He has waded with chimps, whispered with lyrebirds and cuddled mountain gorillas, but now Sir David Attenborough will be encountering some of his most challenging creatures yet – in a new animated series for toddlers.
The 90-year-old broadcaster is launching a series for very young children on the CBeebies app Storytime, in which a cartoon version of the naturalist revisits some of the most famous creatures of his career.
Attenborough’s Adventures will follow the broadcaster on expeditions dating from 1956, when he encountered komodo dragons on his first wildlife programme Zoo Quest, to 2016, when he presented a virtual reality programme about the world’s largest known dinosaur, the titanosaur.
The first episode, entitled David and the Gorilla Quest, recreates his famous 1978 expedition to Rwanda to film mountain gorillas, when one of the baby animals climbed on to his lap. This footage was on TV in 1979’s Life on Earth series.
“You want the very best people to narrate your stories,” Kay Benbow, controller of CBeebies, told the Guardian, “and although our very youngest audience aren’t going to know who Sir David Attenborough is, their parents are.
“He has a wonderful voice, he’s extremely eloquent … and the stories from [his] life are so fascinating for all ages, whether the children have seen the original footage or not. The story is still utterly charming and engaging. And so the idea was born.”
She would have loved, “of course”, to have explored the possibility of making a full series for broadcast, but said: “I think it’s about Sir David’s availability. Who wouldn’t want him [to record] a series, but I think he’s pretty booked up with the Natural History Unit. So we thought, let’s do what we can.”
The series, illustrated by Will Rose, is intended to help teach children how to read, said Benbow, and invites them to listen to Attenborough’s narration and interact with the app, answering questions once the story is done.
The Storytime app, one of three launched by the digital channel, has been downloaded 2.4m times and is read each week by 176,000 children across the UK.
Other “greatest hits” revisited in the five-part series include a 1990 film about termite mounds for The Trials of Life, recreated for the episode David and the Hidden City, and another Zoo Quest clip from 1957 in which he travelled to Papua New Guinea in search of birds of paradise, remade as David and the Treasure Hunter.
Attenborough said he was “thrilled that we’ve brought to life many fond memories of my exploration of the natural world for young children to explore and learn”.
So how easily does the nonagenarian Attenborough connect with the under sixes?
“I think Sir David Attenborough works for everybody,” said Benbow. “If you think about all the programmes he does, he tells you a wonderful story and brings it to life. That’s a wonderful skill – why wouldn’t we want him for CBeebies?”
