Little-known facts about Sir David Attenborough — aka factoids, as hard-bitten journos know them.

And now this …

On the occasion of Sir David Attenborough's 100th birthday:

• David Attenborough hates crowds. He finds being surrounded by masses of people to be intimidating, if not downright unpleasant.

To wit: “I hate crowds … people being hysterical about anything, whether it’s a football match or a national celebration. Because they aren’t rational. A football crowd can be very frightening.”

A million+ wildebeest on their annual migration, on the other hand …

• He was rejected for his first job at the BBC. The Beeb found his handwritten 1951 application as a radio producer to be … wanting. This was before A.I.

• He doesn’t own a car. He never passed his drivers’ test.

• He holds more than 30 university degrees, most of those honorary, from institutions as noteworthy as Cambridge (Natural Sciences, geology and zoology) and Oxford (honorary, Doctor of Philosophy) to the more improbable for a lifelong scholar of the natural world: the London School of Economics (a postgraduate degree in social anthropology), shortly before he was appointed Controller of BBC 2 in 1965.

• He is the only television presenter to have won British Film and Television Awards (BAFTA) for programs in black and white, colour, HD, and 3D. It’s a TV thing.

• He is not fond of rats.

During a stay in a thatched hut in the Solomon Islands for the 1960 BBC docuseries A Journey Through the South Seas, he found rats to be, well … unbecoming.

Frightening, even, though there was also the sense that he may be having his interviewer on (the twinkle in the eye is a dead giveaway):

“I really, really hate rats. I’ve handled deadly spiders, snaked and scorpions without batting an eyelid, but if I see a rat I’ll be the first to run … I don’t mean that I mildly dislike them as I dislike, let us say, maggots. I mean that if a rat appears in a room, I have to work hard to prevent myself from jumping on the nearest table.”

True or not, you be the judge.

• As BBC’s newly appointed Director of Programmes in 1969, Sir David commissioned a late-night sketch comedy program from an untested troupe of Oxbridge misfits, despite initial misgivings.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus would go on to become part of the UK’s cultural DNA … long before Sir David turned to suiting real DNA full-time.

That said, there is no truth to the rumour — none — that the Python sketch “The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog,” a parody of natural history documentaries in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), was in. any way, shape or form a dig at one natural historian in particular.

Sir David had stepped down from his post of BBC’s Director ofProgramming two years earlier, in any event, in 1973.

The Pythons did, however, lampoon knights of the Realm — bigly so! — throughout Holy Grail’s 90-minute running time.

What better way, then, to end a list of Attenborough curiosities than on a light note. Not everyone is a fan , of course, but at least some unbelievers have a sense of humour about it all.

On the subreddit r/AskUK on Reddit, under the heading ‘Bad Things about David Attenborough,’ in addition to the usual contradictory catcalls from contrarians about his carbon footprint; his (alleged) abuse of self-service checkout counters; his (alleged) refusal of fan photos (“Please leave me alone,” he’s said to have said, as though he’s supposed to be on the clock 24/7, in his 90s no less; his (alleged) penchant for jumping queues; his reputation for being hard to work with (allegedly): there is this at least:

“His brother opened a safari park full of dinosaurs … it was a huge tragedy and loads of people died, but David has never bothered to comment on it.”

Ah, humour.

It can solve just about anything — except, it would appear, the climate crisis.

Source notes:

https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/entertainment/greatest-david-attenborough-moments, Reddit.