The woodpeckers that sparked a sensation
It was thanks largely to the producer and amateur bird-watcher, Desmond Hawkins, and a young studio manager, Tony Soper, that the BBC’s West Region in Bristol built for itself an enviable reputation in the postwar period for specialising in natural history radio. But it was one of their most valued contacts in the bird-watching world who helped them launch into television.
In 1954, Peter Scott, who ran a wildfowl sanctuary in Slimbridge, near Gloucester, attended the International Ornithological Congress in Switzerland. On his return, he went straight to Hawkins p;ou’ve got to see this film.q While at the Congress he had seen 13 minutes of footage of woodpeckers recorded by the German naturalist Heinz Sielmann. What struck Scott as remarkable about Sielmann’s film was his stunning use of close-ups, and the infrared technology that had allowed him to film inside a tree trunk.
The German was quickly signed up by the Bristol team, and his film screened on BBC Television. The next morning, there were so many phone calls from excited viewers that the BBC’s switchboard became jammed. The extraordinary public response to the woodpecker film provided the nudge that BBC managers in London needed to invest extra resources in Bristol. The Natural History Unit was soon established.
Its first big TV series was Look, which began in 1955 and ran for over a decade. It was introduced by Peter Scott, and featured short films promising a pfly’s eyeq view of toads, foZes and other native species. Expertly recorded film footage remained in short supply, but over time a pool of camera operators and sound recordists was trained up. In 1957 Faraway Look was launched, showcasing filmed reports from abroad.
Two years later, to coincide with the centenary of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Scott and Soper hitched a ride to the Galapagos Islands, and returned with enough footage to fill seven half-hour episodes. Their pioneering location reports offered a tantalising foretaste of how television would tell the story of evolution through Life on Earth two decades later.
The film was remarkable due to its stunning use of close-ups and infrared technology