David Attenborough is not just a national treasure: he is also the most radical person on TV | Jonathan Liew

4 hours ago 3

The excesses the capitalist system has brought us have got to be curbed somehow. Ordinary people worldwide are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy. Our economic system has been based on the profit principle: you have to come out at the end of the year having made a profit, and the bigger profit you have made, the better it is. In the short term that works, but it ends with disaster.

At this point, I should make a confession. The above sentiments are not mine at all. In fact, they were pilfered, purloined, shoplifted from a far more erudite radical thinker than myself. So, quiz time: which incendiary leftwing firebrand spoke these words? Zack Polanski? Antonio Gramsci? Ash Sarkar? At the very least, you would probably assume that, in the current climate, anyone daring to utter these dangerous fringe sentiments would be cast to the margins of our cultural life, only occasionally being let out for the purposes of getting shouted at on the Jeremy Vine show.

Well, as you’ve probably guessed by now, it was actually the gorilla guy. The national treasure. The beloved 100-year-old television naturalist, often cited in polls as the most trusted man in the country, was also the man who advocated for seismic global financial redistribution in a 2020 BBC interview, arguing for a utopian future in which “those who have a great deal, perhaps, will have a little bit less, and those that have very little will have a little more”.

And, of course, David Attenborough has been trying for many years to tell us what he actually thinks. He proudly voted remain, has railed at Michael Gove, speaks approvingly of the involvement of young people in politics and, in 2016, advocated – only partly in jest and however unwisely – the assassination of Donald Trump. He was banging on about the dangers of mass consumption, extractive capitalism and the miseries of the market economy long before Blue Planet II set footage of a plastic-choked pilot whale to mournful music. He has been warning of our manmade climate catastrophe, in increasingly shrill and alarming terms, for about two decades. The question, as he enters a frankly unbelievable 11th decade, is whether anyone is still actually prepared to listen.

Certainly, anyone watching his centenary tribute on BBC One would have struggled to reconcile the quiet radical depicted above with the cuddly senior citizen being feted on stage at the Royal Albert Hall. A galaxy of celebrities was wheeled out to deliver warm benedictions. A birthday letter from King Charles was conveyed to London by a troupe of CGI foxes and hedgehogs. Beyond some vague bromides about “protecting the planet”, Attenborough’s activism and worldview remained entirely hidden. The climate crisis was not mentioned once.

This is, of course, the Attenborough with which our public discourse is most comfortable: depoliticised, universally adored, a man-sized Paddington Bear fit only for our veneration. Who teaches us about tree frogs and seal cubs and stick insects and asks for nothing in return. And perhaps there are more difficult questions to negotiate here: the extent to which he has been a force for the meaningful and revolutionary change he seeks, and the extent to which his broad, inoffensive appeal has been more hindrance than help, allowing the powerful to feign concern for the planet while shirking the tough and bloody compromises required to secure it.

Personally, I’m inclined to give Attenborough the benefit of the doubt on this. At heart, he has always been a journalist rather than a scientist, aware above all of the importance of meeting the audience where they are, rather than where he would like them to be. His programmes have always focused from first principles on the beauty and fascination of the natural world, depicting conservation as an act of conscience rather than sacrifice. “If we are to persuade people to take decisions about their lives which involve their pay packets and living conditions,” he said in a 2008 interview, “we are never going to do that unless they know something about the natural world from which they have been cut off.”

For a “standard, boring leftwing liberal”, as he once described himself in a New Statesman interview, Attenborough has always understood the importance of spectacle over polemic. Show trumps tell every time. And while there remains a sizeable minority on the anti-net-zero right that has unsuccessfully tried to turn him into a hate figure – last year, the Reform UK MP Danny Kruger described him as “anti-human” – he remains trusted and credible, perhaps even the only eco-socialist in Britain whom the rightwing press hasn’t tried to hound out of a job.

What we get, instead, is the fat-free Attenborough, an Attenborough shorn of all his activist instincts, his many prescient diagnoses of where humanity has gone wrong. Perhaps, on reflection, it is no surprise that he is followed wherever he goes with the sound of applause and fanfares. It saves us the trouble of hearing what he actually says.