Remembering Bourdain, 8 Years Ago to the Day

June 08, 2026

“NOT a shit-hole,” Bourdain said with a rueful laugh, alluding to a certain US president, while surveying the eye-filling landscape of northern Kenyas’s Lewa-Boran wilderness, sitting atop a high rock escarpment alongside his friend and travel companion of the day, W. Kamau Bell.

This would be Bourdain at his most reflective, and pensive.

I never cared much for the words ‘funeral’ or ‘wake.’ A friend prefers the more poetic “celebration of life,” and on this anniversary of a life passed,

I prefer to take this moment to remember Anthony Bourdain in life, and remember what made him a voice of the world … for the world.

Bourdain himself would have been appalled by such maudlin and gauche sentiment. Sentimentality was not for him, though he could cry privately over injustice and cruelty to good, decent people with the best of them. Making a spectacle of himself in public after his passing would be anathema to him. It would have left him feeling embarrassed and irritable. Caustic, even. And witty.

For Bourdain was at his best — and most real — when he was leaning against the tide of popular convention. ‘Get a grip, people,’ I can picture him saying. ‘I mean, for f**k’s sake, it’s not like I’m important or anything.’

From Anderson Cooper to Christiane Amanpour to Barack Obama to the folks who follow him to this day on Tony Donato’s Anthony Bourdain Facebook page, everyone was the same in his eyes, celebrity and non-celebrity alike.

And equal.

For that was one of his unique gifts. He always saw the best in people, regardless of who they were.

For that is who he was, deep down. He lived his life in the moment, by moment,

And when someone stepped out of line, whether that person was merely a lost soul living on the margins or a head of state found to be profoundly lacking in integrity, dignity, humanity, judgment or even an ability to just do the job you’ve been elected to do, Bourdain would call him on his s**t, as he might say — and often did.

Everyone who discovered Bourdain can recall that moment with a unique clarity, as though it were yesterday.

For me, it was Africa.

I was on one of those 12-hour night flights, flying high above over the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where all one could see from the window of a Lufthansa Airbus was darkness and bursts of sheet lightning momentarily lighting up the clouds below, sheet after sheet after sheet of lightning in the darkness, mile after mile after mile, as far as the eye could see. And below the clouds, one of the world’s last surviving, primeval rainforests. This is Africa, and for me it was out of this world.

During his lifetime, Bourdain took in Madagascar and Senegal in his own unique way, alongside companions like the filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (you may know him from films like Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, and then again, maybe not) and the poet-philosopher and musician Youssou N’Dour; Ethiopia, with the chef Marcus Samuelsson; and so on.

Nigeria. Libya. Maroc. Rwanda. Ghana, for No Reservations, along with Liberia, Mozambique, and Namibia, a country I know well.

Parts Unknown’s Kenya, the premiere episode of the show’s 12th — and final, as it would turn out — season, is distinct on so many levels, not least because it was the first season-premiere episode to air after Bourdain died by his own hand on 8 June 2018, in the town of Kaysersberg Vignoble, France, at age 61.

Bourdain was filming an episode for Parts Unknown at the time, ironically enough, alongside his close friend and occasional Parts Unknown sidekick Éric Ripert.

(Parts Unknown Kenya was the first season premiere to air after Bourdain’s passing, but not the first standalone episode. Berlin, Cajun Mardi Gras and Parts Unknown’s 11th-season finale Bhutan, with its rumination on Old World wisdom and coming to peace with the afterlife, all aired in the weeks following. The episode Hong Kong, with its not inconsiderable emotional baggage — and I’ll leave it at that — aired just five days before Bourdain’s suicide.)

Kenya was distinctive, too, because unlike many episodes in which Bourdain was the sole focus, Kenya was driven by Bourdain’s companion W. Kamau Bell, raconteur-philosopher and stand-up comedian with his own CNN show at the time, United Shades of America, as he experienced his first visit to Africa and explored his emotional connections to the continent of his ancestors as an African-American.

Together, the two would tackle the “White Saviour” complex, engaging in candid, often uncomfortable conversation about socio-political dynamics and economic colonialism — the second-hand clothing industry, to cite just one example — and take a close, unflinching look at Nairobi’s vibrant urban culture as embodied by the township of Kibera.’

It’s the ending, though, that final poignant soliloquy toward the episode’s close that had viewers, as one viewer sop aptly put it at the on Reddit, “in bits.”

