Natural History Programmes

Natural History Programmes, television shows that cover any aspect of natural history. The concept of natural history programming was started by the BBC. The Natural History Unit was set up in Bristol in 1957, with the public-service ethos of bringing the wider world into the British home. The BBC has since made a great success of natural history, producing 100 hours of programmes every year. The genre is easily the BBC’s most profitable in terms of worldwide sales. The Living Planet (1984) produced by David Attenborough is the BBC’s all-time best-seller, having been purchased by over 80 countries.

In the early days the emphasis was on the presenters, as in On Safari (1957, BBC) with the husband-and-wife team Armand and Michaela Denis. Another early personality was David Bellamy. Over the years, however, the focus has moved increasingly on to the plants and animals. Innovations in techniques and equipment have meant, for example, that such phenomena as the gradual growth of plants can be filmed over time and condensed into a few moments of footage, and the flight of hummingbirds can be recorded on fast film, and slowed down for playback, giving greater insight into the manner of the bird’s movements. In 1999 the BBC used ground-breaking computer animation techniques in the documentary series, Walking With Dinosaurs, which recreated life in prehistoric times, while state-of-the-art underwater cameras recorded unprecedented footage of the deepest reaches of the oceans in the seven-year undertaking The Blue Planet, broadcast in eight episodes in 2001. The excellence of the BBC, whose Natural History Unit celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1997, has spurred on other channels. In more than 1,000 programmes since 1961, ITV’s Survival has established a reputation for outstanding quality. More recently, such programmes as Raging Planet on Channel 4 and Secret Lives on Channel 5 have continued the high calibre of British natural-history broadcasting.

The patience and time required to film certain events in the wild means that such programmes are expensive to make. Some may cost as much as £800,000 an hour; they are, however, among the most cherished programmes in the schedules. Around the world, dedicated natural history television channels such as Animal Planet and The National Geographic Channel are proliferating. In the United States, they remain the only type of documentary that networks will show in their valuable prime-time scheduling. David Attenborough’s 1979 ground-breaking Life on Earth has attracted a staggering worldwide estimated audience of 500 million. His other substantial works, The Living Planet (1984), The Trials of Life (1990), The Private Life of Plants (1995), and State of the Planet (2000) have achieved similar success.