Attenborough Turns 100: Surprising Secrets Revealed!

We think we know , but what's he really like?

Daily Mail TV critic Christopher Stevens, who's met him many times, reveals a man bursting with wit, humility and irrepressible drive – the world's greatest naturalist.

An encounter with David Attenborough is unforgettable. He's exactly like you'd imagine him to be – humorous, charming, erudite, modest and a passionate talker. 

Unless, of course, he doesn't want to be seen. And then, like so many of the wild animals his shows have enabled audiences to discover during nearly 75 years in TV, he can become invisible.

You might have walked past him in the street and not recognised him. Among his astonishing array of talents, Sir David – who will reach his landmark 100th birthday on May 8 – has a genius for camouflage. 

'In the natural world,' he once told me, 'you can tell when an animal wishes to be seen and when it doesn't. If you hold yourself in a certain way as you walk down the street, it invites people to take notice… and if you don't, they don't!

'I'm an untidy dresser. I don't have many sartorial characteristics, so people don't look twice at me, unless it's to say, "Who is this tramp?"'

Over the years, I've met him, interviewed him and watched him speak to audiences on about ten occasions – and every time I've been struck by his extraordinary ability to switch on the power. When he's simply chatting about one of his favourite subjects – fossil-hunting, perhaps, or birds of paradise – he's a delightful raconteur. 

But at full wattage, when he's delivering a message on conservation that he urgently needs the world to hear, he can be a mesmerising orator, speaking without notes, his words booming with conviction.

Seven years ago, at Central Hall in Westminster, I watched him make a keynote speech to an audience of politicians and celebrities. The effect he had on all of them was remarkable: the BAFTA-winning actress next to me listened with her mouth open, glowing with awestruck admiration.

A producer who has worked with him for decades told me he believed Sir David would have been prime minister, and a brilliant one, had he chosen a career in politics. Instead, he has done something most people will regard as far more influential and long-lasting, by shaping our expectations of television at its best.

Born on May 8, 1926, he was the middle child of three (his older brother was, of course, the Oscar-winning actor and director Richard, and younger brother John grew up to be a motoring executive). 

David joined the BBC aged 26 in 1952, 'when you could only see it in London and only for about three hours a day, on a tiny screen'. 

His Zoo Quest series in the 1950s and 60s took viewers to Africa, Indonesia and Australia, introducing millions to places they'd never dreamed of visiting. The two landmark series Life On Earth and The Living Planet followed, exploring the evolution of all living things, from the first amoebas to human beings, and the diverse habitats of the planet.

A succession of specialist series charted how wildlife adapts to harsh environments, including both the Poles, in The Trials Of Life, The Life Of Mammals, Life In The Freezer and Frozen Planet. His shows became renowned for exploiting the latest technology, with time-lapse photography to capture plants, slow-motion film of birds in flight, high-magnification shots of insects and aerial footage of migrating herds, as seen in The Private Life Of Plants, The Life Of Birds, Life In The Undergrowth and Africa.

The Blue Planet and Blue Planet II took us deep into the oceans; Planet Earth and Planet Earth II provided comprehensive overviews of our world on a scale never before attempted; State Of The Planet, Our Planet and The Green Planet tackled the subject of global warming; Wild Isles and this year's Secret Garden explored British wildlife.

And that's before you even think of more specialised films such as Attenborough's Flying Monsters, about winged dinosaurs, or Dynasties, which followed the life cycle of individual animals and their families. His voice has become so familiar that anyone else's narration on a wildlife show sounds slightly presumptuous.

It's not easy to get him to discuss his achievements. In his quintessentially English way, he is concerned people might think he's blowing his own trumpet. 

But when pushed, he has no hesitation in naming the game-changing 1979 series Life on Earth as his favourite. 'What I am proudest about is that it initiated the genre of the 13-part major series that looks at the world as a globe and at animal life as one entity'. 

Life on Earth hopped from continent to continent, starting with the simplest lifeforms and ending with apes and man. It founded a line of what were subsequently called 'sledgehammers'. Planet Earth and Planet Earth II are direct descendants of that.

'For its time, Life On Earth featured some remarkable stuff simply because it contained pictures of animals that people had never seen. One wonders how long we can go on improving the technology at the rate that we have been doing throughout my lifetime. It started with clockwork cameras and black-and-white film. How on earth can we get better than we've got now?'

At the same time, he has always recognised that technical brilliance alone is not enough to hook an audience. 

'It is not the individual shots, it is the story,' he insisted during our first meeting, about a dozen years ago. 'If you are a good enough storyteller, you can get away with everything else. Narrative structure is the most important element in programmes, and being good at it without distorting the facts is the aim.'

