Its wildlife antics make Springwatch as addictive as a soap opera. But viewers are just as fascinated by the chemistry between the presenters
When Chris Packham was a boy, he and his father read through the encyclopaedia from A to Z. "I remember the process, I remember the images, I remember the excitement," says the biologist, ornithologist and connoisseur of everything from fish ear bones to the Jesus and Mary Chain. "When we got to 'J' my father would test me on 'I' and eventually we got to the end." A childhood of rigorous testing followed by a student career as "a horrible swot" has bequeathed Packham a startling ability to regurgitate knowledge and an insatiable love of learning. "I test myself constantly," he mutters. "Crecy, 1346. Agincourt, 1415."
If wildlife television flourishes on a diet of exotic species, dramatic helicopter shots and macho cameramen then a series in which a obsessively clever geek bickers with a jolly-hockey-sticks outdoorsy type and a bloke who keeps losing his glasses while peeking inside a blue tit's nest is an unlikely recipe for success. In its seventh year, however, Springwatch has become a seasonal ritual as firmly lodged in our television calendar as Wimbledon or I'm a Celebrity. The extraordinary births, deaths and sex lives of the ordinary birds and beasts we can probably see in our back gardens has proved as addictive as a soap opera. Springwatch not only attracts nearly 4 million viewers; thousands more participate online.
Its trio of presenters, Packham, Kate Humble and Martin Hughes-Games, could be forgiven for approaching the new series with some trepidation. The 100-person operation has moved from the home comforts of Norfolk to Ynys-hir nature reserve in Wales. The show's technicians have laid down nearly 40 miles of fibre optic cables and are currently tearing their hair out at the logistics of filming in such a remote location. The acclaimed cameraman/presenter Simon King has departed, to be replaced, in characteristic Springwatch style, by beavers and a rubbish dump. And worst of all, after all the glorious early sunshine this year, Springwatch, which despite its name always broadcasts for three weeks in early June, is in serious danger of missing spring.
"Every single year we've sat here in a panic saying, 'Oh my God, spring is over, there's not going to be anything nesting,'" says Humble, who has presented the Bafta award-winning show since it started in 2005 and is currently nursing a bee-stung nose after getting too close to the hive she has established at her idyllic home in east Wales. "The truth is wildlife takes great advantage of a good situation ? hopefully we'll be seeing birds that have multiple broods."
Packham, who murmurs that he has "passed my spring" despite being an implausibly boyish 50, adds that the red kites and herons they have chosen to study this year have particularly long nesting seasons. "The young of these birds just lay around until their mid-30s so obviously we've approached this with a degree of zoological intelligence to make sure we've got something to talk about."
Dragged to London to discuss the new series, the three presenters are desperate to get up to Ynys-hir. "It's like moving to a new house and opening the garden gates for the first time. The ability to explore a new environment and get to know it is a treat," says Packham, who is most looking forward to watching pied flycatchers. "This is a reserve that none of us know so we are going to be discovering it at the same time as the audience," adds Humble, who is keenest to watch the red kites ? "the Henry VIII of the bird of prey world" ? in mid-Wales.
Springwatch is a well-balanced ecosystem. Humble takes charge and runs the show (she describes herself as "a control freak and incredibly nosy"; "She is the one with the satnav turned on, I'm the bloke driving round and round in circles," says Packham) while he provides many of the nerdy, fascinating insights. Hughes-Games, in presenting terms the junior of the three, is the voice of the audience, running the interactive elements as viewers phone, text, tweet and post messages about the seasonal dramas unfolding on screen and in their own gardens.
Hughes-Games, a producer on the show before coming out from behind the cameras, believes its great strength is that "the audience feel that they own it. They are involved at every stage." But he admits the departure of King, who wanted to focus on other projects, is a huge loss. Instead, the cameraman Gordon Buchanan will stake out beavers in Scotland and Liz Bonnin, another guest presenter, will study the surprising wildlife riches of Pitsea tip in Essex.
Springwatch seems to have nature's knack of overcoming its losses. Fans were distraught when Bill Oddie, the eccentric heartbeat of the show, stepped down because of depression two years ago. But Oddie's good friend Packham flew in and viewers had a new pairing to gawp at. "To some people we were shagging like rabbits and to other people we loathed each other," says Humble of the confusing chemistry of their first series together. When they first met, Humble says she immediately wanted to work with this man with a brain "the size of Britain". Then, on the first day of filming, Packham stormed into her caravan ("nothing very glamorous, not a Winnebago the size of Slough") and demanded they prepare for the show. Humble suggested they could do this in his caravan. She was told there wasn't room and discovered that Packham's "entire caravan was taken up with a long clothes rail, which he had brought himself, with cedar hangers on which were hung about 35 T-shirts immaculately spaced out and perfect, all ironed and colour-coded". She laughs.
Today Packham is wearing a cardigan showing the night sky that makes him look like a new age mystic. "I better take it off then. There's nothing metaphysical about me. It's all gas clouds," he says of space. Is he a dandy? "He's quite OCD ? self-confessed, I'm not being remotely disloyal," muses Humble. "He is a bit of a dandy. He thinks about his appearance so in that respect we're quite different."
Pushed to name Humble's worst quality, Packham eventually thinks she "can be a bit bossy but it doesn't offend me". So she's perfect. "No. No one's perfect," he says seriously. I ask another question but Packham is still pondering Humble's weaknesses. "Her music taste is shit." What's the worst song she likes? "No tangible points of reference!" he says, incredulous. "She's like my partner. It's like they grew up in a vacuum. They can't do T Rex and they can't do the Vaccines. And there's nothing in between."
