Four decades ago, Sir David Attenborough traveled to Nigeria to examine a complex insect society built by more than a million constituents with no more than five brain cells apiece. It was a termite mound, standing 15 feet tall, with imposing concrete-like spires built entirely of clay and saliva. Local Nigerian workers were clearing the area for farmland, which meant that this termite manor would have to be demolished. But not before Attenborough and a documentary film crew burrowed more than 6 feet beneath the surface to capture one of nature’s most extraordinary feats of architectural engineering for the 1990 series The Trials of Life.
A termite colony is multitiered and manifold. There is the queen and her round-the-clock nursery workers. There are gardeners. There are laborers. There are soldiers. This termite species is called Macrotermes bellicosus. Macrotermes means “big termite.” Bellicosus means “warlike.” The soldiers are distinct, with an engorged head and hedge-trimmer pincers comically larger than their abdomen—imagine a stone crab claw affixed to a foam earplug. “These really aggressive soldier termites will attack anything that comes into the mound,” Mike Gunton, the creative director and executive producer of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, told me. “Including David Attenborough.”
The activity among the hundreds upon thousands of termites generates a considerable amount of heat within the fortress. Enough to kill off the entire colony if there weren’t a means of reprieve. Luckily, there is. The film crew bored two holes 6 feet deep: one for the camera, and one for Attenborough to wriggle his way in through. The camera revealed a remarkable underground air-conditioning system, one of the most impressive structures that Sir David had ever seen. The entire colony rested on a plinth of clay, and on the underbelly of that structure were rows of razor-thin slats of mud that absorbed the heat and moisture and cooled the entire colony in the evaporation process.
Attenborough crawled into the hole, but only partially. The most trusted voice of our time could be heard on Gunton’s headphone monitors, but instead of Attenborough’s immortal timbre, the only utterances coming through were a procession of discomforted grunts and yelps. “Ooh, oww!” The soldiers had descended on him. Still, he persevered, delivering his piece about the termites’ bespoke AC unit. Unfortunately, he hadn’t crawled deep enough to come into the lighting. The camera operators only saw Attenborough’s feet twitching. The shot was a disaster. He was pulled out of the hole. His clothes were covered in mud, his body was covered in bites, his hair was mussed, his shirt was torn. Gunton walked over to Attenborough sheepishly. “David, I'm sorry, but you didn't come into the light,” Gunton said. “You're going to have to do this again.”
Attenborough stared at Gunton, heaved a sigh, and composed himself. “Do I? … Of course.”
The crew reset the shot and fixed the lighting. Sir David changed his shirt. Together, they all did a prayer to the termites. Action. “He crawls in, hits his mark absolutely perfectly, delivers the piece to camera perfectly,” Gunton said. “The termites don't attack him.”
Cut! Gunton was thrilled. Attenborough was wrested once more from the termite lair and wryly asked, “Absolutely sure? Don't want to do another one?”
The termite mound was a quintessential Attenborough scene: It brought the viewer closer to an ineffable process of nature than ever thought possible, forming a vivid memory out of something you had no idea existed. That ability to illuminate the unseen is one of Attenborough’s greatest gifts as an educator, a storyteller, and a human being. It is a by-product of his ethos and his iconic half-hushed delivery—intimate enough to make you feel like you’re being told a secret of the natural world, quiet enough so as not to draw any undue attention away from the natural spectacle at hand. The Ringer’s own Brian Phillips once described Attenborough’s voice as “somewhere between the voice of a golf announcer and the voice of a loving god.” It is indeed one of the great voices in history, precisely because it is history. Other than Queen Elizabeth II, who was first publicly recorded on a radio broadcast when she was a 14-year-old in 1940, there might not be another person whose voice has been so thoroughly documented in each of the past eight decades.
On May 8, Sir David will mark 100 years of life on this planet. More than 70 of those have been dedicated to bringing us closer to nature. Attenborough grew up in a world shaped by the Great Depression, began his career on air during the baby boom, and has persisted long enough to see his nature documentaries premiere five generations later, at the ground floor of Generation Beta. A century’s worth of accumulated knowledge is both a privilege and a burden in the Anthropocene—the present geological era, defined by humanity’s industrialized exploitation of the environment and its finite resources. It’s all present in his voice. In his old age, Attenborough’s words are held together largely by the dueling poles of enthusiasm and concern; once formed, they leave a trail and dissipate like vapors. Yet his voice is paradoxically more powerful than it ever was in the vigor of his youth. It doesn’t boom or bellow. It resonates like a conscience.
