Wildlife television presenting was once a man’s world. A documentary on baboon
behaviour or ocelot extinction would call for a bearded naturalist like
David Bellamy, or the cheery anthropomorphism of Johnny Morris. But now this
territory is facing a climate change all of its own, as it is invaded by a
new breed of presenter: feisty, intelligent, eco-aware – and female. Though
a publicist for Sir David Attenborough assures me that he is “obviously not
replaceable”, his grip on the title of king of the jungle may not be as firm
as it once was.
Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek flings open the door to her Bristol-based home, auburn
hair tumbling over her green safari shirt. I have caught up with Uhlenbroek
the day before she flies to Uganda to film a chimpanzee series for Channel
Five. Great apes are this zoologist’s speciality. She lived in a hut for
four years on the edge of Lake Tanganyika, following chimps through the
forest and recording their long-distance calls for her PhD, alongside the
revered primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall.
Uhlenbroek’s big television break came in the late 1990s. “I’d spent months
analysing chimp vocalisations in a soundproof studio back in Bristol,” she
explains – work that revealed that chimp communication involves not just one
type of call, as was previously thought, but several different long-distance
calls. “The BBC heard there was a girl up the road who had been working out
in Gombe, and asked if I wanted to go back to present a series called Dawn
to Dusk, and that they’d pay me!” Presenting came naturally to the young
primatologist. “I was talking about chimps that
I knew incredibly well. I was just turning to the camera as if it was a
friend. I felt like a conduit.” Her ability to decipher primate behaviour,
her blue-chip zoological credentials and look of “an eco-friendly Lara
Croft” meant she was soon fronting BBC2’s Chimpanzee Diary. Since then, her
eager, breathy tones have become a TV fixture. We have seen her swing
through the jungle canopy, scale mengaris trees in Borneo and inspect
pink-toed tarantulas in the Amazon.
Her latest book, Animal Life, is a “bang-up-to-date” look at animal behaviour,
packed with research using the latest technology – fibre-optic
cameras, laser beams, and satellite transmitters tiny enough to attach to
dragonflies. Her passionate aim is to convince people to protect the planet.
“It’s a minute to midnight in terms of survival of our closest relatives,
the great apes. If I can enthuse people about apes and make them care, the
more likely they are to want to protect them,” she says. “Some of the
species we cover in this book are becoming extinct as we speak. You go out
and film, and you think, this might be the last time anyone can collect data
or film this species.” But how can we make a difference? Uhlenbroek says
that if we refuse to buy items containing unsustainable products, such as
some palm oil (which means destroying orang-utan habitats) or tropical
hardwoods (as logging opens up ape habitats to bushmeat-hunters), retailers
will respond. Another way is to see wildlife in situ with reputable eco-tour
companies and “to feel personally connected with the animals when you get
back, in terms of how you lead your lives and what you buy”, she says.
Male journalists have noted Uhlenbroek’s “athletic, almost innocent sexiness”
and her “tight sleeveless tops”; one wished “these frivolous young females
dancing about” would stop making wildlife programmes. She appears
unperturbed. “I’m a scientist. I’m coming in from a point of some expertise.
Otherwise audiences think, ‘Why is she telling us this; how does she know?’
” She doesn’t have a game plan. “I’m very much here and now and take things
as they come. Television is a very fickle industry.”
) ) ) ) )
“It has been mentioned I have to glam up a bit,” laughs Miranda Krestovnikoff,
a biologist by training and a presenter of Coast, her sea-tanned face
beaming from across her kitchen table. “But I’m very much a
jeans-and-wellies sort of person: you’d look slightly stupid if you were
wading around in the undergrowth wearing a large pair of earrings.”
Krestovnikoff, seven months pregnant with her second child, is on a mission
to make us appreciate our native treasures. “I’m passionate about British
countryside and the British coastline. To have an amazing experience, people
think you’ve got to go somewhere wild and remote – they forget the diversity
of wildlife we have in this country.”
Krestovnikoff was one of scores of young, eager and privately educated Bristol
University biology graduates banging on the door of the BBC’s Bristol-based
Natural History Unit.