Musical differences created a rift on Humble and Packham's first Springwatch. Broadcasting live about unpredictable wildlife is deceptively difficult and one of Humble's onerous responsibilities is to listen to the clamour of off-screen instructions and keep the show running on time (Hughes-Games says that Humble holds the programme together with her "extraordinary ability to split her mind in two"). Packham, Humble remembers, would keep uttering weird lines on air. One day, he told her: "You just haven't earned it yet baby." Humble exploded. "I went, 'What? How dare you? We've only just met. You can't say that on live telly. Don't you dare call me baby.' It was like Dirty Dancing ? no one puts baby in the corner." Eventually, Humble discovered Packham was heightening the formidable challenge of live broadcasting by shoehorning Smiths song titles into the show. Last spring, he continued with Cure songs. "The triumph last year was Three Imaginary Boys and Killing an Arab," he says. "I had to choreograph those rather than rely on solely my own ingenuity. Oh, that sounded a bit big-headed. I didn't mean that." He smuggled 36 Jesus and Mary Chain song titles into Autumnwatch last year; for this series he is mulling over the Manic Street Preachers. "It would be good to pay homage to a Welsh band," he says.
Packham would probably demand a scientific explanation for the Springwatch presenters' chemistry but Humble sensibly concludes it is because all three are proper friends. Both Packham and Hughes-Games are coming to her husband's 50th birthday party in a few weeks. "We are genuinely mates. We hang out, we talk, we send each other rude texts," she says. "When the programme is very spontaneous it helps when you know what sparks each other off. It's not to say we don't disagree or argue but that's what mates do."
One area of disagreement is over anthropomorphism and emotional attitudes towards wild animals. The animal stars of Springwatch often get nicknames and Humble and Hughes-Games admit to welling up when baby swallows are thrown from the nest. Humble was devastated by last year's heart-wrenching moment when a jackdaw killed the last little ringed plover chick on its nest.
"This year we're opening a special helpline," interrupts Packham, deadpan. "Springwatch Samaritans. 'If you've been concerned by any of the issues in this programme ? death of blue tits ? you can ring this number and we'll console you.'" Packham is unmoved by the plight of the plover. "I'm a hard-hearted biologist," he says. "I don't really like animal names, unless they are scientific. I don't tend to get emotionally involved with anything other than Itchy and Scratchy [his poodles]." Packham's most annoying habit, confirms Humble, is his absolute refusal "to go, 'ah but look at it, it's so sweet' unless it's a poodle, which is frankly ridiculous."
While critics might argue that Springwatch encourages us to divide all wild animals into cuddly/cruel categories or project stereotypical human attributes on to them, all three presenters argue that a degree of anthropomorphism is necessary to lure in an audience ? particularly if you are telling a story about, say, the life of an earwig. "It's quite difficult to get inside an earwig's head," says Hughes-Games.
"If you just give everything a Latin name and bald biological facts, no one is going to care, they are going to think it's like being back at school and switch off. If you do engage people through [anthropomorphism] you are able to say: 'These are the real facts,'" says Humble. "I'm not strictly against anthropomorphising things," adds Packham. "Birds do have characters. We tend to forget they have individual characters, so you do have naughty magpies but you have rather nice magpies too. Building the stereotypes is something that we might have to guard against but a bit of that is very useful."
Other critics might find Springwatch's focus on the minutiae of our familiar native species too provincial or narrow but the wonders of the natural world are found in its tiniest details, which the battalion of hidden cameras brilliantly convey. The series also tackles pressing issues: a recent special examined the controversy over the proposed badger cull, while the new series will examine debates over the reintroduction of species, the culling of magpies and whether we should feed wild birds.
Packham, who jokingly once said he risked being viewed as "the Pol Pot of nature conservation" for arguing that preserving the giant panda was an enormous waste of money, is keen to debate bigger environmental questions. Far from disavowing his recent suggestion that parents should be given financial incentives to have smaller families, Packham, who has a stepdaughter but no biological children and is a patron of the pressure group Population Matters, says he wants to "creatively agitate" for a debate about overpopulation. He views it as our biggest environmental challenge, more critical than climate change (although he is not a climate change sceptic). Is not excessive consumption rather than overpopulation the key problem? "We could all drive around in 4x4s if there were only four of us," says Packham. While rising population and consumption in China and India is "potentially catastrophic" he insists he is not picking on developing countries. "I'm not going to sit here and tell any Indian or Chinese person they can't have a fridge or a car. We in the west are consuming far more than everyone else. You and I are surviving on other people's energy poverty. That should be on our consciences."
Our failure to realise that over- population is a problem "stems from an arrogance that we are not an organism, that we don't have impacts in the way that too many deer or rats do. We think we're above that. That's nonsense."
Back in Britain, Springwatch is doing its best to combat "one of the most serious extinctions that we face", as Packham puts it: the loss of the British naturalist. "I go into the countryside with Mr Itchy and Scratchy every day. I never see kids making camps, birds-nesting, shooting birds with air rifles or fishing. They are not out there. We have imprisoned them."
Although he and Humble both do their best to inspire children ("I've never talked to children. I just talk," says Packham), and regularly exhort parents to take their families into the countryside, they know it is not enough to have shows such as Springwatch. Children's innate curiosity about nature can only be developed by exposure to the real thing. "Wildlife television is a great way of instigating an interest. It's not a means of satisfying it," says Packham. "To satisfy it you've got to meet it ? you've got to be slimed, stung and scratched by it. You've got to get out there."
? The new series of Springwatch starts on BBC2 on May 30.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/17/springwatch-presenters-send-rude-texts
Tottenham Hotspur Energy efficiency Japan Adventure travel Cobham Enjoy England TwiTrips
No comments:
Post a Comment