In that sense, David Attenborough is not the voice of a generation, but of generations.
David Attenborough with an orangutan and her baby at London Zoo in 1982
The walls of Gunton’s South West England office were painted a warm, yellow-cast green, and a framed poster of the 1953 sci-fi horror movie It Came From Outer Space hung behind his desk. He sat casually on a tufted lounge chair, with one arm resting over the cushion. Just behind Gunton was Sir David himself, slightly askew, his neck wrapped in a black scarf, his chin resting on his fist, not unlike a Rodin sculpture. They were so close that, in Gunton’s enthusiastic gesticulations, his elbow occasionally dug right into Attenborough’s knee. But David didn’t budge. His straightforward gaze was relentless. It was like he was somewhere else completely.
“That cutout has been with me in every office I've had for 35 years,” Gunton told me. “This is one of my most treasured possessions. I sometimes forget that I have it in the room. … And because of the way the Zoom perspective works, it looks like we're sitting next to each other.”
He remembers when this particular photo of Attenborough was taken; he was there with him, along a rocky coastline 60 miles away from this office back in 1989, shooting a scene about hermit crabs for Trials of Life. Gunton recalled sitting by a rock pool as Attenborough took out an empty shell from his pocket. “I'm just going to introduce a new house into the housing market,” Attenborough said, as he tossed the shell into the water and watched the curious hermit crabs take tours of the new property.
Working with David was supposed to be a one-off, a project to cross off the bucket list in Gunton’s 20s. He’d first met Attenborough a couple of years earlier, during an early BBC production meeting for The Trials of Life, what was then thought to be Attenborough’s last documentary series. “It was a kind of boyhood dream, really, to meet him,” Gunton told me. “I'd always had this idea, I'd love to work on an Attenborough series. So I thought if ever I'm going to do it, I’d better try and get on this project because there won't be another chance.”
It turns out that there were many, many more chances. That was nearly 40 years and countless projects ago. Attenborough once again mulled over a possible retirement in 2005, after one last series about insects. "By then I'll be in my 80th year. I'm hoping they'll invent a motorized zimmer frame to get me up trees," Attenborough joked then. But the greats can never walk away. His series on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 was then supposed to be his final on-the-road documentary, but firmly into his 90s, Attenborough was still insisting on rowing his own boat through Croatian waters for 2022’s The Green Planet. “The fundamental reason why I have spent my life in the way I have, and why I am reluctant to stop making programmes, is that I know of no pleasure deeper than that which comes from contemplating the natural world and trying to understand it,” he wrote in his memoir, Life on Air.
Attenborough’s longevity is a testament to both his adaptability and his insatiable curiosity. “His post bag and his libraries are extraordinary,” Gunton, the executive producer of the standard-bearing Planet Earth trilogy, said. “So he has access to all this new information, but his capacity to read and to ingest and to understand and to then report back is unique. A handful of people on planet earth have that capacity at that age.”
Where most narrators invoke an air of credibility through vocal prowess alone, Attenborough’s authority enshrouds him like an aura. He knows more about the systems that govern the six kingdoms of life today than he did when he was 80, and infinitely more than he did when he first began presenting in his late 20s. His sense of duty as the face of new documentaries with bleeding-edge findings and camerawork affirms his commitment to science’s never-ending mission toward acquiring understanding. His mere presence imbues a sense of trust in the story.
Increasingly, that involves saying less. “I’m sitting writing the commentary. So I see the action before I know it’s going to happen. And so it surprises me,” Attenborough has said. “I sit in front of the television with my pen writing the words, and then suddenly you see this and you realize you haven’t written anything. Because you’re just completely held. And that may tell you that perhaps words aren’t all that necessary.”
One can only imagine how enraptured Attenborough must have been when recording his voiceover for the snakes and iguanas scene from 2016’s Planet Earth II, arguably one of the most breathtaking sequences ever captured on camera. It is a perfect chase scene, as stylish and cinematic as the iconic car chases in Bullitt or The French Connection. In a four-and-a-half-minute clip, Attenborough utters just 89 words total.
