He’s just released Life in Cold Blood (a series on reptiles) which he says will be his final ‘on-site’ documentary. Understandable really; he has been doing this most of his life and, at 81, gallivanting around the Amazon or the Sahara is no small thing.

I’m looking forward to purchasing his final ‘Life’ series and, David, if you ever get to read this I want you to know that the work you’ve been involved in has extended my world’s horizons more than any other person. And for that I’m eternally grateful.

Here’s what Nancy Bank-Smith (a TV critic) has to say about his career:

David Attenborough was chasing a giant anteater on the South American savannah. It jinked and sprinted, showing, for a hefty beast, a nifty turn of speed. He followed like a schoolboy in shorts, helpless with laughter. It was the blissful spring of television. Zoo Quest was the first programme to show wild animals in the wild and the oxygenating joy of that moment I shall always remember. I remembered it when I saw, with a sympathetic twinge, how stiffly he walked at 81 in Life in Cold Blood. We are stiffer and wiser than we were. Today he would sit down beside a giant anteater and ask, in that mimicable murmur, how it was feeling. And it would reply: “Endangered.”

And here’s a snippet of what a British TV audience voted as the number 1 moment: