I have to say that I have always been a complete sucker for nature documentaries. If you’re in my age bracket, you probably watched the legendary “Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” every single Sunday night of your childhood just before the “Wonderful World of Disney” came on just like me and my brothers. We also lived for Jacques Cousteau specials and National Geographic specials. I’ve also always been a big fan of Sir David Attenborough, the British naturalist and documentarian who has been a presence on British TV for half a century and on American TV almost as long. His latest series on the BBC is called “Life In Cold Blood” and is about reptiles and amphibians; it begins on BBC One in a couple of weeks (which means we probably won’t see it on American television until 2009).
New Humanist magazine has a good profile of David Attenborough that doesn’t shy away from some criticisms he’s received over the years, or from his role in the ongoing debate with the “Intelligent Design” morons. If you’re a fan, you’ll want to read the piece.
I was a bit disappointed that when Discovery Channel ran the incredible “Planet Earth” series last year that they chose to re-record all the narration using Sigourney Weaver instead of Attenborough, but at least you can buy the original BBC version on DVD from Amazon with his narration (I don’t have anything against Sigourney Weaver at all, I just would have preferred him).
I also have a wee story to share: one of my professors for both my undergrad and Master’s programs was a fellow named Stuart Kaminsky (he has since left academia to pursue his career as a mystery novelist). Stuart liked to tell the story of the doctoral student in our department (radio-TV-film) who chose to write her dissertation on Sir Richard Attenborough, well-known actor and the director of such films as “Gandhi” and “A Bridge Too Far”. Unfortunately, the poor student confused DAVID Attenborough and RICHARD Attenborough (they are, in fact, brothers), and wrote a very detailed analysis of how one person could produce nature films AND star in Hollywood movies at the same time. He swore this was a true story, and also averred that he actually voted to give her a passing grade on her dissertation because he thought her argument, though based on false premises, was totally coherent.
(And it was Dickie in “Jurassic Park, not David, though if he were going to be in a Hollywood movie, that would have been an appropriate choice.)
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