“There's very sparse narration in that because the action is so intense, you don't really need to say what's going on,” Gunton said. “And once you've set it up, it's so visceral. But right at the very end, when the final iguana escapes and makes it up onto the cliff, we decided that you needed to say, ‘A near-miraculous escape.’ Because what you're doing there is saying to the audience, ‘It's over.’ The pressure, the tension is finished. The most enjoyable second of getting off the roller-coaster ride is when you step off the roller coaster onto the ground and go, ‘I survived.’”
There have been more dominant, commanding voices in popular culture. Orson Welles spoke with such rippling gravitas that he drove an entire nation into panic by reading a book adaptation over the radio on Halloween Eve. James Earl Jones’s deep articulation of the New Testament all but established the modern voice of God. Attenborough’s voice sits in the same pantheon but draws its strength from a different source.
Attenborough gets a closer look at an Australian pygmy goanna on a visit to Sydney in 1984
It is the most relatable thing you’ll ever learn about Sir David Attenborough: He, too, was adrift in his mid-20s. In 1949, Attenborough worked as a junior editorial assistant for a London educational publisher, proofreading children’s science books. He spent his days counting words, but mostly counting down clocks. He had a degree in natural science from Cambridge that he’d rather naively thought would allow him to conduct research in the farthest corners of the world. After Cambridge, he’d been called up to the navy; he hoped he would be stationed in a faraway port city like Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. There was romance in those distant lands—less so in the nearly defunct reserve fleet that he was actually assigned to in North Wales, stationed less than 500 miles from where he was born.
Drudgery led him to respond to a job listing in The Times for a BBC radio producer position. The job went to someone else, but his application made an impression with the corporation’s fledgling television department. It wasn’t an obvious fit. He’d only ever watched a television program once in his life, at his in-laws’. Still, he nailed the interview and went ahead with the training, if for no other reason than that he had a young family to provide for.
But even early on in Attenborough’s tenure at the BBC offices, there was a sense that he felt a calling from out in the wilderness. The network used to do educational programs about animals, sure, but only to the extent that humans would still be in control of the environment. Attenborough found it all excruciatingly regimented. He wanted to make a change. So he schemed with a friend, Jack Lester, the reptile curator for the London Zoo, to create a series that showed how animals were captured in the wild to be put in a zoo. From that germ of an idea came Zoo Quest, Attenborough’s first on-screen foray into the world of nature documentary, in 1954.
At last, Attenborough had found the means of exploration he’d been seeking for his entire young adult life. He trekked to forests in Sierra Leone, on the lookout for colobus monkeys and white-necked rockfowl. He traveled through the island chains of Indonesia in search of Komodo dragons and birds of paradise. But the role of presenter—the role Attenborough has shaped and perfected as much as any master in their respective field—had never been his primary ambition. Mary Adams, the pioneering BBC television executive who’d discovered Attenborough’s failed radio producer application, thought that his teeth were too big for him to be on-air talent. Attenborough became the presenter of Zoo Quest only after Lester, the London Zoo curator, was incapacitated by a fatal disease he’d contracted during their travels.
Where most narrators invoke an air of credibility through vocal prowess alone, Attenborough’s authority enshrouds him like an aura.
Zoo Quest ran for eight series, and Attenborough moonlighted as an adventurer as a respite from his day-to-day responsibilities in the BBC office. He briefly resigned from his desk job to pursue a social anthropology degree at the London School of Economics, only to be lured back in 1965 to the mothership as an executive for a new channel, BBC Two.
It was during that time overseeing the programming of an entire television channel—intuiting the balance of education and entertainment, the interplay of comedy and drama, sports and art—that a chrysalis of change began forming around Attenborough. After the success of landmark documentaries like Civilisation and The Ascent of Man, which Attenborough had both commissioned and produced, the BBC’s Natural History Unit began workshopping ideas for a similar series about evolution. The idea they landed on would require a three-year commitment for the presenter. Impossible for Attenborough, given his day job. So the day job would have to go. “Now there was nothing to prevent me from saying outright that I would dearly like to write and present it,” Attenborough wrote in Life on Air.
For years, exploring and making sense of the natural world had been a sort of escape. But this new reality presented an opportunity to turn that desire into his life’s mission. The result of Attenborough’s full-fledged commitment was 1979’s Life on Earth, the Promethean point of origin for all modern nature documentaries. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species at the age of 50; Attenborough was 53 when he presented Life on Earth. All of the accumulated knowledge gained from Attenborough’s time at the BBC had led to this. It was Attenborough’s emergence from his chrysalis.
