'I wanted to escape aspects of my life': Gordon Buchanan on mental health and hiding in nature

So that’s the secret behind a career that’s seen Buchanan wield the camera on programmes such as Planet Earth and Frozen Planet, present the hugely popular Family & Me documentaries and pick up an MBE for services to conservation and wildlife filming along the way. But even with the coffee trick in his toolbox, he’s “had his KitKat moments”, he admits (referencing the 1989 advert in which a wildlife photographer waits ages for a panda to emerge from its hiding place – then misses a pair of them roller-skating as he breaks for a chocolate biscuit). “Any wildlife film-maker who says that’s never happened to them is maybe not being 100 per cent truthful.

“Last year I was working on the Big Cats 24/7 series. Lions can be incredibly docile and lazy, so one day it was really hot, the lions were fast asleep, they hadn’t moved for four hours, so I thought, ‘I’m just going to catch up on that podcast.’ I had one earphone in, one out, and my brain left the Okovango Delta and went somewhere completely different – and of course that’s when the lions got up and started moving. I’ve learnt that if you want to get the footage, you’ve got to be engaged and try to predict what might happen next.”

By way of a more successful example, the Glaswegian mentions filming urban leopards in Mumbai (which also makes for a surprisingly edge-of-the-seat chapter in his beautifully written new memoir, In the Hide). “For Planet Earth II, we were trying to capture them hunting and we had 30 nights to do it. That sounds a lot, but there’s a reason it had never been filmed before: it’s really difficult.” Only by focusing completely – by “engaging my Spidey senses”, as he puts it – was he able to pick up on “the clues that the leopard was coming: those barking dogs, a hush among the humans, the right type of darkness and the intangible atmospherics”.

While 30 nights of waiting, in a small space (with no podcasts!), might sound like hell to some, for Buchanan “the hide is my happy place”. Alone and alert out there, “I’m watching the world and engaging with nature, and it’s an escape. You’re hiding from the animals but also hiding from yourself, from who you are.”

And why would he want to hide from himself? “I gravitated towards this way of living because I wanted to escape troubling aspects of my childhood and adult life. There are things I’m hiding from that maybe we should all try and hide from: modern life and this crazy, unnatural world humans have invented for ourselves. But for me personally, in my 40s I realised I was a depressive and I had probably been depressed my entire life. I’ve always been an anxious person and I can get overwhelmed quite easily by things that really shouldn’t be of any consequence, like having a full inbox or a long to-do list. If I’m not in a good place, that can build to an all-out depressive episode.”

Nature has always been an escape for him, explains the 52-year-old. His difficult early life – a father who left when he was four, a violent stepfather, a “torturous” time at school – was softened a little by the family’s move to the Isle of Mull. “And I suppose that nature and ‘the hide’ is sort of one and the same to me,” he says.

“Nature is a place where you can look around and engage with something that’s far bigger than you and far more important. You can actually transcend your petty issues and switch your own muddled mind off and just exist in the moment. I think that’s really grounding, really levelling. The hide is where you go to hide from the things that concern you in life. And whether that’s an actual hide or a metaphorical one, it’s really important to have a place where you can just… be.”

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