“It was a slow start,” she admits, “but I got my break looking after frogs and
toads for a cameraman who introduced me to people at the BBC. I started as a
science researcher for wildlife programmes, and then became the resident
zoologist and presenter for Fox Television’s World Gone Wild in 1998.” She
has extensive knowledge of marine and other wildlife, a gung-ho attitude and
an ability to encourage even the most tongue-tied field researchers to talk.
She credits her husband, Nick, as much of the reason that she can have a child
and hold down the demanding schedules. “We’re a team, and having that sort
of relationship is really critical in a job that’s so transient. One minute
you’re working and the next your contract has come to an end.” And the
future? “I’d like to do more green-based things on television. It’s not just
conserving species, but getting the message out about our environment and
the world we live in. It is such a fragile place, we are massive consumers
and just don’t think about our actions enough. Somehow it’s going to have to
change.”
Wildlife broadcasting, too, needs to evolve. “If you’ve got the right
expertise, qualifications and you fit the bill, then I don’t think it’s any
harder for women to get into wildlife presenting. But to stay and make a big
name for yourself is difficult. As a woman, you might make it for a few
years, but somebody younger or more glamorous than you is going to come in.
Whereas with men, it’s the voice of authority. I’m prepared for the worst.”
For now, she is embracing what she has. “Every day that I work, I’m learning
something. If I’m in the middle of Pembrokeshire on a boat looking at
puffins, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.” Not that she
doesn’t sometimes question herself. “The weather in this country is so
extreme, and there are frequent moments, when diving and filming with a big
heavy mask on, when it’s hard to breathe. When I’m roped to a boat in murky,
freezing-cold water, trying to work against the current, I do think, ‘What
am I doing? I’m mad.’ ”
) ) ) ) )
“Fear is what you feel at night when you have come to your senses,” says Saba
Douglas-Hamilton. The young anthropologist props her chin on a slender,
bronzed wrist and fixes me with intense hazel eyes. “My biggest fear is that
we don’t wake up in time to this insatiable devouring of natural resources
and pollution that threatens every lifeline, and we lose everything.”
The naturalist – once described as having the “effortless sex appeal of a
young Anna Ford” – captivated the powers that be at the Natural History Unit
when she arrived with her father, the zoologist Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton, in
2001. Since then she has fronted series such as Big Cat Diary, which she
says was “quite macho” before she came into it. “It was two men out in the
bush. When I came in, it did soften a bit, and people realised that,
actually, girls can do this too.”
She is fresh from filming a three-part BBC series The Secret Life of
Elephants, about her father’s Kenyan-based charity, Save the Elephants. As a
graduate she trained with Blythe Loutit, the revered rhino conservationist,
in the Namibian desert. Loutit, who dedicated her life to pulling the last
of the desert-adapted rhinos from the brink of extinction, was “a real
eco-warrior who lived on absolutely nothing”.
Her take on the emotions and awareness that large mammals display attracts
vast audiences. Elephants, for example, have traits such as empathy and a
sense of mortality, and plan for the future in a way that “makes them a lot
more like us than we think”. At present, she says, of all the money given to
animal charities, most goes to domestic pets. She hopes, by helping people
to engage with wild animals, to redress the balance. “The rhino, for
example, may look like a throwback from a prehistoric era, but it thinks and
feels and does things for intelligent reasons.”
Douglas-Hamilton bases herself on the outskirts of Nairobi in her
“biodegradable house” – a ramshackle hut that she built with her husband,
Frank Pope, a writer and marine archeologist. “It’s easy to forget how
lifestyle affects the environment – eating Chilean sea bass or buying ivory.
Don’t buy ivory! It equals dead elephants, most often killed illegally. If
you like sushi or tinned tuna, be aware of what species you are eating,
where they come from and how they are fished. I feel very strongly that we
need to bring a stronger conservation ethic back into making films, how
we’re selling stories, how we’re awakening people’s consciences.”
She grew up in the Kenyan wilderness with her younger sister, Dudu. Her father
introduced her to their extended family of 400 elephants at just six weeks
old – so understanding animals is second nature. “I find human beings far
more scary than animals because they are much more unpredictable,” she says.