Attenborough in the BBC edit suite following his appointment as the new controller of BBC 2
Life on Earth, across its 13 episodes, traced the evolutionary arc of plant and animal life, from the earliest single-cell organisms to the emergence of humans. It set the early blueprint for what would become hallmarks of an Attenborough documentary: patient delivery, state-of-the-art image capture, and the occasional token of profundity. “If beauty comes from perfection, if grace is a measure of skill, then a bird in the air must be among the loveliest sights in nature,” Attenborough rhapsodized in narration during the eighth episode.
But the series was immortalized by a candid moment of connection unlike anything televised before. In 1978, Attenborough traveled to the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda in hopes of filming gorillas in the wild—which, at that point in time, had scarcely been achieved. He and the crew worked with primatologist Dian Fossey, who had spent years in Rwanda researching gorilla behavior, dedicating her life to their conservation. Upon Attenborough’s arrival, he was informed of a recent killing of a young gorilla, Digit, who had developed a bond with Fossey over the years. Poachers had severed Digit’s head and hands to sell them at a tourist shop, Attenborough recalled in Life on Air.
As distrustful as Fossey had grown of outsiders, she agreed to assist the crew as a necessary mediator. The groups of gorillas in the area had grown accustomed to Fossey and her staff’s presence. Attenborough would need to be formally introduced by someone familiar—it’s the same convention as in human social interaction. The crew was taught basic decorum: heads should be kept low in deference; stares are interpreted as challenges; constant burping is a considerate action, as it functions to gently announce one’s presence without triggering a sense of threat.
Attenborough spent a week slowly ingratiating himself, until one day, he pushed past a tall patch of grass and realized that there was an adult female peacefully grazing just a few feet away, her infant children eager to play with a newfound friend. The crew behind Attenborough had set up and was ready to film. The segment was originally meant to explain the evolutionary breakthrough of the opposable thumb, but in the still intimacy of the moment, with the weight of Digit’s death still lingering, Attenborough dropped the script entirely:
The gorilla scene in Life on Earth stands as arguably the most effective delivery of his career. There in the clearing up in the Virunga Mountains, his hushed tone was a sign of respect, to draw as little attention to himself as possible. Yet his message was all the more powerful for it. That whisper would become a trademark, one he carries with him to this day.
There is a photo of David, on his final day in the Virunga Mountains, with a 3-year-old gorilla named Pablo tranquilly resting on top of him. Just moments earlier, the youngster had been trying to untie his shoelaces. In his short time with the gorillas, he’d formed a bond with the young one, and he kept abreast of Pablo’s life even after he’d left Rwanda. Little did he know that Pablo would go on to become the patriarch of the largest gorilla group in the Virunga Mountains to this day. The new Netflix documentary A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough weaves together nearly 50 years between then and now, interspersing clips from 1978, readings from Attenborough’s detailed journal entries from back then, and present-day footage of Pablo’s group.
“There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know,” Attenborough famously said in the scene from Life on Earth. “So if ever there was a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature's world, it must be with the gorilla.” Yet, through A Gorilla Story’s almost impossibly close-up view of gorilla society, the glaring similarities between species become a kind of parable. The documentary highlights a tense transfer of power amid a (relatively) peaceful collaboration between rivals within the Pablo group. It also, rather soberingly, captures an all too familiar crisis experienced by a young adult male and how alienation and ostracization from the larger group can lead to unspeakable acts of brutality.
A Gorilla Story is multiple things at once. It is a time capsule celebrating Attenborough’s illustrious run that helps our understanding of the present. Technology has dramatically evolved in that span, as has our grasp of primate behavior. The new Netflix documentary references lines from Attenborough’s impassioned Life on Earth monologue, but it leaves other parts out. Although he spoke of “escaping the human condition” back then, even Attenborough was not immune to projection. “It seems, really, very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolize all that is aggressive and violent,” Attenborough had said in 1978. “When that is the one thing that the gorilla is not—and that we are.”
