Telegraph "Autumnwatch" article
30/10/2008 00:00 GMT

Posted by lisa

The following article appears in today's Telegraph; it is available online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/30/nosplit/bvtvautumnwatch30.xml

Autumnwatch
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 30/10/2008



Robert Collins spends the day with Bill Oddie and Kate Humble on the set of Autumnwatch

Bill Oddie is looking through his binoculars and using pornography as an analogy for his approach to nature. “Someone once described the difference between me and David Attenborough as being that if his programmes were Playboy centrefolds, mine were readers’ wives.” Oddie chuckles, gleeful at the comparison. “I’ve always tried to show people what they can see. David’s programmes show them what they’ll never see [in person].”

To prove his point, the home of the current series of Autumnwatch, BBC2’s live nature series on seasonal change that Oddie presents with his co-anchor Kate Humble, is Brownsea Island. Owned by the National Trust and run by the Dorset Wildlife Trust, the island is open to the public. It’s a small, secluded haven of wildlife, including Japanese sika deer, which frames one side of Poole harbour. Today there are some 500 visitors walking round it, tripping over the frolicking population of more than 200 red squirrels, whose survival on the island has been helped by the fact that no grey squirrel has ever set a pox-ridden paw here.


 
Bill Oddie and Kate Humble birdwatch on Dorset's Brownsea Island
Oddie and Humble are taking a rare quiet moment on the new series’s second day of live broadcast to sit in the National Trust’s hide and watch a flock of wading avocets who have come to winter in Brownsea’s lagoon. Humble enthusiastically endorses Oddie’s policy of nature for all. “The programme has put wildlife and people together,” she beams. “Wildlife doesn’t have to be shut away behind great gates or hedges. You can all go and enjoy this stuff.”

As he sits in the hut, Oddie’s eyes barely leave the island’s avian visitors. “Look at the lagoon: the spoonbills are back!” he exclaims. Humble clucks proudly: “The lovely thing about Bill is that he knows and loves this place.” Oddie’s love of the island, in fact, was instrumental in making it the new base of Autumnwatch, after two years broadcasting from Martin Mere in Lancashire (its sister programme Springwatch has been based in Devon and Norfolk). Sixty-seven-year-old Oddie first visited Brownsea Island when he was a teenager in the Fifties. “There’s something infectious about being with someone who can put things into context and say, ‘Well, you know, when I was a lad,’” says Humble, 41. To which Oddie wryly adds: “Yes. It makes you feel younger, Kate.”

Autumnwatch was watched by 3.8million viewers on the new series’s first night on Monday — a feat for a programme showing at the same time as EastEnders. With Humble and Oddie presenting from Brownsea, the show also shows live reports from Simon King, who has been following the Fallow deer rut at Petworth House in West Sussex this year, and wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan, who is currently embedded with a colony of grey seals on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumbria. In Monday’s broadcast Buchanan’s transmission was lost — partly because, Buchanan’s transmitter, due to space constraints, is no bigger than a suitcase.

All around Brownsea Island, in the lead-up to transmission, the production crew of 60 dashes around, preparing a slate of pre-recorded shots for the evening’s broadcast. One of the show’s three wildlife cameramen films coal tits hovering in mid-air, using a slow-motion camera that can shoot at 1,000 frames per second. Another, Joe Charlesworth, refines the assault course that he has concocted to test the red squirrels’ intelligence. His latest addition: a tightrope fashioned from pink bungee cord. “Now we just need some squirrels,” he says. Nearly an hour later, the squirrels emerge from nearby woods and begin to test the course (see picture, left). None dare the high wire.

Stephen Moss, the show’s series producer, describes the appeal of broadcasting live as being about, “the uncertainty of what the animals are going to do.” That and the uncertainty of whether Buchanan’s transmission will reach them tonight. As they go on air, Buchanan’s tiny transmitter at last obliges. And, in the programme’s last moments, while items are reshuffled to allow the show to end precisely on time, King manages to capture a Fallow buck rutting with a doe at Petworth House. With perfect televisual timing, the process only takes a second.

Autumnwatch is on tonight on BBC2 at 8.00pm and next week, Mon-Thurs