David Bellamy - Career

Career

He first came to public prominence as an environmental consultant at the time of the 1967 Torrey Canyon disaster; he published Effects of Pollution from the Torrey Canyon on Littoral and Sublittoral Ecosystems in Nature . He has written and presented some 400 television programmes on botany, ecology, and environmental issues. Bellamy is the originator, along with David Shreeve and the Conservation Foundation (which he also founded), of the Ford European Conservation Awards and has published scientific papers (between 1966 and 1986) and many books.

During the early 1980s he was a popular television presenter. He was parodied by Lenny Henry on Tiswas with a "grapple me grapenuts" catchphrase. He once lent his distinctive voice to an advert for the blackcurrant drink Ribena, which claimed that 95% of British blackcurrants were used in Ribena. (This has now been changed to "Nearly all British blackcurrants are used in Ribena".)

During the 1980s he replaced Big Chief I-Spy as the figurehead of the I-Spy range of children's books and to whom completed books were sent in order to receive a reward. In 1980, he released a single written by Mike Croft with musical arrangement by Dave Grosse to coincide with the release of the I-Spy title I Spy Dinosaurs, a title exploring the subject of dinosaur fossils. Entitled "Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me?" (backed with "Oh Stegasaurus") he performed it on Blue Peter wearing an orange jump suit. It reached number 88 in the charts .

In 1983, he was jailed for blockading the Australian Franklin River in a protest against a proposed dam. On 18 August 1984 he leapt from the pier at St. Abbs Harbour into the North Sea. In the process he officially opened Britain's first Voluntary Marine Reserve, the St. Abbs and Eyemouth Voluntary Marine Reserve. In the late 1980s he fronted a campaign in Jersey, Channel Islands, to save Queens Valley, the site of Bergerac's cottage, from being turned into a reservoir due to the presence of a rare type of snail but was unable to stop it. In 1997 he stood unsuccessfully against the incumbent Prime Minister John Major for the Referendum Party. Bellamy credits this campaign with the decline in his career as a popular celebrity and television personality, stating in 2002:

"In some ways it was probably the most stupid thing I ever did because I'm sure that if I have been banned from television, that's why. I used to be on Blue Peter and all those things, regularly, and it all, pffffft, stopped."

He is a prominent campaigner against the construction of wind farms in undeveloped areas. This is despite appearing very enthusiastic about wind power in the educational video Power from the Wind produced by Britain's Central Electricity Generating Board.

In 2010 Bellamy starred in an advert for Churchill Insurance Company, in which The Churchill Dog house sits for Bellamy.

In 2011 David Bellamy made a guest appearance for the BBC's Francesco's Mediterranean Voyage in the episode on Corfu and Greece.

David Bellamy is currently the President of the British Institute of Cleaning Science (BICSc) and is a strong supporter of the BICSc plan to educate young people to care for and protect the environment. The David Bellamy Awards Programme is a competition designed to encourage schools to be aware of, and act positively towards, environmental cleanliness. The 2010/2011 Awards are now accepting applicants and further information on this can be found on the BICSc website.

David Bellamy is currently a patron of the British Homeopathic Association.