While commissioning this weekend’s magazine cover feature, I had a sudden, surreal flashback to a university night out. It was my first year, I was on the sticky dancefloor of a sweaty nightclub, surrounded by fake foliage, while an episode of Blue Planet II played behind a DJ booth. Interpolated into disco tunes were samples of David Attenborough’s narration, and bobbing around me: hundreds of people in masks of his face.
This wasn’t a psychedelic trip. It was one of a nationwide string of Attenborough-themed club nights – and perhaps the most offbeat demonstration of the nature presenter’s enduring, cross-generational appeal.
Attenborough is undoubtedly something of a national spiritual leader and was once crowned the most popular person in Britain. But when I was set the task of wrangling 99 famous faces to each share something they’ve learned from him, to mark his 99th birthday, I was still nervous. As an editor, I am a seasoned veteran of celebrity rejection, I had visions of us limping towards our deadline with a handful of last-minute quotes, or having to pull the feature altogether.
I shouldn’t have worried. With each email our team fired off, a response came back almost immediately, each person more delighted than the next to be asked to contribute. An email to Barack Obama saw a response in record time. Billie Eilish, Jane Fonda, Morgan Freeman, Margaret Atwood, Louis Theroux, Michael Palin all queued up to share their two cents. There were also the A-listers of the nature world: Chris Packham, Steve Backshall, Jane Goodall.
With every quote that landed, I found myself learning some new, beautifully strange fact (and steadily becoming someone who regularly reels off stories about the sex lives of slugs at dinner parties). There were submissions about a bird-eating snake that impersonates a spider, about Clark’s grebes performing water dances as a mating ritual and about the evolutionary wizardry of grasses (they grow from the base, not the top, which is why grazers can munch away without killing the plant). I also learned far more about the man himself – beyond the safari suits and voiceovers, he was the BBC Two controller who brought colour TV to Wimbledon.
Perhaps the most arresting submission was from Just Stop Oil co-founder Roger Hallam, sent from prison, where he is serving a four-year jail sentence for nonviolent climate action. “David has shown us how beautiful the world is beyond words,” he wrote. “And also taught us that words alone will not save what is left to save.”
It’s not every week you get to edit a love letter to a living legend from 99 other living legends. I hope you enjoy it as much as we loved pulling it together.
Illustration: Edith Pritchett/The Guardian
