Split Screen
It was on a particularly wild and blustery day in early March that BBC Wildlife emerged from the Natural History Unit in Bristol. We’d spent a lovely afternoon with the Springwatch team, catching up on plans for the new series. We were full of ideas of how we might cover it – it was to be our grandest coverage yet.
Within a fortnight, all our plans were cast aside as the country descended into lockdown. Much like our colleagues on Springwatch, we stayed at home, trying to work out how to continue to bring our audiences the great natural history content they love.
An incredible amount of work goes into Springwatch. As presenter Iolo Williams tells us overleaf, it takes some 120 people to put the show together, making it one of the BBC’s biggest annual outside broadcasts. Back on that windy day, Springwatch executive producer Rosemary Edwards enthused about the huge, well-oiled machine that the show has become over its 15-year run. And here they were, just a few months from transmission, and pretty much every plug had been pulled.
Since then, it’s been an uphill battle to pull the show together. The whole thing has had to be reinvented from scratch, working remotely from home. At one stage, series editor Jo Brame told me, “At the moment, they could be filming themselves on phones in their back gardens for three weeks!” And while things haven’t panned
