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The BBC Studios Natural History Unit (NHU) is a department of BBC Studios that produces television, radio and online content with a natural history or wildlife theme. It is best known for its highly regarded nature documentaries, including The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, and has a long association with David Attenborough's authored documentaries, starting with 1979's Life on Earth.
Natural World is a strand of British wildlife documentary programmes broadcast on BBC Two and BBC Two HD and regarded by the BBC as its flagship natural history series. It is the longest-running documentary in its genre on British television, with nearly 500 episodes broadcast since its inception in 1983. Natural World programmes are typically one-off films that take an in-depth look at particular natural history events, stories or subjects from around the globe.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on video taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series.
Neil Nightingale is a freelance wildlife filmmaker, executive producer and creative consultant with over 35 years experience at the BBC. From 2009 to 2018 he was the creative director of BBC Earth, BBC Worldwide's global brand for all BBC nature and science content.
John Michael Salisbury, is an English documentary filmmaker specialising in natural history programmes for television. In a career spanning four decades, he spent over 30 years working for the BBC Natural History Unit where he produced a string of award-winning series, many in collaboration with David Attenborough. He retired from the Unit in 2006 but continues to work as a freelance producer. In 2007, he was made an OBE in the New Year Honours List for his services to broadcasting.
Supernatural: The Unseen Powers of Animals, also called Supernature, is a six-part British nature documentary television miniseries that was produced by John Downer Productions and commissioned by the BBC Natural History Unit, the same team behind the earlier successful shows Supersense and Lifesense. The program was narrated by Andrew Sachs and originally broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC1 in 1999. The theme of the series was "the unseen power of animals."
Supersense is a six-part nature documentary television series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, originally broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC1 in 1988. The series producer was John Downer and the narrator Andrew Sachs. It used groundbreaking effects and filming techniques to show how animals perceive the world around them. The same production team went on to make the follow-up series Lifesense in 1991 and Supernatural: Unseen Power of Animals in 1999.
This is a chronological list of selected television programmes and feature films produced or co-produced by the BBC Studios Natural History Unit since its inception in 1957. It is not intended to be exhaustive given the large amount of material the Unit has produced in its history, but it does capture all the major TV series and films for which it has gained recognition. A brief synopsis of pre-1957 radio and television programmes on a natural history theme made by the BBC is given in the History section of the main BBC Studios Natural History Unit article.
The BBC Wildlife Specials are a series of nature documentary programmes commissioned by BBC Television. The series premiered in 1995, and 22 specials have been produced to date, with most of the more recent ones consisting of multiple episodes. The earlier programmes were produced in-house by the BBC's Natural History Unit, but the more recent Spy in the ... titles were made by the independent John Downer Productions. The first 18 specials, through 2008, were narrated by David Attenborough. Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice (2010), Penguins: Spy in the Huddle (2013) and Dolphins: Spy in the Pod (2014) were narrated by David Tennant.
William Goodchild is a composer, orchestrator and conductor who produces music for film, television and the concert hall.
James Honeyborne is the creative director of Freeborne Media, he previously worked as an executive producer at the BBC Natural History Unit where he oversaw some 35 films, working with multiple co-producers around the world. His projects include the Emmy Award and BAFTA-winning series Blue Planet II, the Emmy Award-nominated series Wild New Zealand with National Geographic, and the BAFTA-winning BBC1 series Big Blue Live with PBS.
Gordon John Buchanan is a Scottish wildlife filmmaker and presenter. His work includes the nature documentaries Tribes, Predators & Me, The Polar Bear Family & Me and Life in the Snow.
Jeffery Boswall was a British naturalist, broadcaster and educator.
Keith Scholey is a British producer of nature documentaries for television and cinema, and a former television executive. He is the joint series producer of the Netflix original documentary series Our Planet, the joint director and executive producer of David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, and executive producer of Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet. He is the executive producer of the 2021 BBC / Discovery series A Perfect Planet, The Mating Game and The Earthshot Prize: Repairing Our Planet. He also co-directed African Cats, Bears, and Dolphin Reef with Alastair Fothergill for Disneynature, and is also the executive producer of the series North America for the Discovery Channel.
Madagascar is a British nature documentary series, first broadcast on BBC Two and BBC HD in February 2011. Produced by the BBC Natural History Unit and Animal Planet and narrated by David Attenborough, the three-part series focuses on the landscape and wildlife of the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Attenborough also appears briefly on camera at the beginning and end of the series. Each episode is followed by a ten-minute Madagascar Diaries segment, illustrating the techniques used to film a particular subject.
Chris Morgan is a British-born ecologist, conservationist, TV host, filmmaker, podcaster, and author. His ecology and conservation work focuses on bears and other large carnivores worldwide. Over the last 25 years Morgan has worked as a wildlife researcher, wilderness guide, and environmental educator on every continent where bears exist.
Dolphins - Spy in the Pod is a British factual television series that was first broadcast on BBC One on 2 January 2014. The two-part series was narrated by David Tennant and produced by John Downer Productions. The series was also broadcast by Discovery Channel in the US.
Spy in the Wild is a British nature documentary television series, produced by BBC Natural History Unit, John Downer Productions and PBS. The series, which is directed and produced by John Downer, premiered in 2017 with a second series in 2020. The employment of animatronics makes it possible to document interactive behaviour no animal would have shown towards a human filmmaker or in front of a hidden camera.
Lifesense is a six-part nature documentary television series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit, originally broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC1 in 1991. The series producer was John Downer and the narrator Andrew Sachs. It used groundbreaking effects and filming techniques to show how animals perceive the wildlife, pioneering techniques reveal our lives from the animal's point of view and creatures across the landscapes from the world around them. The same production team had made the series' predecessor Supersense in 1988 and would go on to make the follow-up series Supernatural: The Unseen Powers of Animals in 1999.
Michael Kaczorowski, a nine-time nominated and three-time Emmy Award-winning producer and executive producer, is currently the creative director and producer of Bangkok Swagger. As executive producer, he is responsible for some of Animal Planet and Discovery's biggest and most iconic hits including Carrier: Fortress at Sea, Raising the Mammoth, and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts. Kaczorowski is also responsible for many of Discovery Channel and Animal Planet long running hit series including Meerkat Manor, North Woods Law, River Monsters, Alaskan Bush Family, Wild West Alaska, Buggin with Rude, and American Stuffers. Kaczorowski has worked in Washington D.C. for Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and the National Geographic Society. Kaczorowski began his filmmaking career in 1982 working in feature films for Director Robert Altman on Streamers, O.C. and Stiggs and Secret Honor. In 1985 Kaczorowski helped launch before it became National Geographic Television, and was a film editor for over 10 years editing over 40 films, earning two Emmy nominations for best editing for Dancing with Stingrays and Ocean Kayakers. He edited Discovery Channel's first original production Ivory Wars. Kaczorowski joined Discovery Communications in 1994 holding many positions and titles across different Discovery networks. Over the next 20 years, he developed, supervised and managed everything from documentary specials and long running series, IMAX movies Wildfire: Feel the Heat, Discovery's first feature film The Leopard Son, Animal Planet's first feature film Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins and Animal Planet's first scripted drama The Whale. His production company Bangkok Swagger casts, develops and creates programing around the world for the web, social media and traditional television & cable networks.
References
- ↑ Jenifer Warren: John Downer: Natural Highs . Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1991.
- 1 2 3 BBC Earth: John Downer's Biography , retrieved in October 2020
- 1 2 Interview with EARTHFLIGHT Filmmaker John Downer. PBS Nature, August 12, 2013.
