alice roberts

This might be a sad reflection of our family, but we’ve often joked about “who on earth will replace David Attenborough on the TV?” (apart from either Felix or Stu, that is!). We had fears that either Alan Titchmarsh or Richard Hammond was being groomed to fill his considerable boots. But I’ve started to relax a little…. because the BBC seems to have realised that Dr Alice Roberts is the new Attenborough (and rightly so). She won’t become the voice/face behind exactly the same type of “natural world” television programme, but she is one of those multi-talented people who is opening up whole new range of programmes. She’s an osteoarchaeologist and a lecturer at Bristol University (in fact, I’ve actually seen her described as “the David Attenborough of the human body”). As well as being highly intelligent, she’s one of those people who seems to be able to do absolutely ANYTHING (and do it really well) – artist, caver, diver, rock climber and athlete (if the first programme was anything to go by, when she ran with a couple of native hunters in the heat of the African “bush”). I first came across her on my favourite “Time Team” and then, of course, she was one of the presenters on “Coast” before the BBC built an entire programme around her with “Don’t Die Young”. Her latest television series is “The Incredible Human Journey” – an impressive five-part series in which she “follows the archaeological and genetic footprints of our ancient ancestors to find out how their journeys transformed our species into the humans we are today, and how Homo Sapiens came to dominate the planet”.
She’s brilliant and, as you might have gathered, I’m a bit of a fan!

PS: .... and she's obviously been added to my "world eleven"!