Combat cameraman was brave under fire

Nick Downie, who has died of COVID-19 in South Africa aged 74, was a former SAS soldier widely regarded as one of the world's best combat cameramen.

Downie had been a professional soldier for six years, 3½ of them in the SAS, and also fought as an irregular alongside Bedouins in the Sultanate of Oman against Marxist-led insurgents from 1972 to 1974, and with Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas in Iraqi Kurdistan during the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War (1974-75).

The skills he learned served him well as a cameraman, whose single-handed missions to world troublespots made him the darling of television awards committees and the despair of television unions paranoid about preserving members' rights to “normal crew backup.”

Nicolas Jon Downie was born on May 27, 1946, and educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College. His father was a doctor and it seemed that Nick would follow him into the medical profession. He trained at Middlesex Hospital medical school, but found hospital life boring, and even began to experience blackouts in which he would fall asleep unpredictably — on one occasion across the bed of a patient he was meant to be examining.

Instead, he developed a keen interest in revolutionary guerrilla warfare, and signed on for the SAS territorial selection course. Dropping out of medical school in his final year, he applied to join the gruelling selection course for 22 SAS. Although he was the only civilian among 120 candidates, he was one of only seven who passed.

Downie built a reputation for exceptional toughness and composure under fire. In the Western Sahara he was involved in a savage close-quarter firefight in open desert in which 30 out of the 40 combatants died in the space of 10 minutes; his footage recorded the moment when a Polisario guerrilla a few yards away had his head blown off.

Downie was most proud of Survive, a series broadcast on Channel 4 in 1985, in which he demonstrated the art of survival in extreme situations. His first episode, filmed in the frozen wastes of northern Canada, was described by one critic as “absolutely riveting, blood-curdling.” Other episodes dealt with survival techniques in the jungle, at sea, in concentration camps, under torture and interrogation and after a nuclear war.

In 1993 The Daily Telegraph reported that he had been killed in Afghanistan, prompting Downie to write a letter correcting the error: “I have no wish to appear a pedant ... (but) for the benefit of my friends, colleagues and erstwhile comrades-inarms (not to mention the Inland Revenue and my somewhat startled 80-yearold mother) I would like to make it clear that I survived all my visits to that country and am living peaceably in Sussex with my two young daughters.”