That soliloquy, first in quiet conversation as Bourdain and Kamau Bell sit alone atop a vast escarpment overlooking the silence of the African wilderness, and later in voiceover, would be Bourdain’s final witness statement.

From Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in the heart of northern Kenya’s Lewa-Boran wilderness region, to the hardscrabble back lanes of Nairobi’s Kibera township, this was Bourdain at his most reflective.

What better way, then, to close than with Bourdain’s own words:

“I will tell you,” he told Kamau Bell, “I got 17 years (of this). As soon as the cameras turn off … and the crew, we’ll be sitting around … having a cocktail … I’ll f**king pinch myself. I cannot f**king believe that I get to do this. Or see see this. Ever. That I ever would.

“Because, at 44 years old, dunking fries, I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would never, ever, ever see Rome, much less this.”

And then, minutes later, at the close, with Kamau Bell in Kibera…

“All of us, when we travel, look at the places we go, the things we see, through different eyes. And how we see them is shaped by our previous lives, the books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the baggage we carry…

“Who gets to tell the stories? This is a question asked often. The answer in this case, for better or worse, is, ‘I do.’ At least, this time out.

“I do my best. I look. I listen. But in the end, I know … it’s my story, not Kamau’s, not Kenya’s, or Kenyans’ … “those stories are yet to be heard.”

Anthony Michael Bourdain.

25 June 1956 to 8 June 2018.

Gone but never forgotten.

Letter from Tsavo

June 03, 2026

This is Tsavo, where Dame Daphne Marjorie Sheldrick lived for much of her 83 years.

Dame Daphne Marjorie Sheldrick, DBE (4 June 1934 - 12 April 2018) wrote of Tsavo National Park …

“Tsavo is a land where time doesn’t count and where everything is just as it was meant long ago. Trees and flowers are left to grow unchecked, and streams and rivers flow where they will …

“Here, all creatures live in accordance with a law that has governed nature since the world was new — the survival of the fittest. We, who lead sheltered and protected lives, might think of it as a cruel and rather frightening place, for it is a pristine world where mercy is unknown, but it is intensely fascinating with a mysterious charm of its very own that is pure and beautiful.

“Those who have once tasted its enchantment find it addictive and can never again escape its spell. They are drawn back as though by a magnet to savour the solace that it imparts to the soul. There, stepping back in time, we glimpse the world of yesterday, and we will forever be reminded that we share it with many other creatures who are also a part of creation with a specific purpose to their being, a vital ink in the chain of life.

“Thinking of the wild wonders all around us, we become mindful also of a great responsibility that has been vested in us, the responsibility to keep the chain of life intact, for to break a link is to jeopardize our own survival and that of many other creatures too.”

The solitude of a wild place often has another side, of course, that of the “notorious tsetse-infested nyika.”

This formidable and inhospitable barrier of arid scrub country was known as the Taru desert, Daphne Sheldrick goes on to write in her 2012 memoir An African Love Story: Love, Life, and Elephants.

Tsavo’s terrain was described by the 19th century Scottish explorer Joseph Thomson as ‘weird and ghastly … eerie and full of sadness, as if here all death and desolation.’

“Just one bite from an infected fly could be catastrophic,” Sheldrick continued in her memoir, “transmitting the wasting livestock disease trypanosomiasis, for which there was at the time no known cure.

“A few years earlier, most of the livestock used to transport materials to build the railway had been wiped out in this way and lessons had been learned.”

Or had they?

“It must have taken days to cut the cloth and secure it around each animal. Not an enviable job.”

Not unlike the unenviable job of today, when the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) among others are engaged in a pitched battle against elephant poaching in the 47,200 km² landscape. The poaching is driven by insatiable markets for ivory in the Arabian Peninsular, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

The Tsavo Trust, in partnership with KWS and the Sheldrick Trust, deploy ground patrols, aerial surveillance, and help from surrounding communities protect what is left of the 15,000 remaining elephants in the greater Tsavo Conservation Area.

While it is true there were roughly ten million elephants across the entire African continent in 1900 — specific numbers for Tsavo are hard to pin down, as the region was relatively unexplored at the time — the Tsavo program has had some effect. A poaching rampage in the late 1980s, coupled with a severe drought, devastated Tsavo’s elephant herds, driving the elephant population down to fewer than 6,000 animals.

In that context, today’s 15,000 elephants shows that conservation programs can work, if coordinated and well managed, and rooted in clear-eyed scientific research and rigorous numbers taking.

