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# On 8 May David Attenborough turns one hundred
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/8-maia-devidu-attenboro-ispolniaetsia-sto-let/
- Published: 2026-05-03T15:42:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:10.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Cinema, Science, People, Nature

On 8 May David Attenborough turns one hundred. No one in history has shown the whole world for so long how life on this planet is put together. At 99 he managed, last year, to make one more film, Ocean, in which for the first time he spoke openly of industrial trawling as the chief catastrophe of the seas.

Attenborough's career began in 1952 at the BBC, when, as a young employee, he talked his superiors into sending him to Sierra Leone to film animals instead of presenting from the studio. Over the following seventy-odd years he made Life on Earth, The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and some forty more major series, translated into dozens of languages.

His elder brother Richard, the actor and director known for Schindler's List and Gandhi, joked all his life that David was known in more countries than any British prime minister.

For the centenary the BBC is preparing an anniversary series and a reissue of his archives, while we can meanwhile refresh the filmography ourselves. Take care not to get tangled in the similar titles. In the worst case, simply watch them all in a row:

☘️Life on Earth, 1979\. Thirteen episodes, the evolution of life from the first cell to the primates. The very programme after which nature on television became a genre in its own right.

🏜 The Living Planet, 1984\. A sequel to Life on Earth in geographical cross-section: deserts, oceans, tropics. It was here that Attenborough first spoke of the vulnerability of ecosystems, thirty years before the general interest in ecology.

🪸The Blue Planet, 2001\. Eight episodes on the world ocean, at that time the most expensive documentary project in the BBC's history.

🗺Planet Earth, 2006\. The BBC's first HD series. Five years in production and more than a hundred countries in the lens.

🥶Frozen Planet, 2011\. The Arctic and the Antarctic. The final episode, on climate, was at first refused by America's Discovery without alterations, but Attenborough insisted, and the episode went out in full.

🐘Africa, 2013\. Six episodes on African ecosystems. It includes the harsh and pitiless scene of the death of a baby elephant during a drought, which Attenborough called the most difficult episode of his career.

🌎Planet Earth II, 2016\. A sequel in which filming technique advanced so far that the episode with the iguanas and snakes in the Galápagos went viral. The soundtrack was written by Hans Zimmer.

🌐Blue Planet II, 2017\. An underwater sequel focused on plastic. The scene of a whale that will not let go of her dead calf shifted British public opinion so far that the country introduced legislative restrictions on single-use plastic. The effect was dubbed the Blue Planet effect.

🌏 A Life on Our Planet, 2020\. A feature-length film-testament. Attenborough's biography set alongside the history of the planet's ecological degradation.

🌊 Ocean, 2025\. Premiered for his 99th birthday. Attenborough for the first time openly names industrial trawling as the chief catastrophe of the seas, and films it as a personal message to the viewer.