A peculiar career
From a windowless shed to the Moon
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1989
Video Village, Bristol · tape op
Started in a windowless shed on the Feeder Road, lacing up reel-to-reel videotape.
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Early 1990s
Broadcast Film and Video · offline services manager
Went from printing tape labels in an office under the stairs to running the new digital offline edit, hiring out 2GB drives for hundreds of pounds a week.
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Mid-1990s
Partridge Films · post-production manager
Began working on scripts, and flew to Washington DC to finish films for National Geographic, where I found colour grading on another level, and Dean & DeLuca.
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Late 1990s
Production manager for Jane Treays, Granada
Took the job without ever having done it, because Jane thought I could. If Jane needed it to happen, I made it happen. Drove the crew van overnight from Essex to Glasgow to follow Status Quo on tour, and took teachers from Cheltenham Ladies' College to the Moulin Rouge to learn the can-can.
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2000
Shiatsu practitioner, Bristol
Qualified in shiatsu, and gave treatments part-time in a hypnotherapist's practice on Whiteladies Road, the same road as the BBC Natural History Unit and many of Bristol's production and post-production companies. All alongside trying to break into the editorial side of production.
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2004
Flip Flop Films, with Dave Pearce
Set up a company so we could pitch to Channel 4, and won the only commission I ever pitched myself: four three-minute films about ageing performers, made for about £3,000 each.
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2004
Wildscreen Festival
Went from technical support to the content committee, then ran the live Panda Awards for three festivals: a dinner for 650, with presenters including Joanna Lumley, Alan Titchmarsh and Andrew Sachs, and Sir David Attenborough giving Lifetime Achievement Awards.
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Mid-2000s
Freelance edit and reversioning producer
Rewrote European documentaries for American audiences for Parthenon, cut twelve short films from the 2006 Everest expedition for Tigress, and ran the recording sessions for the Noddy computer and learning games. When our young Noddy's voice was about to break, I helped cast a new one.
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2007
Icon Films · The One Show
Came in to Icon reversioning a National Geographic film about building a mechanical pterosaur, then edit producing Street Monkeys, about vervet monkeys living on a South African housing estate. Then several years of One Show films. One took a stray turtle home from Britain to North Carolina, upgraded to business class, while immigration carried our bags so we could keep filming. We handed it over to Mama Turtle at her rehab centre, interviewed her on the beach, and flew back the next day.
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2011
River Monsters, Icon Films · writer and director
The major breakthrough of my career, moving from short films to full-length and feature-length episodes. I wrote and directed six episodes across four seasons. On one shoot in Iceland, an 80-year-old rally driver flew us down canyons in a Cessna as if it were a helicopter.
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2015
Savage Kingdom, Icon Films for Nat Geo Wild · series producer
Slept on the roof of a Land Cruiser in a dry riverbed in Savute, with lions asleep nearby. In the moonlight, twenty elephants came up the bank, raised their trunks, caught the lions' scent and fled. Another night, buffalo thundered past on either side of us like a horse race.
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2016
Expedition Mungo, Blast! Films · producer/director
Stood in the steam of the Boiling River, deep in the Peruvian jungle, where you can cook eggs in the water.
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2017
Animal Babies: First Year on Earth, BBC Natural History Unit · series producer
Spent time with mountain gorillas in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, and filmed Arctic foxes in Hornstrandir, in Iceland, which looked like Middle Earth.
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2019
Growing Up Animal, Wall to Wall · executive/series producer
Made it to Uganda for one chimp shoot just before lockdown. The series' stars, hyper-realistic silicone animal fetuses that everyone took for CGI, I never saw in person. They were built at Elstree, filmed in a warm-water tank in Southampton, then shipped off to National Geographic. See them behind the scenes.
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2021
Islands: Nature's Wild Laboratories, Wall to Wall · executive/series producer
Made a series without going on location, coming out of lockdown, bringing geography and geology to life to make sense of six isolated worlds.
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2023
Shark vs Ross Edgley, Big Wave Productions for Nat Geo · director
Stood on deck off Grand Bahama and Bimini as the divers surfaced, talking about vast, gentle female hammerheads, one six feet from the base of her pectoral fins to the tip of her dorsal.
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2023
MOON: Nature's Secret Force, Humble Bee Films · series producer
Highlights included filming a tiny alpine newt on a hand-built set of real plants and mosses, in front of a virtual production wall that could change the weather, the light and the time of day, and working with the team to produce a Swahili-language impact film for a Tanzanian NGO. And at the very end, two days in the studio with Tilda Swinton recording the narration.
A last series
I knew when I started working on MOON that it would be my last job in the world I'd built my career in.
It was tough, it is tough, and the grief at the loss of my TV career surprised me. But instead of leaving it behind, I now realise it has built the foundations for this new chapter.