Though he's aware of the influence he's had on countless viewers worldwide, the ambitions he has sown and the opinions he has changed, he rarely watches his past work. He did once admit to me that occasionally, for a retrospective or a compilation, he has to look backwards: 'I see myself in old photos and think, "Gosh, was I really as young as that?"'

Mostly, though, he shuns the idea of watching his own series: 'You know what happened to Narcissus.' He enjoys other film-makers' wildlife programmes, but freely admits that this is because, 'I know most of the people involved and we're all pals. I watch and say to myself, "B******! How did he get that shot?"'

That's another surprise: he may have the most recognisable voice in entertainment, but he isn't above lobbing the odd swear word into the conversation for comic effect – in the same breath as an erudite reference to the Greek myth of Narcissus (the chap who gazed at his reflection for so long that he turned into a flower).

'I don't watch quizzes much either,' he said. 'It's good if you want to show off in front of your family but then perhaps you stumble a bit, and they're amazed you don't know the answer.'

Since the death of his wife Jane in 1997, Sir David's daughter Susan has lived with him and, as he puts it, runs the household. 'She was a primary school head, and now organises the office and lives in the same house.' He also has a son, Robert.

Any attempt at small talk with him will dry up quickly. He doesn't want to be put at his ease with chit-chat, and he doesn't always respond to questions that invite introspection. Occasionally, though, I've caught him in a reflective mood.

'I have had the most extraordinary life,' he did tell me. 'It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary. Virtue is not involved: I just arrived at the right time. I've been lucky enough to spend my life exploring the wild places of the planet. I've travelled to every part of the globe. In truth, I couldn't imagine living my life any other way.

'The start of my career coincided with the advent of global air travel. It was the best time of my life. Fifty years ago there was hardly a species in Life on Earth that most people would even have heard of, let alone seen. Now it's rare to find animals that haven't been filmed at length.'

One interview, in a back room at the Royal Albert Hall, lasted much longer than its allotted half-hour, as Sir David reminisced about his trek into the Australian outback for the 1963 series Quest under Capricorn. Hundreds of miles from the nearest city, in Australia's Northern Territory, he befriended a tribal elder named Magani. 

As the young David won his trust, he learned some of the tribe's sacred legends. 'Magani talked a lot of Pidgin English, which I picked up so I was able to talk to him,' he told me. 'I sat with him in his humpy or hut, to chew the fat and smoke cigarettes... We both spoke enough Pidgin to make ourselves understood.'

To make the point, he rattled off a few sentences in Pidgin English, a simplified hybrid of English and local dialects. When I expressed surprise that he still spoke it fluently, Sir David grinned and insisted it was easy to master: 'He no trouble!'

His adventures by canoe, jeep and light aeroplane brought him face-to-face with tribes now long vanished, whose ancient ways of life were on the verge of dying out. 'You couldn't do it now,' he said. 'Everyone has mobile phones.' These have made it impossible to escape from the industrialised world, much to his sorrow.

'Until quite recently,' he said, 'you were able to get away and leave everything behind, because you didn't have phones or any way of contacting the outside world. Out there, in the rainforest, you were in the same situation as an indigenous hunter.

'You can't sense that now, because if you've got a mobile phone you can speak to your family, and you're probably getting updates on the news. It changes the way you behave, creating a sense of irresponsibility. Before mobile phones, if you got into trouble there was only one person who could get you out of it – and that was you. 

'Now if I'm in trouble, I can just phone and ask for someone to come and rescue me. That makes you take a different attitude, subconsciously changing decisions about where you go and how you behave. It's safer but it's much less liberating.

'Time and again, in the desert or the forest, in Amazonia or New Guinea, I have discovered how limited my knowledge of the world is, compared to the people I've encountered. I felt like a child, and a feckless, incompetent child, by comparison. 

'The first time I found myself in a rainforest, I'd have been hopelessly lost without my guides: I couldn't see the sun, I had no idea where I was, and I was apt to wander in circles. I'd still be there today without their knowledge!'

He's never lost his sense of adventure. As he turned 90, 2016's Planet Earth II opened with him floating over the Alps, two miles up. 'That's not difficult,' he assured me. 'It's a doddle. You get in this laundry basket, which is perfect for its job because it's light and strong, and pliable so it doesn't shatter when you land. People start pulling ropes, and suddenly you look over and realise you're 50ft up.

'On one occasion, when we were doing a high-altitude shoot, we got into winds and were dragged along in the wrong direction. We were nearly swept out into the Atlantic Ocean – which wouldn't have been too good!'