Of course, we now know that to be false. Gorillas certainly demonstrate tenderness and care in their social bonds, but they, too, contain multitudes. A Gorilla Story is anchored in violence, both in its resolution and in its inevitability. It is a behavior that, as has become increasingly clear, binds the entire hominoid family. Earlier this month, a research study was published about a conflict within a previously harmonious group of Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda that has led to a fracturing into two distinct factions—and the violent deaths of at least 28 members (the majority of which have been infants) over the past eight years. It can be difficult not to see the Ngogo chimpanzee “civil war” as a portal into the very origins of human conflict, before religion, politics, and cultural differences made for convenient tension points. The more we learn about our closest relatives, the more there is left to uncover about the very nature of us all. Attenborough is a living document of that pursuit.
“Animals, when they appear on your screen, have a number of qualities that are unique to them,” Attenborough has said. “They’re not trying to sell you anything, and they’re not telling you lies. They are unpredictable. They are very often new. They’re extraordinarily beautiful. They’re dramatic. And they share something with us, which is life. What more do you want from your television?”
Attenborough in the studio
Attenborough’s on-location presenting days are largely over, so footage of him actually interacting with the faraway lands he speaks of is a rarity in new material. But, for several generations at this point, Attenborough has been more readily recognizable as the benevolent, disembodied voice playing off a swirling Hans Zimmer score. When Attenborough was younger, there was a set routine on narration days. He would get in his car and make the two-hour drive west from his home in Richmond to Bristol, home of the best nature documentary filmmaking on the planet. He’d have his cup of coffee, bang out his lines, have lunch with the crew, and then drive home.
The COVID-19 pandemic complicated things. Rather than setting up at a professional studio, producers gathered at the Attenborough household. The audio engineer Graham Wild would isolate in Attenborough’s backyard garden shed, feeding wires into the house, where David would record from his dining room. Susan, Attenborough’s daughter, would line the walls with old duvet covers to dampen the echoes, then set up the Zoom on his laptop. He’d put on his headphones and go.
“We did that for, I suppose, 18 months during COVID,” Gunton said. “And then we all thought, ‘This is actually really nice. It is technically quite efficient.’ And so we've never changed it. That's our default position now. That's what we do. Well, the only difference is now Graham isn't in a shed out in the garden; he's now in the kitchen.”
There is an implicit understanding among the audience that Attenborough is great at what he does. He ought to be, after several hundred documentaries under his belt. But it’s difficult to overstate how extraordinary his gift of narration is. He’d spent his early career beholden to the technology of the times. Audio used to be recorded on rolls of magnetic 35mm film that ran for 10 minutes apiece. Because of the cost, they weren’t allowed to edit the rolls. “So if you fluffed a word nine minutes in, you had to start again. That usually produced enough adrenaline to enable you to keep your concentration right to the very end,” Attenborough wrote in Life on Air. “Today, it is possible to stop and start after every sentence, but I still think it preferable to record an entire commentary in one run, even if that lasts an hour.”
Turning in an entire documentary episode’s worth of voiceovers in one casual afternoon, though, isn’t expected of anyone other than David Attenborough. “I’ve worked with Hollywood actors on movies I’ve made, and you’ll spend three or four days recording the narration for a 90-minute movie,” Alastair Fothergill, a documentary producer who has worked with Attenborough for more than 40 years, has said. “David, still, will come into Bristol at 11 o’clock from Richmond and record a 50-minute narration in about an hour and 10 minutes.”
More on David Attenborough
Since production teams started defaulting to remote Zoom sessions, it has become more convenient to invite bosses and clients to see Attenborough’s process for themselves. “David sits there, and we play the footage. And he's got the time codes, and he reads against those time codes,” Gunton said. “And we get to the end in one take, and everybody goes … What?”
Little has changed, even as Attenborough enters his centenarian years. A Gorilla Story traces an arc of connection and resilience nearly 50 years in the making, and it wouldn’t work without Attenborough’s ability to bridge that time span with his personal recollections. “It's a miracle that he can perform and communicate and remember with such clear detail and then see the meaning of that in hindsight,” Fothergill said.
No one does it like David, which raises a question that’s been on the minds of fans, producers, and media corporations alike in their decades-long preparation for a world without Attenborough. How do you replace someone irreplaceable—at a time when he’s needed more than ever?
