Beak performance Woodpeckers such as these attracted a huge audience response when they featured in a 1954 BBC documentary
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It was thanks largely to the producer and amateur bird-watcher, Desmond Hawkins, and a young studio manager, Tony Soper, that the BBC’s West Region in Bristol built for itself an enviable reputation in the postwar period for specialising in natural history radio. But it was one of their most valued contacts in the bird-watching world who helped them launch into television.
In 1954, Peter Scott, who ran a wildfowl sanctuary in Slimbridge, near Gloucester, attended the International Ornithological Congress in Switzerland. On his return, he went straight to Hawkins: “You’ve got to see this film.” While at the Congress he had seen 13 minutes of footage of woodpeckers recorded by the German naturalist Heinz Sielmann. What struck Scott as remarkable about Sielmann’s film was his stunning use of close-ups, and the infrared technology that had allowed him to film inside a tree trunk.
The German was quickly signed up by the Bristol team, and his film screened on BBC Television. The next morning, there were so many phone calls from excited viewers that the BBC’s switchboard became jammed. The extraordinary public response to the woodpecker film provided the nudge that BBC managers in London needed to invest extra resources in Bristol. The Natural History Unit was soon established.