Gordon Buchanan, cameraman and presenter

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:48My cast away this week is the wildlife broadcaster and filmmaker Gordon Buchanan. Viewers will know him for getting up close and personal with his subjects, sneaking up on a lioness in the Kalahari Desert, breaking down in tears when he became the first person to capture footage of tigers in Bhutan and, in an encounter that went viral, keeping his cool inside a perspex box while a hungry polar bear spent the best part of an hour trying to break into it. His love of the outdoors goes back to his childhood on the Hebridean island of Moll. He was only 17 when he got his first break, assisting on a shoot observing chimpanzees in the bushlands of Sierra Leone.

1:26It was an experience that changed his life. He says, I'm lucky that I've found a job that's pretty much a continuation of what I used to do when I was nine or ten years old, being out in the wilds, watching the world go by. Gordon Buchanan, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. So, Gordon, you've been called fearless many times. Are you? No, I'm not without fear. I don't know. I think it's just sort of animals are quite easy to predict. Most animals are easy to predict. Human beings, on the other hand, are kind of the most unpredictable creature on Earth. So I'm more on edge walking through the streets of London, like walking through Euston.

2:04I'm much more on edge than I would be out in the wilds of Africa. So I think it's just because I've been doing this job for, yeah, since I was 17. My norm is not that normal for a lot of people. And you do everything you can to avoid getting into trouble. Or if you're scared, generally you've done something wrong. or not being observant enough. But yeah, I'm kind of fairly... I'm laid back. In wild places, I'm laid back. But in the kind of modern human world, I'm not that laid back at all. So it's the urban jungle that's a problem. Yeah, definitely. Got it. Now, to many of us, Gordon, the idea of sitting in a cramped hide for days on end, just kind of waiting for something to happen, sounds like a bit of a nightmare.

2:46But I know that you don't see it that way at all. You've talked about it as an escape, in fact. Tell me about that. Well, sitting in a hide, and you sometimes have to do that for a couple of hours, a couple of days. Sometimes I've done it for 30 days in a row and it's small enough that you could touch all four walls from your seated position and you leave behind a lot of human problems. I do when I go into that space. It's like you become invisible. You're sitting in there waiting for the animal that you're interested to come along or you're waiting for the behaviour to unfold in front of you.

3:22So there's lots of little clues and signs that often sort of happen in the lead up to that. So you have to really tune into that frequency and you're tuning into the frequency of nature. Yeah, it's kind of almost transcendental meditation. You just sort of, I don't really worry about much when I'm in a hive. I wonder, you know, which animals have surprised you the most? Do they often kind of not do the stereotypical thing that you would expect of a wolf or a leopard or whatever? I did a two-part series back in 2014 and was filming wolves up in Ellesmere Island, which is way up in the Canadian Arctic.

3:58And the wolves there have never seen human beings before. So they hadn't learned that really fundamental lesson that a lot of wildlife has to learn, which is to fear human beings. And because we weren't a threat to them, they kind of just accepted us. and then it was one day, the one day I thought something is going on here was ordinarily when all the wolves went off to hunt they would leave one of the wolves with the cubs at the den to keep an eye on them and there was this one day all six adults just went off hunting and I looked around thinking, who's left to babysit? And I realised that I was the honorary unpaid babysitter for these wolves and I think it was just they thought, okay, with these guys around And other wolves are unlikely to come in.

4:44So it wasn't like, yeah, we'll get Uncle Gordon to look after the cubs. But it was definitely a level of acceptance that they were happy and comfortable enough with me being there that I wasn't going to do anything and their cubs weren't at risk and there might have been a little bit of an umbrella of protection. We've got to make some time for the music. So I think we should get started with your first disc today, Gordon Buchanan. Disc number one, what is it and why are you taking it to the island? It's Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver. I love, it's an amazing song, but it reminds me of my mum and it reminds me of happy times in my mum's life that I was aware of, I suppose.

