Gordon Buchanan: "Coming from such a small community, I'm almost embarrassed by my achievements"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

A pride of lions – two lionesses and six or seven, almost-grown up, cubs – are gorging on a zebra carcass in the Okavango Delta. They have been without food for several days. Astonishing close-ups show the longed-for meat disappearing into the jaws of each lion. Drone shots capture the moment when the pride has had its fill. Tummies full, the big cats roll over, sated. If you want to see lions in a state of bliss, Big Cats 24/7 is for you.

Wildlife film-maker Gordon Buchanan, who grew up on the Isle of Mull, is part of the BBC team following lion, leopard and cheetah across Botswana, day and night, as the title promises. The Scottish cameraman is at the top of his game, having shot more than 32 natural-history programmes, a number of which he’s also presented. In 2020 he was appointed MBE for his services to conservation. Is he as satisfied as those lions? “Coming from such a small community, I’m almost embarrassed by my achievements. I never set out to prove anything, bar to myself,” he says.

Buchanan didn’t have an easy, or privileged start in life. Born just outside Glasgow, the third of four children, the family moved to Mull when Buchanan was a small child, after his mother separated from his father. They lived in a caravan and money was tight; his mother held down three weekly jobs.

“She had no support. There were hugs and we were loved, but the rest… you had to make up for yourself. We had a sort of feral existence.” School was no help. “I think today I would be defined as dyslexic,” he says. “I struggled through school, not grasping things. I could skive my way through it and I wasn’t expected to pass anything, bar woodwork and art.”

Buchanan acknowledges that being a natural-history presenter from a working-class background is unusual. “Historically, the only people who were naturalists were the clergy or monied classes,” he says. “There is an assumption that I’m middle-class because in the media, and in wildlife film-making in particular, there are a lot of middle-class people. About 90 per cent of people have been to private school, so I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder. There’s this assumption that I’m probably privately educated. Someone once asked me if it was true that my family owned half of Mull. Ha! The only bit of land we had was under my mum’s council flat.”

Appearing in front of the camera was never meant to be part of the story. “It scared me so much to speak in public – it was the worst thing,” he says, but that changed when Buchanan shot a Natural World documentary called Leopard Hunters in Sri Lanka in 2001. “There was a big hole in the film and I was ordered to get in front of the camera, with my producer shouting, ‘Put some effort into it!’ But I didn’t want to be a wildlife presenter, so anything I did in front of the camera was minimum effort. But the BBC liked the laid-back approach…”

Buchanan’s love of the outdoors began as a child, as a place of escape from a difficult home, which he shared with his then stepfather: “That’s why the outdoors held excitement and promise. I could run away, explore and be carefree. The house wasn’t really a safe place.

“My mum said it didn’t happen that often, probably less than 10 times, but the threat of domestic violence was always there.” The violence escalated until Buchanan returned home one day to find blood on the stairs. His mother – who would later throw out his stepfather – had been attacked in her sleep.

Having left school at 17, Buchanan’s weekend job, washing up at a restaurant owned by the wildlife cameraman Nick Gordon and his wife Ann, turned into an escape route. The teenager was invited to join Gordon on his next trip, to Sierra Leone.

“It was my one golden ticket. It was the chance for me to do something that was different and ticked so many boxes, whether building filming towers or setting up camp,” he says.

After two days away he had contracted dysentery and seen a dead body. He was away for 18 months and it was another world compared to travel now. “I don’t want to go back to the days where it took two months to get news from family, but the internet has shrunk the world.”

In a good way? Not really, he thinks. “At the age of 53, I’m addicted to my phone. You can pick up your phone and discover a whole day has passed.” A father of two grown-up children, aged 22 and 20, does he support the anxiety about young people on social media? “I’m all for banning phones for the under-16s. I’m dismayed when I walk through a school playground and you see these little clusters of kids around someone’s phone. They should be burning off some energy and running around.”

Buchanan’s talent has taken him around the world. He has sat in a Plexiglas box and been pushed around by a polar bear; he has waited all day beneath a tree for a leopard; he has followed camels across the Gobi desert and accompanied huskies across the Yukon in Canada; and he has discovered a new species: the Bosavi woolly rat in Papua New Guinea.

He is what is known as a super-recogniser, and not just for different types of lion. “I take in more details of the human face than other people. I have the ability to spot – before anyone else – who’s had Botox,” he says drily. Is he tempted? He laughs. “There is no substitute for healthy living, and a bit of style.”

This man is as focused on the work (from the safety of a Land Rover) as a lion is on eating. “It’s roulette,” he laughs. “You can spend all night with them and nothing happens. The minute you get a stove out and start heating up some bolognese, that’s when things start to kick off.” He’s learnt how to wait. And he believes it’s a skill we all have.

“People think I have an infinite amount of patience, but when you are sitting in a hide, you are observing everything that’s going on around you, whether it’s a noise from a baboon, a bird fluttering up, or a storm coming.

“It’s within us all to find the frequency of nature. Every single human, whether you are from a tribe in the Amazon or Elon Musk, has ancestors who walked out of a cave and sniffed the air and saw a bird fluttering at the alarm of a lion. We haven’t changed in 10,000 years as human beings. That desire to connect with nature is still with us.” Only now we can do it from the safety of our sofa, watching this show.

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Big Cats 24/7 airs at 9pm on BBC Two and iPlayer on Friday 27 February.

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