Not many people can boast that their first job was researching for David Attenborough. I first walked through the doors of the BBC Natural History Unit on Whiteladies Road in Bristol in the spring of 1993. To anyone interested in wildlife or television, it was a place that felt less like an office and more like a shrine. 

As a 21-year-old fresh zoology graduate I’d been taken on as a researcher for The Private Life of Plants, a six-part landmark series devoted entirely to flora. On my first morning I was shown to a desk, handed a telephone and a bulging folder labelled “orchids”, and told, more or less cheerfully, that my job was to find a sequence rare enough to justify sending David Attenborough halfway around the world to Japan. It was utterly thrilling. 

Read the article in The Times

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/david-attenborough-researcher-experience-s6d8jdwvv

And listen on The Saturday Show podcast