The nature documentary as a form won’t end with Attenborough, but it may lean deeper into the human impulse to conveniently match the content with the spirit of a celebrity narrator. Paul Rudd’s immortally boyish ethos—and portrayal of Marvel’s Antman—made him a fitting, on-the-nose choice for Apple TV+’s Tiny World. Tilda Swinton’s forays into documentary voiceover work are compelling, perhaps because her imaginative character acting on film lends itself to narrating something outside the human paradigm. Morgan Freeman’s dignified performance in March of the Penguins made him one of the most sought-after voices in the business. More than 20 years later, Freeman remains a staple, most recently heard in last month’s The Dinosaurs, a Steven Spielberg–produced miniseries that collapses and condenses the context and existence of dinosaurs in an effort to present a sort of prehistoric Song of Ice and Fire.
“I would say that there's a handful of actors that I've worked with who have delivered, I think, extremely good performances,” Gunton said. “And without exception, they will be the ones who say, ‘I don’t know how I can do this compared with David Attenborough.’ They understand what he's bringing to it.”
Attenborough and Mike Gunton at the launch of BBC Studios’ ‘Planet Earth III’ in 2023
Attenborough speaks with an accent known as Received Pronunciation, considered the British standard, connoting high social status and prestige. For those who are ill versed in the U.K.’s many regional accents, Received Pronunciation is the sound of an English person in your mind’s ear. It is the sound of the Lannisters on Game of Thrones, the sound of Shakespeare in a theater. “It can sort of make him sound timeless,” Laurel MacKenzie, an NYU linguistics professor, told me. “Which is funny, because Received Pronunciation is really rooted in a particular era.”
There is no one in the world who has spent more time examining Attenborough’s voice than MacKenzie, who has published not one but two studies on the changes in his speech over the course of his life on air. MacKenzie’s recent 2025 study analyzed more than 50 hours’ (or 504,697 words’) worth of data collected from 18 different Attenborough documentary series spanning from 1956 to 2015.
It can be jarring to revisit footage of Attenborough in his 20s, during his Zoo Quest days. His diction has always been impeccable, but his manner of speaking was notably different then. His vocal pitch was much higher. His words were hurried and sharp, emulating the zooming articulation of old-time radio broadcasters. “His accent sort of changes over the course of his lifespan or his career,” MacKenzie said, “which seems to potentially connect to the way Received Pronunciation has changed over the 20th century.”
MacKenzie noticed that Attenborough’s pronunciation was at its most formal at the beginning of his career, which was largely spent interfacing with colleagues at the office. The culture that surrounded him, MacKenzie suspected, had informed his speech—after all, Received Pronunciation, for a time, was also called “BBC English.” But by the time Attenborough transitioned to being a full-time presenter in his 50s, the kind of cut-glass sharpness in his accent had relaxed. Perhaps in the East African savanna, among the vervet monkeys, no one cares how posh you sound.
David sits there, and we play the footage. And he's got the time codes, and he reads against those time codes. And we get to the end in one take, and everybody goes … What?Mike Gunton
“I would be very surprised if he's consciously changed that voice,” Gunton said. “I just think with exposure to the media and with age and with the range of things he's doing and also the type of narration, the type of voice he's bringing to these projects, I think it has evolved into a theatrical voice. He's learned how to deliver, how to bring punctuation, how to bring the comic timing, how to bring the seriousness, when to give energy, when to give pathos, all those skills that come from a great performer.”
The great actor Judi Dench has long held admiration for Attenborough, undoubtedly an inspiration for her 2017 BBC documentary, My Passion For Trees. “Judi's a great fan of David's delivery, and she says he is as good as any Shakespearean actor. He has got the same range and the same understanding … and I think she's dead right,” Gunton told me.
“But what David has got, this extra ability, is it’s Shakespeare for everyone. A Shakespearean play may not be to everybody's taste, but David manages to deliver that sort of Shakespeare DNA, but to everybody, irrespective of their background and their age and their perspective.”
Attenborough’s voice is not as pliant as it was in his younger years, yet he has rare access to a dynamic range of expression that’s only fully revealed itself in old age. Attenborough’s patinated voice carries with it a lifetime of witnessing the greatest threat to the planet—us. It grows stronger because it has to. He is not alone in that regard within the animal kingdom. A 2011 study found that, in African elephant families, herds led by a matriarch older than 60 years were better at identifying and communicating against predatory threats than herds featuring younger matriarchs.
“If you go back to the older programs, even on Blue Planet [in 2001], it’s quite a clipped voice,” Fothergill once said of Attenborough. “It’s now the voice of an older man, but it’s become even more powerful, with a timbre and an emotional resonance.”
