Centenarian Naturalist’s Birthday Concert Draws Prince William; Charles Makes Video Appearance Possibly More Moving Than the Live One
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Isla Campbell | Central London | prat.uk/author/isla-campbell/
The Hundred Years of David Attenborough
Sir David Attenborough turned 100 years old, prompting a national response that can only be described as unanimous: every political party, every media outlet, every demographic group that pollsters have identified as holding any opinion produced the same output, which is that David Attenborough is a national treasure who has been communicating the wonder and fragility of the natural world for longer than most currently living people have been alive, and that whatever honour the Crown can bestow, the country would like him to have more of it. This unanimity is unusual in contemporary British public life, which suggests that Attenborough exists in a category of cultural figure that transcends the polarisation that has defined public discourse for at least the past decade. He is a rare thing: someone that Britain agrees on.
The birthday concert drew Prince William, who has been publicly associated with conservation causes throughout his adult life and whose Earthshot Prize represents the most significant institutional expression of that association. William’s presence at an Attenborough birthday concert is therefore both a personal tribute and an institutional alignment: the heir to the throne appearing publicly alongside the centenarian whose work has done more than perhaps any other single cultural force to communicate environmental urgency to British and global audiences. King Charles made a video appearance, which was described as moving, which the specific intimacy of a filmed tribute from a head of state to a man who helped shape how the world understands the natural world can genuinely produce.
What Attenborough Has Done
The question of what David Attenborough has accomplished in 100 years is best answered not by the filmography — though the filmography is extraordinary — but by what the filmography produced in audiences: the specific knowledge that there is a world of extraordinary complexity and beauty that exists beyond human habitation, that this world is under severe pressure from human activity, and that understanding it is not merely academic but urgent. Attenborough’s communication of these facts across six decades of documentary work has been, by the measure of what it made the public know and feel, one of the most consequential acts of public education in the history of British broadcasting.
He has said that he is more concerned about the state of the natural world now than at any point in his career. This is not a comfortable statement from a man who began his career before the concept of mass extinction was widely understood by the public. It is the honest assessment of someone who has watched the trajectory for seventy years. The concern is warranted. The work that communicated it was necessary. Happy birthday, Sir David. The nation agrees on very little and on you, it agrees completely.
Mother’s Day and the Natural World
Today is Mother’s Day. Attenborough’s documentaries have, across their run, included some of the most striking footage ever filmed of animal motherhood: blue whale mothers and their calves, elephant matriarchs leading their herds, bird mothers feeding young from extraordinary distances, and the specific tenderness that maternal care across the animal kingdom produces when observed with the patience and expertise that Attenborough’s teams have always brought. The natural world, on Mother’s Day as on every day, is full of maternal behaviour that the documentaries have made visible to audiences who would otherwise never witness it. Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers, human and animal, that David Attenborough has spent a century helping us see. The work continues. The world needs it.
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London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
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