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Chris Packham
It would be a mistake to think that Chris Packham has mellowed. His hair might no longer be crafted into a bleached blond quiff, his punk rocker wardrobe has been replaced with something more sophisticated and he has graduated from the rowdy, if entertaining, Really Wild Show that launched his career to co-presenting the decidedly more grown-up Springwatch.
You wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. Wouldn’t you have been a bit bored ‘out there’ with no wildlife?
I grew up throughout the 1960s and the Apollo programme was on. It was extraordinarily exciting and particularly for young people. I had posters on my wall of the astronauts and the Saturn V rockets. Astronauts were very much the heroes of the age. And they were glamorous, there was no doubt about that.When I first saw that photograph Earthrise taken on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, of the Earth looking back, that little jewel floating in space, I just wanted to be there. Obviously it was never going to happen.
Would you want to go up on a Virgin Galactic flight?
I’d love to but I’m never going to have the money. I’m very envious, but only in a nice way, of people like Sarah Brightman who are able to go the space station. And I wouldn’t want to go up [to the International Space Station] and be kicking my heels while everyone else was busy working, I’d want to be part of the scientific programme.
As a child you took a kestrel chick from the wild and raised it yourself. Would you be outraged if a child did the same now?
When I did that, kestrels were the commonest raptor in the UK. I can’t condone the fact that what I did was illegal. I did everything I could to make it legal. I applied for the necessary licence, but people like me didn’t get licences. It wasn’t fair. So I took the bird out of the nest. In my defence I can say that the keeping of that bird and the time that I spent with it had the singularly most profound effect on my life. What would I do now if I found a child that had taken a bird out of the wild? Well, you are talking about a child. My reaction to an adult doing it would be very, very different. I wouldn’t chastise that child.
Has working for the BBC clipped your wings as far as activism goes?
No. There are certain protocols which are agreed with the BBC so that I don’t compromise its impartiality and I don’t transgress those.
You’ve been touted as the next David Attenborough. Do you feel comfortable with that?
Obviously not. There’s only one David Attenborough. He’s a remarkable broadcaster and he has been broadcasting through a period of relatively stable television, but now we are in a period of great flux, both in terms of what we are able to do as a public service broadcaster and also how we are going to use that technology in the future. I think that there won’t be any successor to David.
You’re a fan of rewilding. How about de-extinction, bringing back the mammoth?
Well, I am interested. I like blue-skies science, I love the idea that we find out things just because we want to know. That’s again part of the human spirit so I will champion that. You could easily argue that we don’t need Cern, ring up Brian Cox and say: “Brian, give us a break mate, we honestly don’t need that,” but I think we do. I do want to know about those particles. He wants to know more than I, but for me it is important that we try to understand everything maximally.
You wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. Wouldn’t you have been a bit bored ‘out there’ with no wildlife?
I grew up throughout the 1960s and the Apollo programme was on. It was extraordinarily exciting and particularly for young people. I had posters on my wall of the astronauts and the Saturn V rockets. Astronauts were very much the heroes of the age. And they were glamorous, there was no doubt about that.When I first saw that photograph Earthrise taken on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, of the Earth looking back, that little jewel floating in space, I just wanted to be there. Obviously it was never going to happen.
Would you want to go up on a Virgin Galactic flight?
I’d love to but I’m never going to have the money. I’m very envious, but only in a nice way, of people like Sarah Brightman who are able to go the space station. And I wouldn’t want to go up [to the International Space Station] and be kicking my heels while everyone else was busy working, I’d want to be part of the scientific programme.
As a child you took a kestrel chick from the wild and raised it yourself. Would you be outraged if a child did the same now?
When I did that, kestrels were the commonest raptor in the UK. I can’t condone the fact that what I did was illegal. I did everything I could to make it legal. I applied for the necessary licence, but people like me didn’t get licences. It wasn’t fair. So I took the bird out of the nest. In my defence I can say that the keeping of that bird and the time that I spent with it had the singularly most profound effect on my life. What would I do now if I found a child that had taken a bird out of the wild? Well, you are talking about a child. My reaction to an adult doing it would be very, very different. I wouldn’t chastise that child.
Has working for the BBC clipped your wings as far as activism goes?
No. There are certain protocols which are agreed with the BBC so that I don’t compromise its impartiality and I don’t transgress those.
You’ve been touted as the next David Attenborough. Do you feel comfortable with that?
Obviously not. There’s only one David Attenborough. He’s a remarkable broadcaster and he has been broadcasting through a period of relatively stable television, but now we are in a period of great flux, both in terms of what we are able to do as a public service broadcaster and also how we are going to use that technology in the future. I think that there won’t be any successor to David.
You’re a fan of rewilding. How about de-extinction, bringing back the mammoth?
Well, I am interested. I like blue-skies science, I love the idea that we find out things just because we want to know. That’s again part of the human spirit so I will champion that. You could easily argue that we don’t need Cern, ring up Brian Cox and say: “Brian, give us a break mate, we honestly don’t need that,” but I think we do. I do want to know about those particles. He wants to know more than I, but for me it is important that we try to understand everything maximally.
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