But from where does that power emerge? A human’s vocal cords are no more than 2 centimeters long, opening and shutting about 200 million times annually, according to Trevor J. Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford. It’s a muscle that can be built up, but as with any other muscle, it invariably degrades over time. Around the age of 60, the cords weaken and don’t always close the way they did before, leaving a small gap. The gap allows air to leak out from the larynx, creating the sort of sighing, murmured speech effect that we often associate with the elderly.
From one perspective, losing one’s full range of vocal dexterity is evidence of human frailty. From another, it’s a kind of relinquishing of self. We are taught to speak up when we’re younger, to wield and sharpen our voices like weapons, slicing through dead air and noise alike, as a means of asserting our individuality. Call it a perverse romanticism, but there is also something gained in ceding some control of one’s voice, in embracing its fusion with the surrounding air. Perhaps that’s why stories are best told by our elders: Their voices are quite literally atmospheric, the sum of something more than just themselves.
Attenborough plants a tree in honor of Queen Elizabeth II in Richmond Park with schoolchildren from across London in 2023
If a single word could exemplify the stylistic markers of Attenborough’s voice, it would be dawn. The first breaking light of day, the start of something profoundly significant. The dawn of a new age. Dawn in the plains of the Serengeti. There is hope embedded in the word. It’s a wonder that one syllable from one voice could summon such a cinematic landscape in the mind. Only natural to wish to inhabit that, if only for a few seconds. So people did. Back in the day, the U.K.’s earliest home voicemail systems served as an open mic, of sorts. “The number of people who did a David Attenborough impersonation,” Gunton recalls, “it was just people loved that voice.”
It’s a voice that has been admired and often imitated for more than half a century. Attenborough has interfaced with every technological advancement in filmmaking over each of the past four generations. He has been a part of the switch from black and white to color; the proliferation of slow-motion and time-lapse image capture; the use of robotics and remote underwater cameras; the experimentation with 3D, CGI, and 4K drones. Each new advancement has brought with it the capacity to see the world from a different perspective, which has been Attenborough’s guiding principle his entire life. But as Attenborough approaches the century mark, the most consequential technological advancement of our day stands in direct opposition to his worldview.
In late 2023, AI programmer Charlie Holtz went viral on social media when he demonstrated a system that narrated Holtz’s actions with an unauthorized synthesis of Attenborough’s voice, as though the programmer were the subject of a documentary. The result was an uncanny, unnerving display of uninhibited access to another person’s likeness, played for a laugh. In the ensuing year, similar fabrications of Attenborough’s voice emerged, but in contexts far less innocuous: Audio clips about Donald Trump’s attorney general nomination and NATO’s response to impending war were rendered in a synthesis of Attenborough’s voice. “Having spent a lifetime trying to speak what I believe to be the truth,” Attenborough told BBC News, “I’m profoundly disturbed to find that these days my identity is being stolen by others—and greatly object to them using it to say whatever they wish.”
Judi's a great fan of David's delivery, and she says he is as good as any Shakespearean actor. He has got the same range and the same understanding … and I think she's dead right.Gunton
Sarah Barrington, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley, has spent the past few years focused on deepfake detection and digital forensics, with the hopes of effecting policy and regulatory changes that would create safeguards for every person’s likeness, in all its representations. “I think the case of David Attenborough's voice is so interesting because it's not just about identity, not just about taking his identity, but that voice has weight,” she told me. “That voice means something in society. Hearing that voice with certain types of content literally changes the meaning of that content.”
ElevenLabs, the AI voice-generation platform used in Holtz’s demo, claims to be able to create a professional voice clone “virtually indistinguishable from the original speaker” with just 30 minutes of audio samples. Its less precise “instant” model requires no more than five. That’s a drop in the bucket of Attenborough’s immense catalog. The company may have adjusted its terms and conditions since Holtz’s Attenborough AI stunt to skirt any liability on its end, but the underlying technology is out there for anyone to use—and exploit. “The amount of content that's out there means that fine-tuning [a large language model] to be able to reproduce exactly the words he'd say is pretty feasible,” Barrington said. “He feels so unprotected in that sense, doesn't he?”
