The envelope was small and square – and a bit battered from its journey across the Irish Sea – while the handwriting inside had an intensely squiggly quality. The signature, however, was unmistakable: an oversized “D” for David, a huge arching “A” for Attenborough. The missive itself was just a single page. “Dear Edward,” it began. “Thank you for your letter.”
Why was David Attenborough, the world’s most famous natural history presenter, writing to me, an annoying child on the northside of Cork city? As was often the case with irritating children in the mid-1980s, it was all to do with dinosaurs.
To be specific, it related to a Mesozoic mix-up. An early edition of Attenborough’s children’s book Discovering Life on Earth had contained a printing error. A chapter on the rise of the reptiles misidentified the plant-eating Hypsilophodon as razor-clawed Deinonychus (a bigger, nastier cousin of the Velociraptors from Jurassic Park – a novel and franchise that did not yet exist).
At this point, I was obsessed with David Attenborough and his first series, Life on Earth. Just about able to read, I’d badgered my parents into buying the luxury edition of the hardback adaptation of the series, which cost an eye-watering £15 and which I had paid for with weekly pocket-money downpayments to Russell’s Bookshop in Cork.
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Attenborough and the BBC had eventually realised that they had a big following with the under-10s and, to that end, had published a more child-friendly edition of Life on Earth. Called Discovering Life on Earth, it came with a terrifying image of a moth on the cover. And it contained that mix-up between dinosaurs – an error I decided I should immediately alert Attenborough to by contacting him, care of the BBC. Cheekily, I’d signed off by asking him to “please write back to me”.
He did exactly that. How the message had reached him, I had no idea. My presumption is that this was still the era when he was merely a well-known TV presenter rather than a natural history superstar, and so he was in a position to a) read nitpicking letters from schoolboys with nothing better to do and b) reply to them.
Whatever the reason, he very kindly sent a handwritten note explaining that, in the process of publishing a book, everything is double-checked for accuracy. Sadly, in this case, an error had slipped through. Hence, poor vegan Hypsilophodon being misidentified as the nasty, ravenous Deinonychus.
Life on Earth was even then recognised as a landmark in natural history television. But at the time, it was also understood to be a bit terrifying. The days when Attenborough’s wise tones would be paired with the meditative strains of Sigur Rós were still a way off. Rather than partner Attenborough’s soothing voice with something appropriately calming, the opening credits to Life on Earth were a Wagnerian royal rumble of screaming horns and exploding volcanoes – as if the BBC’s natural history department was actively trying to terrify children.
In this, it was hardly alone. This was the era of Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, with its nerve-shredding theme music and scary crystal skull, and of petrifying kids’ shows such as Children of the Stones and Chocky. If children’s television wasn’t sending your loved ones to bed with nightmares rattling around their brains, then it wasn’t doing its job properly.
Still, if scary, then Life on Earth was never boring – and in that, it stood apart from other natural history television. At the time, Ireland had its own Life on Earth (sort of) in Gerrit van Gelderen’s To the Waters and the Wild. But that was not television for kids who wanted to learn more about Tyrannosaurus Rex.
To The Waters and the Wild was, in many ways, ahead of its time – a contemplative precursor to the genre of “slow” television knocking around the internet nowadays (generally these shows are from Norway and feature lengthy footage of trains travelling through featureless snowscapes). But Van Gelderen did not have the pzazz of Attenborough, who threw himself into the action, whether staring iguanas from the Galápagos in the eye or allowing a gorilla to sit on his chest during that famous segment from the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda.
Where is the letter today? Why can’t I show you a picture? Alas, it went missing when we moved house a few years later. It wasn’t so much that my parents were careless, as that this sort of stuff didn’t matter as much back then. For better or worse, children in the 1980s were background characters in the lives of parents, not the main event.
Ireland at the time was also poor and miserable – step outside and you could smell the despair, almost as acrid as lead fumes or the haze from all the coal fires. A letter from a posh man on the BBC simply was not that big a deal.
All these decades later, it is obviously a regret that it was allowed to go missing. But I am mostly surprised, with hindsight, that David Attenborough, who turns 100 on Friday, took the time to write to me in the first place. The man who had walked the Serengeti and plunged into the jungles of New Guinea was scribbling a letter to a kid in Cork – and all because the printers had got their dinosaurs in a twist.