As always, the long rains and a sustainable supply of freshwater play their part.

The rains, Daphne Sheldrick wrote “(opened) my eyes to the spell of space and the contrasts that transformed the semi-desert of the brick red earth and grim leafless trees in the dry season to a vibrant painted paradise after the first rains. The first precious drops of rain had an intoxicating effect on us all.”

And there it is.

Daphne Sheldrick would have been 91 today, 4 June, 2026.

“It’s Like Killing Culture"

May 21, 2026

Indigenous Maasai face forced relocation from their ancestral lands in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area

It’s a story that has been quietly unfolding in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area since 2021, the year the UN Climate Working Group officially concluded that many of climate change’s impacts are now irreversible.

Given everything else going on in the world at the moment, it won’t surprise anyone — except those directly affected — that the story of indigenous pastoralists being forced off their ancestral lands in one of the world’s most pristine biodiversity hotspots has rated barely a mention in the world’s media. But there it is.

It’s a story worth following, though, a story that tell us who we are as a society, and a worrying sign of where humanity may be headed in the not too distant future.

Five years ago, Tanzania’s government initiated a large-scale tourism development project, in the name of conservation, in the Maasai’s traditional homelands surrounding Ngorongoro Crater, “the Eighth Wonder of the Natural World.”

Ngorongoro has been nicknamed “Africa’s Eden” — and rightly so — owing to its breathtaking views and year-round concentration of wildlife living in the sunken volcanic caldera.

Ngorongoro’s forest walls rise some more than 600 metres (2,000 feet) from the crater floor; the rim stands at an elevation of 1,800 m (7,500 ft) above sea level. The crater is the world’s largest inactive, unbroken, and unfilled caldera.

The crater floor spans some 260 km² (100 sq. mi). The crater walls, with their imposing 15°-17° vertical drop, act as a natural enclosure.

The crater floor is both home and refuge to a host of some of Africa’s most symbolic, enduring wild animals, from elephants, rhinos, lions, leopards and buffalo to wildebeest, zebras, hippos, giraffes and even the occasional cheetah.

The surrounding Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) is a panoply of sloping hills and vales, surrounded by a wide expanse of highland plains, savannah, savannah woodlands, and forests that, during the rainy, green season, have been likened more to Ireland’s emerald green hills and vales than equatorial Africa.

The Conservation Area is home, too, to some 20,000 Maasai at last count, though the exact number is hard to pin down.

Maasai have been barred from grazing their cattle inside the crater itself since colonial times in the late 1950s; Maasai still living in the crater were moved out by force in the mid 1970s by Tanzanian paramilitary units, and again in 2018, to preserve the crater’s wildlife and natural ecology.

A recent UNESCO report noted that Maasai have since been restricted from allowing their livestock to enter surrounding craters in the area, such as Olmoti, Empakaai and Lake Ndutu basin, which borders Serengeti National Park to the west.

Ngorongoro was established by British colonial authorities in 1959 as “a multiple land use area,” according to UNESCO, with wildlife “coexisting with semi-nomadic Maasai pastoralists practicing traditional livestock grazing.” (Ironically, Tanzania itself gained independence from Britain just two years later, in 1961.)

Ngorongoro Crater itself is of growing importance to global biodiversity, especially now, during these times of climate change and the growing threat of habitat loss and species extinction.

Humans have long lived in the area, early hominid footprints dating back 3.6 million years. The Maasai themselves are relatively new to the area, and have inhabited the Ngorongoro region for roughly the past 200 years.

Maasai villages, called bomas, crisscross the highlands surrounding the crater, but no longer in the crater itself, as we have seen.

To the Maasai, a boma or enkang is a social concept, not just a physical village, that helps unite families, homes, religious beliefs, and traditions. Without a written history, Maasai view bomas as part of their being and a symbolic record of their historical past, and not just a place to live.

The uneasy coexistence of cattle herds alongside wild predators, though, and the inevitable human-wildlife conflict that inevitably follows, has been a bone of contention for years.

With so many of Africa’s apex predators in the IUCN’s Red List of threatened and endangered species, the situation has never so fraught than it is right now.

Factor in the transmission of diseases from domestic animals, including dogs, to surrounding wild populations, and the challenge of maintaining an already fragile ecological balance is increasingly volatile.

Over the past two months, the Tanzanian government has ramped up plans to move Ngorongoro’s Maasai pastoralists to a planned village, Msomera, in the Tanga region, 600 km (370 m.) away.

