FACTUAL TV


NATURAL HISTORY


A WHOLE DIFFERENT ANIMAL


The climate for natural history programmes is currently very healthy with more and more buyers in the market. And essential environmental messages are an easier sell now too. Pippa Considine reports


services. The drama of the natural world can offer stories as riveting as any behaviour on Bridgerton, or I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Natural history production is still underpinned


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by specialists and scientific rigour; to capture animal behaviour requires a specific discipline. But, whether it’s a multi-million pound landmark production, or a more modest show, wildlife TV in the twenties is mixing up genres and meeting the mainstream. One of the strongest natural history slates


belongs to Plimsoll TV, founded by Grant Mansfield, the man who launched I’m A Celebrity. His chief creative officer of natural history and science, Martha Holmes, describes Plimsoll’s 2021 discovery+ series Meet the Meerkats as “a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs.” The meerkats’ rewilding in the Kalahari Desert involved killings, affairs, desertions. “They delivered in terms of the story, taking an arc through a six-part series.” At Silverback Films, co-founder Keith Scholey


worries that too much natural history lacks the bingeability factor. “People are focused on making sequences better, but there’s not enough scrutiny of narrative.” The indie has made Disneynature feature films for many years, where Disney is exacting about the story. Streamers, he observes, are not necessarily re-ordering.


EVOLVING MARKET But audiences for natural world programming appear to have built during the pandemic. Wendy Darke, ceo of Sky-owned True to Nature puts this down to “the subtext of getting you to fall in love with nature…. It’s life affirming, reassuring, calm- ing, you feel less alone.” Producer and distributor


ild animals now sit cheek by jowl alongside blockbuster dramas and reality shows in the schedules of major broadcasters and streaming


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