, CH
, CVO
, CBE
, FRS, FZS
, FSA
(born 8 May 1926 in London, England) is a British broadcaster
and naturalist
. His career as the face and voice of natural history
programmes has endured for more than 50 years. He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series
, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit
, which collectively form a comprehensive survey of all life on the planet. He is also a former senior manager at the BBC
, having served as controller of BBC Two
and director of programming
for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s.
There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive. This is the story of how a few of them came to be as they are.
Immensely powerful though we are today, it's equally clear that we’re going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what's more there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world. […] As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.
The savage, rocky shores of Christmas Island, 200 miles south of Java, in the Indian Ocean. It’s November, the moon is in its third quarter, and the sun is just setting. And in a few hours from now, on this very shore, a thousand million lives will be launched.
At a time when it's possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it's possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what's more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so.