Alastair Fothergill was educated at Harrow School and the Universities of St. Andrew’s and Durham. He joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983. He has worked on a wide range of the department’s programmes, including the BAFTA award-winning ‘The Really Wild Show’, ‘Wildlife on One’, and the innovative ‘Reefwatch’, where he was one of the team that developed live broadcasting from beneath the sea.
Alastair went on to work on the BBC1 series ‘The Trials of Life’ with Sir David Attenborough.
In 1993 he produced ‘Life in the Freezer’, a six-part series for BBC1 celebrating the wildlife of the Antarctic, presented by Sir David Attenborough. While still working on this series, he was appointed Head of the BBC Natural History Unit in November 1992, aged 32.
In June 1998 he stood down as Head of the Unit to concentrate on his role as Series Producer of ‘The Blue Planet’, a landmark series on the natural history of the world’s oceans. In 2001 Alastair become Director of Development for the Natural History Unit.
In 2002 he co-presented ‘Going Ape’, a film that took Alastair to the Ivory Coast in Africa. He has produced ‘Deep Blue’, a cinematic view of the world’s oceans and he was recently one of the presenters and executive producer of the innovative live broadcast Live from the Abyss.
He was Series Producer for the Natural History Unit’s landmark series, Planet Earth, the ultimate portrait of our planet. He subsequently co-directed the cinematic version ‘Earth’ to great world-wide acclaim. He is currently Executive Producer on the Unit’s next major series ‘Frozen Planet’.
