parasitic fungus after him.
Gibellula attenboroughii, found in Irish caves, infects orb-weaving spiders, hijacks their behaviour and forces them into exposed positions to spread spores before killing them. Honour does not get more peculiar than that.
Of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst, which marked its 25th anniversary last year, Sir David has said it is ‘perhaps the most significant conservation initiative ever’.
Kew is asking the public to mark the day in their own way, by spending more time in nature, planting native trees, supporting conservation projects or simply visiting a green space.
From scientists to horticulturists, from volunteer guides to retail staff, their message was that we can all play a part in the future of our planet by becoming champions for nature.
Speaking at the event, Kew’s Director, Richard Deverell said: “Sir David’s extraordinary storytelling has inspired millions to value the natural world. His work amplifies the importance of
plants and underscores the urgency of Kew’s mission to document, conserve and protect the world’s plant and fungal diversity. It is a critical message at a critical moment in our planet’s trajectory.”
100 people from across Science, Horticulture, Learning and Visitor Operations gathered with Kew’s Director, Richard Deverell and Chair of the Board of Trustees, Sir Andrew Steer, to sing Happy Birthday to their dear friend, former Trustee and neighbour.
Sir David’s longstanding association with Kew goes back to his early life when he used to visit Kew to find peace and tranquillity in nature. He then became a Trustee of the Gardens before going on to make several landmark documentaries including Kingdom of Plants and The Green Planet.