Alastair Fothergill

Roles: Director

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’, ‘The Natural World’ and the innovative ‘Reefwatch’, where he was one of the team that developed the first live broadcasting from beneath the sea.

Alastair has worked on a variety of programs with Sir David Attenborough, from ‘The Trials of Life’ to ‘Life in the Freezer’, and 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.

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 worldwide acclaim. He was Executive Producer on the Unit’s major landmark series ‘Frozen Planet’, a natural history of the polar regions, which aired to record audiences and critical acclaim in autumn 2011. In addition to his work with the BBC Natural History Unit, Alastair has co-directed four original cinematic movies for Disney as part of their Disneynature label: African Cats (2011), Chimpanzee (2012), Bears (2014), and Monkey Kingdom (2015).