Attenborough has been on this planet long enough to surmise how this will play out. An unregulated industry runs rampant, seeking forgiveness rather than permission. It aims to become a staple in the day-to-day lives of many, to the point that it can be difficult to remember life before its proliferation. There is a positivity bias that comes from its expedience and convenience as a service and commodity. And when that expedience and convenience are taken for granted, ethics can be ignored, even abandoned. Using a voice clone of Attenborough’s obfuscates the origin point the same way the commercial meatpacking industry, the fast-fashion garment and textile industry, or Amazon does. When a divide is created between the consumer and the source, it’s all too easy to proceed without considering the ramifications.
In her studies, Barrington found that humans are far less equipped to detect AI-produced audio compared with AI-produced video. And it’s getting harder and harder to notice the difference by the day. A few years ago, AI models weren’t able to replicate normal breathing patterns very well, resulting in speech without natural pauses. Now, audio snippets of up to 10 seconds can sound extremely realistic, but the longer the audio runs for, the easier it is to detect some peculiarities. Over a 30-second span, the lack of pitch and tonal variations becomes more apparent. In other words, AI degrades and falters exactly at the point when Attenborough’s mastery becomes peerless. “You change the pace, you change the timbre, you change the mood, and the commentary has organic flow,” Attenborough once told The Guardian. “If the last sentence ended 10 seconds ago rather than one minute ago, you start in a different kind of way. I don’t think other people do that. It’s a craft, and I quite enjoy it, actually.”
Attenborough delivers lines from his scripts with musical compositions coming through his headphones and documentary footage played in real time, allowing him to calibrate to the audiovisual landscape being constructed by the producers. Any of the elements on their own would be inspiring, but the way Attenborough frictionlessly layers ethos, pathos, and logos brings new dimension to the tapestry. “I don't think the AI will be able to do that yet because that comes from a knowledge which is being expressed instantly,” Gunton said. “When he's reading the narration, of course the words are written on the page, but what he's bringing to the delivery is not just I'm going to say those words, but it's a deep knowledge of what those words mean, what that sentence means, and how it's constructed.
“It's not an iteration,” Gunton said. “It is a performance.”
Attenborough in Buckingham Palace
At his best, Attenborough reminds us that there are natural wonders beyond our comprehension and that, despite our collective self-absorption, we are not the center of the universe. Standing next to the towering clay spires at the end of the termite scene in The Trials of Life, Attenborough leaves the viewer with a bit of a parting shot. “We might like to think that we are the most accomplished architects the world has ever seen, but if this was built in human terms, with every worker termite the size of me, then it would stand a mile high. And we haven’t done that yet.” Four decades later, we’ve reached only halfway.
He’s spent his entire life pushing back against the anthropocentric view of this world he was brought into. Two years before Attenborough was born, a 1924 silent documentary called The Epic of Everest was released, detailing the expedition of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine to the summit of Mount Everest. Not 30 seconds into the documentary, a bold assertion appears on the screen: “Since the beginning of the world men have battled with Nature for the mastery of their physical surroundings. Such is their birthright, and such is their destiny.”
It stands in stark contrast to what Attenborough has to say at the end of Ocean With David Attenborough, a recent National Geographic documentary made more than 100 years later. “When I first saw the sea as a young boy, it was thought of as a vast wilderness to be tamed and mastered for the benefit of humanity,” Attenborough says. “Now, as I approach the end of my life, we know the opposite is true. It is my great hope that we all come to see the ocean not as a dark and distant place with little relevance to our life on land, but as the lifeblood to our home. I’m sure that nothing is more important. For if we save the sea, we save our world.”
None of Attenborough’s documentaries in the past have more clearly outlined the extent of the destruction going on in our world, and none have more plainly acknowledged his own mortality. He has borne witness to the incalculable damage done to rainforests and reef systems, sites of the densest biodiversity in the world. He has also witnessed triumphs in some of the most improbable natural restoration efforts in human history—nowhere near enough to undo the harm caused, but enough to maintain a measure of hope in tomorrow. After evading the specifics of climate catastrophe for so long, Attenborough has finally lent his voice to the urgency of environmentalist efforts in his nonagenarian years—after all, old age should burn and rave at close of day. All these years later, what a voice it still is, weathered but enduring. Not unlike the Earth itself. Attenborough’s signature whisper is a gesture toward decentering humanity and all the dominance it has staked over the natural world. It sets the stage, then cedes it.
“He's turned into a person who almost speaks for the planet,” Gunton said. “And I guess, maybe, subconsciously has adopted that persona in his voice.”
