Neil Nightingale

April 2007

The BBC Natural History Unit celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Since 1957 it has been thrilling audiences young and old with the marvels of the world around us. Neil Nightingale has worked in the unit for more than 20 years and today is the head of it. He feels he’s in the best place in the world to produce documentaries, given the creativity of his colleagues and the wide range of programs they get to produce.

TV DOCS: What would you consider to be the BBC’s major contributions to the wildlife and nature documentary genre?

NIGHTINGALE: We’ve been one of the most ambitious documentary creators in the world. What stands out above all else are our big definitive landmark series that look at great chunks of the natural world. The biggest body of work in that area is the one we’ve done with David Attenborough, from Life on Earth (at the time the most ambitious series ever produced by the BBC Natural History Unit), then The Living Planet, The Trials of Life, right up to his current series, Life in Cold Blood, which explores the lives of reptiles and amphibians and is scheduled to transmit on the BBC in 2008. There have been many in between: The Life of Birds, State of the Planet, The Blue Planet, The Life of Mammals, Life in the Undergrowth and Planet Earth, [which] gives a definitive view of the natural history of the planet. It’s the landmark series that has been popular all around the world [and] that has been our real trademark.

TV DOCS: What is it like working with David Attenborough?

NIGHTINGALE: David is just so brilliant. He has two great strengths. One is his enthusiasm—in his eighties he will still find a new species of frog and be as fascinated as a 5-year-old, and that enthusiasm is just wonderful to work with. And the second is his huge ability as a storyteller, as a producer, as a presenter—that incredible professionalism. Many of us were trained with him and directed some of our first films with him. We learned so much.

TV DOCS: How has technology in its various forms—smaller and more portable cameras, HD, aerial filming, underwater filming, special effects—enhanced what you can offer viewers?

NIGHTINGALE: Oh, enormously, it’s driven almost everything. In fact, David Attenborough always said it was the invention of airline computers that allowed the landmark series to be invented in the first place. Before the mid-’70s, you couldn’t book air flights to travel from continent to continent to continent in order to set a filming schedule, which would allow you to do something like Life on Earth. So a simple piece of technology like the airline computer was what enabled those big ambitious landmark series.

We did The Private Life of Plants in the mid-’90s, which was an exploration of plant behavior and revealed them to be every bit as interesting as animals. It was not only the ability of the cameramen that allowed us to film the series, but the fact that we had small computers, which let us build dramatic time-lapse sequences. Before that it had been very difficult, if you didn’t have small portable computers, in a time-lapse setting, to drive all the cameras, the tracking, the lights, and build up those sequences. Likewise, a year ago we finished Life in the Undergrowth, about invertebrates. The miniaturization of cameras allowed us for the first time to show an ant in the same kind of action sequence and depth of field as you would film a lion on the Serengeti. Until then, you could film small things but you had a small depth of focus, or you had to have a very clunky lens system, or you had to put so much light on the insect that it would, at best not behave, and at worst probably cook under the light. So miniature cameras have been incredibly important.

In Planet Earth, the aerial filming has been very important in shooting on high-definition video, which gives a cinematic look. With video you can separate the camera head from the recorder, which means you can have very lightweight, gyroscopically controlled camera mounts. This has given us a completely new perspective on animal behavior because we’ve been able to be a thousand feet away on the end of a very, very long lens with animals not knowing we’re there. We can film things that would have been completely impossible. For example, a wolf hunt in the tundra had never been filmed from start to finish because you just cannot keep up with wolves except in a helicopter. But in a helicopter you could never zoom in to a close-up on a wolf. Now, with a high-definition gyroscopically stabilized lens you can do that, and the wolf isn’t even aware that you’re there. So those are some of the latest pieces of technology we’ve used to show new things.

TV DOCS: What projects are you currently working on?

NIGHTINGALE: We’re in the middle of production of Wild China, a six-part series on the natural history of China. It’s a co-production with CTV [China Television Media, the production arm of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV]. Through them we’re getting access to all the most remote places and most beautiful landscapes. There are news reports almost every week on all the environmental problems in China, how many power stations they are building and the pollution, which is all terribly important. But what isn’t widely known, and isn’t even widely known within China, is the country’s extraordinary wildlife, diversity of landscapes and biodiversity. It’s the third most biodiverse country in the world after Brazil with the Amazon and Indonesia with its rainforest. It’s third in terms of number of species of animals and plants. With China’s development moving at the pace that it is now, there’s a huge amount of wildlife to be conserved and protected if China is to have all that beautiful nature in the future. I don’t think anyone’s ever done a definitive series showing both the Chinese and the international community what natural wonders China has. That will be ready early next year just before the Beijing Olympics.

And the other project that’s set for this year, which I think is an exceptional one, is called Saving Planet Earth. On the back of Planet Earth we’ve done a number of environmental series. We did a companion piece at the time called Planet Earth: The Future. We went back to the places we’d been to and talked to leading environmentalists and politicians about what the future held. We did two programs with David Attenborough on climate change called Are We Changing Planet Earth? and Can We Save Planet Earth? last year which were hugely popular. They were taken by the Discovery Channel and made into one special, which I think was their highest-rated documentary last year.

This year we’re using the Planet Earth brand to do a whole season of programs on BBC One for children. With all our colleagues in all the regions around the U.K., we’re looking at endangered species and the habitats they represent. We’re also doing documentaries all around the world and in the U.K., to raise awareness and money for conservation projects that protect animals but also provide a sustainable future for the people who depend on them. And that’s a massive, multiplatform project for the summer.

TV DOCS: What do you offer on your website to extend the television experience?

NIGHTINGALE: When online started, it just offered extra information. What we now have is a completely interactive relationship with the audience. For example, we have a three-week live event each spring called Springwatch. We follow the fortunes of creatures at that most critical time of year when they are raising their young. We have 50 miniature cameras inside birds’ nest boxes all linked up to a live gallery with reports from around the country. And the interactivity comes in a number of ways. Throughout spring we have a survey where we ask people to look out for the first signs of a particular bird. In the three years of running Springwatch, we’ve literally had hundreds of thousands of reports. It’s become the biggest single study of seasonal climatic change in the world because of our audience engagement. So they’re doing real science. And they are contributing editorial to the program because we’re featuring the results of their work in our series. So it’s not only the viewers coming to us for information, they’re actually providing stories in the show.

The other big activity around Springwatch is the Breathing Places campaign. We’re aiming to get millions of people in Britain doing things to help nature. We’ve teamed up with over 100 wildlife partners and with the [Big Lottery Fund]. We have events around the country and that’s all only possible, really, with the tools that online gives you. And on the series Big Cat Diary, we’ve done mobisodes and we’re just [beginning a trial of] a video podcast.

TV DOCS: Do you think you’d be able to do the same range of programs if you worked with a commercial broadcaster?

NIGHTINGALE: I think it’s essential to have the British audience and the BBC at the heart of what we do. The BBC has ridden the troughs in the market. There have been times when wildlife hasn’t been very popular commercially and other times when it’s been the most popular factual genre. We’ve seen producers come, expand, go bankrupt and so on, but the BBC has always had that ambition and provided the core commissions that we’ve needed to keep going. They’ve been absolutely essential.