The making of Wonders of the Monsoon

Series producer Paul Bradshaw on making Wonders of the Monsoon.

What excited and challenged us most in this series was the sheer scale of the story to be told. The mission: to turn this vast and mesmerising tapestry, spanning two continents, incomparable wildlife and over half the world’s population, into five powerful and compelling films.

To do it, we had to embrace both the grand scale and the tiny; to weave in a diversity of human experience and, above all, connect everything together, through the monsoon.

To have any chance of doing this, we needed great timing, or preferably, a crystal ball. Amongst the most unpredictable things to film in nature are animal behaviour and weather. And In Wonders of the Monsoon, we had both, one dependent on the other. And everything hinged on the most capricious beast of all, the monsoon.