She likens film crews to “parasites. We go out there, find the best stories,
suck out all the information, take beautiful images and then leave. The
scientists who are there day in, day out, collecting data and finding those
stories are the real heroes. Like rangers taking bullets from poachers, they
are in the front line. My job is to link these worlds. What I love is to
bring the wilderness into people’s sitting rooms and then, hopefully,
they’ll feel a passion for what’s going on”.
I try to imagine Douglas-Hamilton on our screens at 80 – silver-haired and
sun-worn, trundling behind elephant herds in a dusty green truck. And
Uhlenbroek as a pensioner, translating chimp calls in Tanzania while a
weatherbeaten Krestovnikoff enthusiastically prods sea anemones with a
walking stick. It’s entirely possible. Attenborough himself has said he is
“impressed” by Uhlenbroek. Will there come a time when male wildlife
presenters join the endangered-species list?
Animal Life, by Charlotte Uhlenbroek (Dorling Kindersley, £30), is published
on October 1. It costs £27, inc p&p, from BooksFirst; tel: 0870 165
8585
Saba Douglas-Hamilton
Born: In Kenya at 7pm on June 7, 1970, the seventh grandchild (hence the name
Saba, Swahili for seven, given to her by tribesmen)
Resides: In Nairobi with her husband, Frank Pope, marine archeologist and
writer
Schools: Secondary school at the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales
Degree: Master’s in social anthropology from the University of St Andrews,
Scotland
Languages: English, Swahili and French
BBC presenting jobs: Going Ape (2001); wildlife programmes on Wild BBC2; co-presented
five series of Big Cat Diary
Films: With her younger sister, Dudu, produced and directed Heart of a Lioness
(2004) and Rhino Nights (2008)
Viewers: Big Cat Diary has regularly attracted an audience exceeding 3.5m
Charities: Trustee of her father’s charity, Save the Elephants (www.savetheelephants.org
); supporter of the Save the Rhino
Trust and the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation; an active member of
Concerned Citizens for Peace, Kenya
Best moment: Visited by a bull elephant at night on a dry river bed in Namibia
Worst moment: Stranded in rough seas, miles off the coast of Namibia, at night
Miranda Krestovnikoff
Born: January 29, 1973, and brought up in the Buckinghamshire countryside
Resides: In Bristol
Children: Amelie, 2
Schools: The Abbey School, an independent day school in Reading
Degree: Zoology at the University of Bristol
First presenting job: World Gone Wild, for Fox Television (1999)
BBC wildlife series: Nature of Britain; natural-history expert on Coast;
wildlife specialist on The One Show
Viewers: The first series of Coast, in 2005, attracted an audience of 5m
Books: Eyewitness Companion to Scuba Diving, co-authored with Monty Halls
Charities: Supporter of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Bite-Back
(which aims to reduce demand for shark meat) and the cycling charity
Sustrans
Best moment: Swimming with basking sharks off the Scottish island of Mull
Worst moment: Strapped to a wreck underwater in freezing seas off Britain
Charlotte Uhlenbroek
Born: May 16, 1967, in London, then moved to Ghana, where she lived until the
age of five. From 5 to 14 she lived in Kathmandu, Nepal
Resides: In Bristol
Schools: Lincoln School, an American international school in Nepal; Queen
Ethelburga’s, a private school in York, from 14
Degree: Zoology and psychology at the University of Bristol
PhD: Chimpanzee communication in Tanzania
BBC presenting jobs: Dawn to Dusk (1996); Cousins, a series on primates
(2000); Talking with Animals (2002); Jungle (2003); My Life with Animals
(2007); Safari School (2007)
Viewers: My Life with Animals attracted an audience of 2.3m
Books: Talking with Animals (2002); Jungle (2003); Animal Life (2008)
Charities: Vice-president of Fauna and Flora International; co-founded
Kathmandu Animal Treatment Centre, protecting Nepal’s stray dogs; supporter
of the Ape Alliance
Praise: “I’m very impressed by Charlotte Uhlenbroek,” says Sir David
Attenborough
Best moment: Swimming with humpback whales in Australia
Worst moment: Sweat bees crawling into her eyes and ears in Congo
