It's an unspoken reality in the world of journalism, but certain obituaries are written in advance and kept on file until required.

After Lord Attenborough moved into a care home in 2012, four years after a fall had brought on a stroke, work would have begun on memorials in newspaper offices up and down the country.

Television researchers would also have been sifting through the film archives and calling up his colleagues for interviews too: how else could both the BBC and Channel 4 have turned around hour-long tributes to Attenborough mere hours after the sad announcement of his death emerged last Sunday?

Richard Attenborough: A Life On Film (BBC One, Monday, 10.30pm) was, as the title suggests, better structured when it came to assessing his career as an actor and director, and as the tireless cheerleader who almost singlehandedly kept the UK film industry afloat.

Alan Rickman narrated; Anthony Hopkins, David Puttnam, John Hurt, Ben Kingsley, Debra Winger and others reminisced.

It was poignant to hear them speak of Attenborough in the past tense.

There was inevitably some crossover in personnel in Richard Attenborough: A Life (More4, Tuesday, 7pm), which took a more touchy-feely approach to Attenborough's achievements by emphasising his charity work (Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock weighed in on the political side) and treating us to lingering shots of his cluttered office in his home in Richmond-upon-Thames.

This programme, the end credits betrayed, was made two years ago and so the present tense references to Dickie jarred somewhat.

Ultimately, however, this should not be about marks out of 10 for competing television channels: Attenborough accomplished more than enough in a single lifetime to fill several such programmes, and everyone who met him would have a good word to say about this kind and passionate man.

At this point, I'm going to head off-track and add my own.

It was the end of 2000, and I had gone to Attenborough's home to interview him for Total Film magazine. As we sat in the comfort of the projection room he'd built at the bottom of his garden, I threw at him the names of some of the movie icons he'd worked with over the decades: John Wayne, James Stewart, Steve McQueen.

We talked too of newer talents he'd directed: Denzel Washington, Robert Downey Jr, Anthony Hopkins. He had an anecdote for each and every one, such as the time he'd been staying at Frank Sinatra's estate in Palm Springs and Ol' Blue Eyes had flown in his private doctor to attend Attenborough's daughter.

From another mouth it might have sounded like luvvie name-dropping.

But Attenborough recounted each tale with a fondness for its subject and a touch of wonder that he, a boy from Leicester, had rubbed shoulders with such legends.

I met him a handful of times afterwards - at a National Film Theatre event to mark his 80th birthday; for a touchingly dignified interview about his final film, Closing The Ring, made soon after a time of personal grief as he mourned the loss of his daughter Jane and granddaughter Lucy in the 2004 tsunami.

But it's that morning in Richmond that stays with me. At the time I was thrilled that his stories rendered me one small degree of separation away from the great icons of cinema history.

Now I realise that one of the greatest was with me in the room all along.