The BBC Natural History Unit at 60

Back in October 2017, queues of people spilled out of Cabot Circus’ Cinema De Lux, through the double doors and past the posters advertising the premiere of Blue Planet II, the BBC Natural History Unit’s latest flagship programme. More than 105,000 people had entered the ballot for just 200 seats in the cinema. “You were 50 times more likely to get tickets to Glastonbury,” current director of the Natural History Unit (NHU) Julian Hector told a crowd that included Sir David Attenborough.

As the credits closed to a thunderous round of applause, Tony Hall, director general of the BBC, took to the stage to call the series “inspirational”. “There are things that make you so proud to be part of the BBC, and the Natural History Unit and films like that are them,” he said. “It’s the ingenuity, dedication and scale of ambition that is one of the great wonders of the BBC, and that makes the Natural History Unit stand out. The series will be showcased and admired the world over, but it’s great to see it here, in the heart of Bristol, because this is where it all began.”

Sir David Attenborough at the Bristol premiere of Blue Planet II in Cabot Circus. ©Alistair Heap

Since its inception in 1957, the NHU has been based on Whiteladies Road, despite several attempts over the years to move production to London. “It all came down to a chap called Desmond Hawkins, who was a radio producer just after the Second World War,” explains John Sparks, who worked at the NHU for 38 years and ran it from 1983–1988.

Hawkins’ personal interest in nature led to radio series’, and then, in the early 1950s, to programmes in the new medium of television. “Desmond brought in other people to continue that tradition, and, crucially, he got to know Peter Scott, who founded Slimbridge,” John says. “Peter Scott said, ‘We’re doing all this in radio, but wouldn’t it translate for television?’ so they started a series called Look. It was a time that the BBC was encouraging regions to specialise, so Bristol started to develop natural history, and, once people started watching the programmes, they were very popular: in those days, you’d get audiences of 15-20 million.”

Peter Scott, pioneer of the BBC Natural History Unit. ©Wildscreen

When John Sparks first joined the Unit in 1965 “as a green research zoologist with a keen interest in birds and monkeys”, he was tasked with producing programmes for radio. “The Unit was very small when I first arrived. There were about 25 people – compared to something like 200 now,” John says. “It was just coming into the age of television, and there were people at the BBC who thought television would never catch on.”

Leaving radio behind, John produced groundbreaking series’ including Day of the Zebra, the first time the Unit had made a full film in Africa, and also Life on Earth, the 13-part 1979 series that catapulted one David Attenborough to fame.

David Attenborough filming the 1979 series Life on Earth. ©Wildscreen/Chris Parsons

“Time in the Unit was measured as ‘before Life on Earth’ and ‘after Life on Earth’,” John says. “Up to Life on Earth, on the whole, the Unit made programs in this country. London had a view that down in Bristol, there were a lot of straw-chewing naturalists who would stalk out onto the Downs with their binoculars at lunchtime, so they left us to make programmes about the UK and did all the interesting foreign stuff in London.

“Attenborough always wanted to do a wildlife series with a high budget himself, and when he left as controller of BBC Two, he came to Bristol to talk about it. London put up quite a strong fight that Bristol was not capable – it would involve travel all over the world and a high-standard of filming, and these straw-chewing people couldn’t possibly manage it, but David put his foot down.

“As the series went out, the audience went up, the critics took notice and academics started writing articles saying, ‘This is absolutely fantastic, we teach this stuff’. It peaked with my primate programme at 17.5million viewers, and suddenly we’d arrived. London had to admit that we were capable of doing it.”

Attenborough with mountain gorillas in Rwanda ©John Sparks

John’s ‘primate programme’ – in which Attenborough encounters mountain gorillas in Rwanda – is one of the most famous televised sequences in history. Approaching the group to do a piece to camera, an adult female and two young gorillas began to groom Attenborough, while John and the film crew looked on.

“I never thought I’d see mountain gorillas, but we were able to sit with them – that close,” John recalls. “That sequence was lifted out as being one of the top 20 on British television of the decade, which was nice. Although I didn’t get a pay rise,” he adds wryly.

John Sparks with king penguins on a recent adventure

Life on Earth paved the way, in terms of content and also in scope and investment potential, for the NHU’s modern run of huge-budget, cutting-edge series’. “Like everyone else I watched Life on Earth when it was transmitted and was entranced by it,” says Miles Barton, producer of the Coasts episode of Blue Planet II. “I love discovering and watching animal behaviour and so I also loved the series Trials of Life, which was 12 hours of extraordinary animal behaviour with wonderful photography and David Attenborough at his memorable best, whether in a cloud of bats or in a termite mound.”

Trials of Life also inspired fellow Blue Planet II producer Kathryn Jeffs. “As a kid who was fascinated by wildlife, it was opening up the world of animal behaviour, and it was really where I first got the idea that I might want to make wildlife films. From the age of about four I wanted to be a vet, living in Africa, saving rhinos, but Trials of Life helped me see there was a different way to share my passion with the world,” she explains.

Following a degree in wildlife filmmaking run by Jeffery Boswall, a producer at the NHU for 30 years, Kathryn moved to Bristol and began working as an assistant producer. “I came because this community exists here,” she says. “It’s possibly the best place to be in the world if you want to make wildlife films.” After her sequence about bats’ feeding habits was spotted by the BBC, Kathryn began working with the NHU. Most recently, she produced the fifth episode of Blue Planet II, Green Seas.

NHU producer Kathryn Jeffs. ©Dan Paris

“We filmed around the world. I went out to Shark Bay in the west of Australia, to join up with shark scientist Sammy Andrzejaczek and put a camera on the back of a tiger shark – which is quite a task!” Kathryn says.

“It was something of a pilgrimage for me. I’d heard so much about Shark Bay being a legendary place for wildlife. It was quite a gamble to film there, as people sit there for weeks and don’t see a thing, but it has the best seagrass meadows in the world, patrolled by these four-metre-long sharks. There was a lovely ecology story to tell about how the meadows couldn’t survive without these apex predators – just like prairies in America that would be overgrazed without the wolves.”

Sir David Attenborough called Bristol ‘the undeniable home of natural history’.  ©Alistair Heap

As the Blue Planet II series airs on BBC One and on channels around the world, a new generation will watch it and feel a pull towards a career choice as the cameras dip beneath the waves. “When the original Blue Planet came out, the popularity of marine zoology courses at UK universities rocketed. It’s really inspiring – if you’re getting people to switch on and connect to wild places, that’s the best you could ever hope for,” says Kathryn.

There are so many elements that have contributed to the success of the NHU, but perhaps Attenborough said it best when he addressed a rapt crowd in Cabot Circus. “Every programme contains in it things that I could not have dreamed of, and things that other people have never seen,” he said.

“The reputation of the BBC’s Natural History Unit here in Bristol is incredible – it doesn’t matter where you go: North America, New Zealand, China,” Attenborough continued. “I’ve just been recording something for Japanese people and the chap there who was responsible for it trained in Bristol 35 years ago, and he came here from Japan because he knew that the unit was a world leader.

“The broadcasters and the BBC make Bristol the undeniable home of natural history, and I think people in Bristol are pleased that this is the centre of creation. It’s not only a centre for Britain – it’s worldwide.”

The final episode of Blue Planet II airs on BBC One at 8pm on Sunday December 10.