The Great Centenarian

Well, there's no escaping the Attenborough centenary – it's everywhere, and will be all day, with a special concert from the Royal Albert Hall on TV this evening. It was 100 years ago today that the Great Man, our most assured National Treasure, was born – in Isleworth, by the Thames in Middlesex (though he did not grow up there). I remember Isleworth from my childhood: it was there that, despite the state of the heavily polluted river, I saw my first (and for a long while last) Kingfisher. A flash of electric blue, unmistakable, unforgettable... So, Attenborough. In his prime a great broadcaster and communicator, and even a great Controller of BBC2, responsible for Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. As regular readers of this blog will know, I found Attenborough in his later years hard to take, such was his insistent focus on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change. Having bought in to Paul Ehrlich's Malthusian predictions of planetary catastrophe…