Help an American: David Attenborough

sharpless

Member
Hi all,

I am writing an article on the nature doc Planet Earth, and was wondering if I could ask the UK folks on here (who is nearly everybody I think) a question. Which is: how famous is David Attenborough? Is he famous among nature-folks? Is he famous generally? What kind of cultural place does he occupy in England?
 

luka

Well-known member
he is as famous as the queen. he is a sort of spirtual leader i suppose, in a very secualr nation.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
well put Luka.

he is a 'national treasure', for people across political/cultural/background divides, above the fray of most popular entertainment/politicians/sports stars/celebrities, he is trusted and adored because of his patient devotion to his craft and he always seems such a gentleman.

i could do without the Royal Family but i couldn't do without Attenborough.

on why he is an agnostic

My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, that's going to make him blind. And, 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy'
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Yup to both ^^, luka nailed it.

I'd be surprised if you get any responses that aren't close to adulation.

He's Britain's greatest living artist and was Britain's greatest artist of the 20th century. He documented the world before it died.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"I'd be surprised if you get any responses that aren't close to adulation."
Weirdly I was just thinking this morning about the affection he is held in - maybe there was something about him in the paper.
Anyone going to dissent anyway?
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag

This is just excellent, it says so much with so few words:

Attenborough, who attended the Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester in the 1930s, said he was astonished at manifestations of Christian faith.

"It never really occurred to me to believe in God - and I had nothing to rebel against, my parents told me nothing whatsoever. But I do remember looking at my headmaster delivering a sermon, a classicist, extremely clever ... and thinking, he can't really believe all that, can he? How incredible!"

Christians/religious believers just like words. They think words are special and mystical. They don't really worship a being in the sky, they worship words (Christians in particular even call their god "logos", which literally translates to "word").

Philosophy = classicism = religious belief on the secular level; so the precious, holy words are still there, but any pretense to belief in an invisible sky being (which would be grounding these words) is absent.

Although, in Plato, and in neo-Platonism you do have basically the same Christian babble under different names-- with "forms" being a lot like "words" in the Christian tradition, i.e. a priori universals with mystical values imbued from on high by Something Eternal, an ontological grounding force like a God.

Oh yeah, the true cults! All of them. All 6.66 x 10^25 of them.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
We came up with something bad to say about him.

His brother, Dickie, that being Sir Richard Attenborough, director of the film Gandhi and star of 'Brighton Rock', could be a bit difficult at times.

There.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
completely off topic i know but i'm really looking forward to that life on earth
soundtrack that's due any second.
 

Sectionfive

bandwagon house
sweet jesus

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ea...hange-episode-to-sell-show-better-abroad.html

The BBC has dropped a climate change episode from its wildlife series Frozen Planet to help the show sell better abroad.

British viewers will see seven episodes, the last of which deals with global warming and the threat to the natural world posed by man.

However, viewers in other countries, including the United States, will only see six episodes.

The environmental programme has been relegated by the BBC to an “optional extra” alongside a behind-the-scenes documentary which foreign networks can ignore.
 

martin

----
He's a complete cunt. That 'famous' footage of him, close-up to a mountain gorilla? It's fake. It was actually a well-trained gorilla they flew in from Whipsnade Zoo, whom they'd doped to the eyeballs. When they'd finished filming, they just chucked the wretched beast off the side off the mountain and drove off laughing.

Attenborough also really pissed off this small tribe in Polynesia, the camera crew burst into their food hut at 2am and scarfed down 2weeks' worth of hunted meat, plus they left a load of cigarette butts in a sacred urn. Apparently, Attenborough also once relieved himself on one of the heads at Easter Island, and he once broke a Masai warrior's spear, then hid it in a stock of firewood cos he was terrified they'd want financial compensation (the warrior, convinced he'd lost his weapon and tormented with shame, later topped himself).

He also once dropped a firework down a meerkat burrow, just so he could get some open shots of them 'before lunch'. He also dumped toxic chemicals into a small stream to 'flush out' some sarcastic fringeheads, because he was 'bloody sick of shy fish'.

But he's got a soft, unassuming camera style, so he's an 'institution'.
 
Top