David Attenborough | Biography, Documentaries, A Life on Our Planet, TV Shows, & Facts | Britannica (2025)

David Attenborough (born May 8, 1926, London, England) is an English broadcaster, writer, and naturalist noted for his innovative educational television programs, especially the nine-part Life series.

Attenborough grew up in Leicester, England, where his father was principal of the local university; his older brother, Richard Attenborough, later became a successful actor and film producer. David early developed a strong interest in natural history. He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge (M.A., 1947), and began work at an educational publishing house in 1949. In 1952 he completed a training program at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and became a television producer for the BBC. Together with the reptile curator Jack Lester, in 1954 he originated the television series Zoo Quest, in which live animals were filmed in the wild and in zoos. This show proved enormously popular and widened the scope of the educational programming offered by the BBC.

In 1965 Attenborough became controller of the BBC’s new second television channel, BBC-2. In this capacity he helped launch the dramatic production The Forsyte Saga and such landmark cultural-educational series as Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. He also aired the seminal comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Attenborough was director of television programming of the BBC from 1968 to 1972, but he resigned to write and produce television series on a freelance basis. He subsequently wrote (and narrated) a succession of award-winning television programs on anthropology and natural history, most notably the Life series: Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), The Trials of Life (1990), Life in the Freezer (1993), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002–03), Life in the Undergrowth (2005), and Life in Cold Blood (2008). His other TV credits included The Blue Planet (2001), an exploration of the world’s oceans, and State of the Planet (2000) and Are We Changing Planet Earth? (2006), both of which dealt heavily with environmental issues such as global warming. He narrated but did not write Blue Planet II (2017); for his narration, Attenborough earned an Emmy Award.

Attenborough later narrated Our Planet, an eight-part series that debuted on Netflix in 2019. That year the BBC also broadcast his documentary Climate Change—The Facts, in which he warned that the failure to act could lead to “the collapse of our societies.” David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020) was described as his “witness statement.”

Attenborough wrote numerous books, a number of which were companions to his TV series. Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster (2002), Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions (2017), and Journeys to the Other Side of the World: Further Adventures of a Young Naturalist (2018) are among his autobiographies. Attenborough was the recipient of numerous other honors, including several BAFTA Awards and a Peabody Award (2014). He was knighted in 1985.