The next year, Blue Planet II saw him explore the depths in a mini submarine. This, he said, is no more difficult than 'sitting in an armchair, watching the sharks with a bar of chocolate in your hand'.

Three-quarters of a century as a natural history presenter has given him a unique perspective on environmental change. 'I was born in 1926 and, when I was in my thirties, we had no idea of the damage that was coming... Mankind hadn't done the devastation we have now. 

It was possible to see the world as it was of old, with great areas that were still untouched. Although one was aware that there were creatures becoming extinct, you didn't feel that nature was beleaguered in the way that it is now.'

This is the subject on which he talks most intensely. And every time we've spoken about it, he refuses to be pessimistic. 'Never in history have all the nations of the world agreed on something… except once. In the 1980s, people around the world saw the hole opening in the ozone layer and realised that if we didn't deal with it, humanity would fry.

'So the whole world worked together and took action, and that ozone hole is healing because human beings got together to fix it. The ecological problem now is much deeper and more complex, and it's getting worse as the population grows. 

'But there's still reason for hope, because we are on the verge of getting together again. We have to. It would be catastrophic to stand around saying, "It's hopeless, we can't do anything about it". The natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It's happened in my lifetime, I've seen it with my own eyes. This is mankind's greatest mistake but, if we act now, we can yet put it right.'

Solving this crisis, he has told me several times, is the responsibility of us all. 'My simple motto is this: Do Not Waste. Don't waste electricity, gas, heat, food, paper. Our society is so profligate in what we waste. 

'For instance, instead of just throwing them away, I save biodegradable bags, the potato-based ones, to use as bags for vegetable and organic waste. Then I put them out for recycling. It's a tiny thing, but tiny things matter.

'We are too wealthy a society, we don't live in an economical way. The way I live myself is too profligate. I am aware of the amount of paper I waste because I don't like to use email. I shall have to change!'

For all his passion, it's clear that he is a reluctant campaigner. He defines himself as 'a public service broadcaster… I began my career as a producer, there to enable people to give their opinions – not mine. I still feel in my bones that I ought to be impartial.'

If he'd remained behind the scenes, he would almost certainly have become the BBC's director-general. As it was, by the late 1960s he was controller of BBC2, and among his successful commissions was Monty Python's Flying Circus. 

The show was slow to find an audience, and some wanted to see it taken off the air after a single series, but Sir David was a fan of the surreal antics. 'He told us it was going to become a cult,' Michael Palin has said. 'Of course I thought that was complete nonsense!'

Even after the colossal success of Life On Earth, he remained a high-ranking BBC executive, with one of the most prestigious jobs in media – producing the Queen's Christmas Broadcast. Many people won't even know that between 1986 and 1991, David oversaw the annual message aired, by tradition, at 3pm on December 25. It was not a duty he sought, but one he held by royal request – both Her Majesty and the palace flunkeys were great admirers.

He took the job reluctantly ('Do I have any option?' he asked the BBC's managing director and was told, 'No!') and made a diplomatic exit at 65, 'the retiring age for permanent members of the Royal Household'.

That was 35 years ago and he's still making several shows a year. The latest on the list is Making Life On Earth: Attenborough's Greatest Adventure, telling the story behind the landmark series, which airs on BBC1 on 3 May. 

David Attenborough's 100 Years On Planet Earth, featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra and guests, airs live from the Royal Albert Hall on his birthday. And you can watch him this week in Secret Garden (Sunday, 7pm, BBC1).

His highly productive 'retirement' has lasted as long as most people's working careers. 'Is it virtue that has enabled me to live so long? No! Is it exercise? No, I never take it. It's just luck,' he once told me. 

'I am reasonably mobile, but I have never in my life put on running shoes and skinny shorts to trot around Richmond Park. My natural tastes take care of healthy eating – much to my surprise, I really don't eat much red meat any more. It's not because of any principled view about slaughterhouses or something, I just don't like it all that much. I eat eggs, milk, fish.

'Because I am so antique, the crew treat me with great care. I love it, and who wouldn't? I am working a lot and I'm very grateful for it. I'm sure a lot of people are saying, "Why doesn't the old b****** move over and give the rest of us a chance?" but I'd much rather be working than doing nothing.

'I'll retire when my producers say I have to, when they look at me and whisper, "Poor old fellow, he thinks he can still do it but he can't really." But I have no intention of retiring, not as long as I can do the job and they still want me. Who wouldn't want to do my job? It's just a joy and a privilege.'

That was seven years ago, and he's been as good as his word, working tirelessly and embracing every innovation since. If ever there was a life in television worth celebrating, it is that of Sir David Attenborough.