On the eve of a new series, "Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild," Samantha Weinberg recounts the career of England's iconic naturalist:
By 1956, Attenborough had persuaded the BBC to let him try a new way of filming—from and of the natural world. With only a cameraman and animal expert for company, he would go off for months to remote lands in search of rare beasts. In Borneo, some days’ walk from civilisation, he was on the trail of orangutan when he spied a man paddling up the river, wearing only a sarong and bearing a message tucked in a cleft stick. It was from the BBC, giving instructions on how to use their new toy: colour film. What started in a makeshift fashion with "Zoo Quest" matured over the decades into "Life on Earth", "The Private Life of Plants", "Life in Cold Blood", "Frozen Planet" and many more. With Attenborough, the phenomenon of natural-history film-making was born.
Attenborough hopes his film-making will push people into saving a planet they typically enjoy from the couch:
As he concludes in the last episode of the new series: "I've spent my life filming the natural world and I’ve travelled to some pretty remote and exciting places to do so… But every journey seems to have got quicker and shorter. It’s as if the world has shrunk – but then sadly so have the wild places."
The Dish 