The relocation programme has been described as voluntary, and includes a promise to provide housing, land and access to services, the environmental news site Down to Earth noted this past month.

“On paper, the offer appears substantia,” researchers wrote. “In practice, (however), it has faced significant criticism.”

The Tanzanian government said the move is necessary for conservation.

Naysayers say it has more to do with tourism, however, and the much needed foreign exchange tourism raises.

A substantial development project, designed to cater to the fast growing China-based tourism market, is the main driver behind the government’s decision, detractors say.

Tanzania’s government insists the move is needed to protect fragile ecosystems and reduce pressure on a globally significant landscape.

The Maasai see it as a loss of land rights and identity, part of a larger plan to move them off their ancestral lands once and for all.

Government officials point out in turn that, in 2026, the world is a different place, and a young, independent African nation state like Tanzania faces an increasingly uncertain future, environmentally and economically.

They need to tackle increasingly complex economic and environmental problems with a sober, clear-headed point of view, based on science, reason, and technology, not creation myths.

Critics argue that, in the end — as with most things — it comes down to money. Tourism has only scratched the surface in Africa’s wilderness areas, its boosters argue, and the fast-growing Chinese market — and fast-growing Chinese middle class — represent too good an opportunity to pass up.

Conservationists — some, but not all — counter that replacing the Maasai with mass tourism developments is hardly conducive to maintaining a stable environment and ecosystem. The Maasai, they say, have a point when they point out that they have coexisted with wildlife relatively peacefully for 200 years, having migrated into the area around the early 19th century.

Others note however — with no small amount of irony — that the Maasai themselves displaced prior pastoral groups like the Datoga.

“We are used to living with wild animals,” Maasai pastoralist Valerian Esuvat told Down to Earth last month.

“They want to take away our land as if we were never part of it.”

“A Maasai man is not meant to live in such a confined space, cut off from his cattle and his way of life,” a village elder told fellow villagers in Msomera, before leaving.

What comes next?

The future is cloudy. The Maasai point out that they have coexisted peacefully with wild animals since Enkai, the god of rain and thunder, created the universe, the earth, the sky, and all living creatures.

The Tanzanian government is insisting on moving ahead, however, citing good intentions and trusting in science and economics over tribal beliefs and religious traditions.

Detractors are dug in,. History has shown that indigenous people can be effective stewards of wildlife, academics at Yale University’s School of the Environment noted in the journal YaleEnvironment360, this past March.

“In Tanzania alone,” they wrote, “an area equal to seven Yellowstones (has been) managed for wildlife (for generations) by herders, farmers, and hunter-gatherers.”

It’s a new age, though, and the jury is out on whether mass tourism and conservation can co-exist in a world increasingly besieged by climate change and human population growth.

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors,” goes an old Maasai saying. “We borrow it from our children.”

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/39/

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/africa/maasai-displacement-fears-grow-as-tanzania-moves-to-reshape-ngorongoro

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/tanzania-maasai-evictions

https://ccs-ng.org/breathing-new-life-into-tanzanias-ngorongoro-lengai-geopark/

A Centenary for the Ages

May 07, 2026

As David Attenborough turns 100, our planet faces an uncertain future. It was ever thus — but he’d be the first to tell you that’s no reason to give up. Not now. Now, we need hope, and action, more than ever.

Just so.

“I have had the most extraordinary life,” David Attenborough said in his self-described witness statement for filmmaker Jonnie Hughes’ A Life on Our Planet, recorded in May 2018, on the occasion of the natural historian's 92nd birthday. “It’s only now that I appreciate just how extraordinary.”

He could not have known it then, but even something as seemingly simple and straightforward as a documentary film based on his life of exploring natural history and sharing what he found with an eager, appreciative global audience, would find itself being buffeted by the the capricious whims of fate. A Life on Our Planet was supposed to be released in theatres in April 2020, a week in advance of Earth Day.

And then COVID-19 happened.

Uncertainty reigned. In an eerie reflection of Attenborough’s lifelong concern with the environment, burgeoning world population, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the human-made forces threatening to tear apart what's left of the wilderness, there is not a single life on the planet that COVID did not touch in some way.

Mass vaccination campaigns and hybrid immunity reduced the severity of cases over time, even as the virus evolved to become more contagious but less severe. It could just as easily have gone the other way.

Today, the emergency phase may have been consigned to recent memory — but the virus itself continues to be circulate globally and is still being monitored.

