From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story on Saturday. I'm Manvine Rana.

The man for whom the term national treasure could have been invented, Sir David Attenborough has turned 100.

To Marcus Centenary, and to take stock of the remarkable character, who's brought so much

to national life and to audiences around the world, the Times has heard from Tony Lee Morrill,

the writer and documentary filmmaker who began his career working with

a living legend, Sir David Attenborough, at the BBC's Natural History Unit.

Here are his reflections on the great man. Not many people can boast that their first job was researching for David Attenborough.

I first walked through the doors of a BBC Natural History Unit on White Ladies 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've been taken on as a researcher for the private life of plants,

a six-part landmark series devoted entirely to flora.

It's taken over three years to track their territorial and sometimes predatory behavior.

We've exposed their poisonous characteristics.

And yet, without these organisms, neither you nor I would exist. There would be no food, no animals, no life on earth.

The Private Life of Plants, with David Attenborough, new on BBC One.

On my first morning, I was shown to a desk, handed a telephone,

an abulging folder labelled orchids, and told more or less cheerfully that my first job was to find a sequence rare enough to justify sending David Attenborough

halfway around the world to Japan. It was utterly thrilling. Within days, I was on the phone to

orchid specialists, faxing botanists in Japan, navigating conservation

permissions and learning the art of international logistics, before email and the internet

had made any of that easy.

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