WILD AT HEART
Award-winning wildlife filmmaker and presenter Gordon Buchanan explains how growing up on Mull shaped his life and fascinating career
Iwas born in Dunbartonshire, but my family moved to Mull when I was very young. It was a huge decision made by my mother and for the first few years of our life on Mull we (my two brothers and sister and I) lived in a caravan near Tobermory. We spent our entire childhood outside exploring the island.
I didn’t really see the point of school. I could read and write and always knew that studying physics or maths wasn’t going to be relevant to what I wanted to do. We had to do a science so my friend and I went to the headmaster and told him that we wanted to be chefs and asked if could we do food nutrition as a science. To our absolute shock he said yes. I actually really enjoyed it and did learn to cook.
My report cards always said I needed to try harder and was capable of more. I wasn’t seen to be disruptive at school, but actually a lot of the disruption in class emanated from me. I usually had the ideas and would manipulate someone else into carrying them out.
For me, everything to do with school was a total pain in the arse because it got in the way of being outside. For a while I worked at a trekking centre and got to ride a lot which I loved. I wanted to spend all my time riding about, as well as reading and writing. I think when I didn’t have a teacher telling me to do something, I actually quite enjoyed it.
I was once asked back to Tobermory High School to present the end of year prizes. I guess they assumed that as I had done alright in life I was probably hardworking at school. I made a speech for the kids that were sitting there knowing that their name wouldn’t be read out.
I said that the end of your education is not the end of your life, it is just the beginning, and that I had left school at 16 with no qualifications. The headmaster was scowling so I quickly added, ‘But I encourage everyone to work hard and do the best you can…’ I haven’t been asked back since.
When I was a teenager I worked in a restaurant in Tobermory called The Captain’s Table, washing up at the weekends and in the school holidays. It was owned by Anne and Nick Gordon. Anne ran the restaurant and Nick was a wildlife cameraman for Survival Anglia, who were the biggest wildlife production company of the day. The phone was near the sink so I would often answer it and it would be Nick on a very crackly line saying, ‘Hi, it’s Nick... I am in Guyana… or China...’
I think for a boy who had never been abroad and never been on a plane, to be on the phone to somebody who was in such an exotic place, or somewhere I had never even heard of, was just fascinating. I would ask Anne what he was doing there, how long he was there for and when he’d get back.
By that time I was 16 and was weighing up my options. I loved watching wildlife documentaries and couldn’t think of anything better to do with my life than travelling the world making them. Nick’s study was full of strange and exotic collections of things he had picked up on his travels, such as a huge anaconda skin, an otter skull, a dried piranha, hundreds of maps and boxes of equipment. To be in such an alien environment was intoxicating. I remember just standing in there gawping at the walls in complete wonder and awe.
Nick and I got on very well and I would often run errands for him. He needed an assistant and I never once thought that he would offer me the job – I didn’t even fish for it. But one day he did and I jumped at the chance. I’d never been to London before, I’d never been on a plane, I’d never been anywhere. I went into school the next day and instead of going to maths, I went to the headmaster’s office and said I was leaving.
Our first trip was to Sierra Leone for a year and a half and I was naive about what it was going to be like. I thought of Africa
as gin and tonics and giraffes nibbling on acacia trees. I didn’t realise that Sierra Leone was one of the most povertystricken countries in the world with the lowest life expectancy of any African country at that time.
When I walked off the plane and was confronted with the horrors of that, I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life but, because Nick had made me promise I wouldn’t walk away from it, I had to commit to the whole thing so I got my head down and got on with it.
It was really difficult, being away from home, missing all my family and friends, who were all still at school, and being in a place that was so alien. It was the deep end for sure.
When I came back to Mull after Sierra Leone to go to university, I felt so different to everyone else. I felt windswept and interesting to have been on a plane, to not just a foreign country, but to Africa – suddenly I was different to everyone else my age.
The world is definitely shrinking as more and more people have access to television and the internet. When I was filming leopards for Planet Earth in Mumbai we were walking through a slum to get to the filming location and there was a bunch of lads drinking and having a bit of fun.
As we walked past them one boy was pointing at me. I thought it was because I was a foreigner and he wanted a photo with me but, actually, he had seen me on another documentary and wanted an autograph. It completely threw me.
When I think back, not so long ago, I used to write letters back home from location. In Sierra Leone at the beginning, I wrote a letter a night to send home. My boss went to Freetown once a month to post and collect mail, so it was a funny cycle – I would receive everything in clumps. Weeks after I returned to Mull, my family were still receiving their letters from Freetown. Nowadays everywhere is accessible.
Recently I was filming in Mongolia, in just about the most remote location in
The world is definitely shrinking as more and more people have access to television and internet
the world, days from the nearest village. We had LTE (Long-Term Evolution), which is better than 4G, and I was Facetiming home to Wendy and the kids every night.
I am glad it is like that now that I have my own children – keeping in touch with those that matter to you makes the job much easier. I think there are very few places in the world where you can truly disappear nowadays.
In Ethiopia, there’s a place called the Omo Valley, and the Bodi tribe live there. As you would expect, they have metal pots and pans, machetes, even AK-47s, but actually they’ve had them for 40-odd years and since then, very little has changed. Their houses are traditional, their clothing is traditional.
They’ve got all their cattle and their goats. Even the old guys who wear full traditional Bodi costume with elongated earlobes and lip plates – they still have mobile phones!
I remember the first time I went to India we would have to drive for an hour to get to the nearest town where we could possibly get a crackly phone line home, but I went back to that place years later and everyone had a mobile – even the poorest. It seems to be the thing that everybody wants and needs, which is interesting as it’s the one thing that unites people around the world. Maybe communication and mobile phone signal are actually the secret to keeping these communities and cultures alive.
For people to be linked up and in contact with the rest of the world, the desire to leave maybe isn’t quite so great. For me, growing up somewhere like Mull, I knew nothing about what life was like anywhere else – except of course what I saw on television – and was so desperate to get away and see what was out there.
I love coming back to the island. A lot has changed, but in many ways, it is the same. Everyone knows everyone, and the sense of community is strong. Everyone would come out to these community events in Tobermory, like coffee evenings and whist drives.
I cannot imagine how different my life might have been if my mother hadn’t made the move up here when we were children.