Blog posts by year and monthOctober 2011
Posts (6)
Frozen Planet: Filming in the polar wilderness
The polar regions are truly other-worldly places - aside from their alien beauty, they are extreme and unforgiving, and some of the most challenging places on earth for a film crew to operate. A female polar bear leads her two cubs across the sea ice. If anyone ever asks what the key ...
Codebreakers, spies and double lives: World War II's secret stories
Despite our fascination with World War II it never fails to surprise me how many unusual, forgotten or relatively untold stories there still are. An upcoming series of programmes on BBC Two takes a fascinating look at some of these lesser known tales, focusing on some of the ordinary heroes ...
Holy Flying Circus: Making a drama of Monty Python
"I suppose the challenge with Jones The Wife was to try and create something sweet, something truthful, then stick some fake boobs on it and see if the audience still bought it."
Origins Of Us: Studying chimpanzees
Filming for Origins gave me the opportunity to do something I've never done before: to observe our closest cousins, chimpanzees, in the wild. Earlier this year, on 5 March, I met up with a crew I knew very well - we'd filmed before on Incredible Human Journey - in Heathrow's Terminal Five. ...
Mixed Britannia: Telling the story of mixed race Britain
I guess there are two ways of approaching a TV production: knowing exactly what you want to say and finding the people who fit into the mould, or telling the story you discover as you go along. There's always going to be a bit of an overlap, but in the case of Mixed Britannia on BBC Two I'd ...
All Roads Lead Home: Teaching my celebrity students the art of natural navigation
A little over three years ago I set up a school to teach the rare art of natural navigation. Since then I have run courses, indoors and out, teaching hundreds of people how to find their way using only the sun, stars, moon, plants, animals, weather and buildings. When my book on the subje...
