It is so esteemed that its name has been given to animals and plants, such as a tiny Australian spider – Prethopalpus attenboroughi – and a giant carnivorous plant from Palawan in the Philippines, Nepenthes attenboroughii.
For American singer Billie Eilish, David Attenborough is a “living treasure”.
He “made natural history a general public subject, something that can be as popular as sport or football,” explains Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, professor of Science Communication at UCL University in London.
“He instilled a passion and wonder for the natural world that is unrivaled,” continues this Frenchman, who discovered David Attenborough while settling in the United Kingdom.
David Attenborough’s career, inseparable from the BBC, began at the beginning of the 1950s. His natural gift for telling stories, his warm, recognizable voice, quickly won over viewers.
Since then, he has never stopped and his almost childish enthusiasm has not left him.
Like when he played with mountain gorillas in Rwanda in 1978.
Attenborough traveled the planet wearing beige pants and a blue shirt, bringing back often never-before-seen images of jungles, deserts and oceans.
An estimated 500 million people worldwide watched his first major nature series, 1979’s “Life on Earth.” “I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still left to explore,” he said at the time.
“He brought nature into our living rooms. He took us to places where we would never have gone otherwise, it’s a huge gift,” pays tribute to Sandra Knapp, botanist and director of research at the Natural History Museum in London.
Sandra Knapp explains that for the scientist that she is, he is “a true inspiration”. “He manages to make quite complex scientific concepts very simple,” she says.
For years, she showed her evolutionary biology students her show about birds of paradise, “a wonderful illustration of sexual selection.”
It also sparked vocations. “Many biologists are where they are because they watched David Attenborough programs when they were children,” assures Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.
Although he holds a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University, he always presented himself as a television man and not a scientist.
Knighted in 1985 by Queen Elizabeth II, with whom he was friends, he warned of the devastation caused by humans.
In 2025, in the documentary, “Ocean”, he condemned the industrial fishing methods of rich countries, “a modern colonialism of the sea”.
Many of the locations filmed by Attenborough were later destroyed by man.
David Attenborough has always refused to be seen as a celebrity. “He’s someone who fades away, who always brings the spectators’ gaze back to the thing he wants to show,” underlines Jean-Baptiste Gouyon. In this, he is different from the Frenchman Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997), who was “the adventurer with his red beret, the one who tells his story”.
But “each time David Attenborough releases a new documentary, even if it is 100 years old, it is an event”, underlines Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.
David Attenborough no longer travels through the jungle or the desert but continues to tell stories about our planet.
In “Wild London”, a documentary broadcast in early 2026 on the BBC, he is passionate about the extraordinary wildlife of London, his city of birth.
After all his travels, Attenborough said his favorite place remained Richmond, a wealthy, leafy suburb in southwest London where he lived most of his life, with his wife Jane, mother of his two children, who died in 1997.
