Sir David Attenborough opens up about retirement – "I dread not working"
Sir David Attenborough has said that he will retire from broadcasting the moment he feels as though his work has become substandard, in a rarely candid interview.
The 91-year-old normally keeps his cards close to his chest on the topic of retirement, but in a interview with Radio Times he was frank about the prospect of hanging up his binoculars, and what would have to happen for him to consider it.
“I would like to think I would be able to detect when I couldn’t find the right words any more,” Attenborough told the Radio Times. “If I think I’m not producing commentary with any freshness or which is apposite or to the point, I hope I would be able to recognise it before someone else told me.
“If I thought I was turning in substandard work, that would stop me.”
Attenborough, who first started working for the BBC in 1952, said he’d also consider calling it quits if he was physically incapable of performing his day-to-day duties.
“If I can’t walk up and down steps any more, that will stop me,” he said. “Yes I do dread not working, although there are things I can do without running up steps six times – books to be written, things I’ve never got round to. But at the moment it seems to be all right.”
The lengendary documentarian said his schedule for 2018 is already looking pretty full, after last years Blue Planet II was the UK’s most watched television program.
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