As it was, A Life on Our Planet finally saw light of day in theatres in September of the COVID year; a month later, it made its streaming debut on Netflix.

There is a special irony that A Life on Our Planet opens in Chernobyl, as it was in 2018, in Pripyat inside Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, a ghost city frozen in time, 40 years after the 1986 disaster.

Ruined schools and apartment blocks are overgrown with trees; a rusting Ferris wheel, a symbol of the abandoned, silent urbanscape, lies at the heart of the abandoned city, both sentinel and silent reminder.

Wolves and other wildlife roam through the forest — for them, life goes on. Hidden secrets remain: do not think the radiation has somehow miraculously vanished. Long-lived isotopes like plutonium-239 will remain for thousands more years, though it is believed some areas will be safe for human habitation in another 300 years, give or take, as isotopes like Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 decay.

A handful of areas are safe for short-term visits — Attenborough survived it after all — but other areas will remain contaminated for 20,000 years, possibly more.

Chernobyl’s lessons have not been learned, though. War in Ukraine has seen to that…

Today, as Attenborough turns 100, he will have time enough to once again reflect on a life lived, and the world's prospects for a safe, green future. That future looks bleak indeed, right now, on 8 May 2026.

I didn’t intend this piece to be a hagiography. There will be plenty enough of those … and by better scribes — and deeper thinkers — than I. After all, there have been few public figures more admired and appreciated than this soft-spoken man born in Isleworth, West London, on 8 May 1926.

Still, even so, his life bears closer scrutiny, just the same.

Over the course of a lifetime he has given voice to those creatures unable to speak for themselves. He has touched people on a global scale precisely because because he is neither strident nor a shouter. He is soft-spoken on the screen, a whisperer, a gentle advocate for nature. with nothing to sell but his passion for the natural world.

His enthusiasm for nature is real, genuine, authentic, palpable, without the cynicism and condescension that makes so many other environmental messengers appear insufferable by comparison.

The “Attenborough Voice" is calm, soothing — never shrill or hectoring. Intimate. Singular. Unmistakable. Distinctive. His voice is a comforting presence for millions, even as the world around us appears to be unravelling.

He has that rare, unique ability to bridge the divide between science and entertainment. He speaks to everyone, not just a select few.

As a storyteller he is unmatched.

His work in television has been described as “reality TV for realists” but in truth there is do much more to it than that.

He is marked by his seeming humility. He comes across as gentle and kind; his focus is on the subject and never himself. It’s never about him. It has never been about him.

During these later stages of his career, he has become more outspoken on issues to do with climate change, overpopulation, biodiversity loss, and the damage we are doing to ourselves.

He has stayed this course, even as his critics — and they are legion — insist that he came to these realizations too late, that he could have done so much more, put his platform — and the massive global following that platform accrued — to better use.

The naysayers fail to see that he achieved what no others before him had done, which was to make people care about nature, and care passionately, whereas before they might not have given it a second thought.

He worries now. He worries terribly. For his entire life he has been a champion for the planet, and for the wild beings that inhabit it. A beacon of hope for millions.

His focus, starting with Coelacanth in 1952 and working through to A Secret Garden in 2026, has been to inspire others to action.

It has not always been easy, though, and he has not been immune to self-doubt.

In a private, personal admission to his good friend Jane Goodall — as later recounted by Goodall herself — Attenborough admitted to feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the state of the planet. He felt a growing despair for the future. He wondered if he had done enough.

Goodall told him that he judged himself too harshly, She told him that his singular achievement was in uniting the planet through his passion, giving untold millions a cause they could believe in, a cause rooted in hope, as she herself tried to do with her book Reason for Hope, and her Roots & Shoots advocacy program for young people.

The secret, she told him, was — and still is — in spurring others to action.

Jane Goodall passed in October of this past year, and the world feels her loss keenly. We live in the world, and the world is thus.

If I have strayed too close to hagiography, I am sorry. That was not my intention. Sometimes, though, we must simply accept the natural order of things. Do we live in the world thus, or this have we made the world?

The last word, as seems only fitting, belongs to Attenborough, from his witness statement in A Life on Our Planet:

“We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth … but if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.

“We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves.”

There was more.

“We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives …

“We humans, alone on Earth, are powerful enough to create worlds, and then destroy them.

“The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. All we require is the will.

“Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.“

Just so.

David Attenborough Curiosities

May 07, 2026

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.