5:21My mum had a lot of challenges, I suppose, from the moment she met my dad and became a parent. So there was a lot of, I think, difficult times for her. But this song reminds me of the times when things were good. It always makes me happy. And she's a farm girl as well, so it's a nod to that. Do you remember her listening to it? Yeah, I remember it being on and we didn't have a kind of huge record collection, but what we did have was a lot of country and Western, Sydney, Divine, so not much that a kind of young person could leaf through and go, I'm desperate to find out what this sounds like. But actually, the John Denver album, I was more than happy to listen to time and time again.

6:01Almost heaven, West Virginia, the Ridge Mountain, Shenandoah River. Life is old and older than the trees, younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze. Country roads Take me home John Denver and Take Me Home Country Roads. So, Gordon Buchanan, you were born near Dumbarton in the west of Scotland in 1972, the third of four children. So tell me more about your mum, Margaret. She was quite young when she had the four of you, wasn't she? Yeah, I think she met my dad when she was 19 and she was married within a year, had my brother within a year of that and then had another sort of three kids.

6:55By the time she was maybe 24 and my grandfather had a farm so my mum kind of was from farming stock and also her mum died sort of at the start of her 20s so she'd gone, had sort of this blissful sort of upbringing on a farm, carefree, surrounded by her family and sort of out in the countryside and then she found herself in a town with a husband that didn't often come straight home from work, go to the pub a lot, and having lost her mum at that point. So she had a real... You would not know this if you spoke to her because she's a very positive person, but, yeah, she had a tough time. And what about your dad, Gordon?

7:36He was a mechanic. Yeah. How would you describe him? He was just one of those kind of Peter Pan-type characters that... Not a bad bone in his body, I have to say. Yeah, my dad was in a band. So he was a drummer. They were called the Big Six. And the photographs of that time look as if they're all living their best lives. They're all kind of really sharply dressed, all really handsome and just kind of being young and having fun. But I think that period from doing that to becoming a father of four kids was too much for him. So it was too much for the marriage. Your parents split. you were just four at this point and it was a few years after that that your mum decided to take you all to live in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull.

8:21So did she have a connection to the island? We used to, my grandparents had a caravan up in Tobermory and we'd spend these lovely, you know, a week or maybe a couple of weeks in the summer in Tobermory and it's a very holiday-ish place and it's brightly coloured and I think because by this point we were living in a little flat in a council estate with social problems growing around us. And my mum, I think, realised that this probably wasn't going to give us the best start. All of her family were on the mainland, all of her friends, so she completely restarted for us. And it's a huge change going from a town or going from a council estate to living in a little caravan in the woods, which we did for the first two years.

9:05It's this scene in The Wizard of Oz when it goes from Kansas and it's black and white and then it goes into sort of Technicolor. That's kind of what it felt like. Were you able to keep up your relationship with your dad? We would go and see my dad. Once he kind of sort of was more settled, we were allowed to go and stay with him. But I suppose ultimately, if you don't share the same roof, there's a void there. Not at all that I kind of, when I was younger, I wasn't like thinking, oh, I'm looking for a father figure, looking for male role models. But everyone needs that. Boys and girls, I think, need a kind of good, strong male role model in any form.

9:44And I kind of lack that. Let's have some more music, Gordon. It's your second choice today. Disc number two. What is it and why are you taking it? This is Brandy in the Arry by Pete and Diesel. This is about Tuchter Pride. Do you know what Tuchter is? I do. Well, my dad was from Dingwall, so I know that it's in the Highlands. So it was, yes, it's country folk. Yeah, country folk. I mean, kind of a derogatory term. It is a derogatory term, isn't it? But when we were growing up, we would call people, you know, we lived in Torbemori, the big bright lights of the big town, but we'd call someone that lived in Dervik a Tchuchter or something.

10:21But we were all Tchuchters because we were all country folk living on an island. And in the 80s, it didn't feel that cool to be an islander. And it really was. And with Pete and Diesel, they're this really bonkers phenomenon. it's like a kind of electric Kayleigh, it's a bit like a Hebridean form of the Wurzels the Wurzels album my mum had which I used to, a few albums in the house but I used to listen to the Wurzels that's a good album Why is it taking so long for a Hebridean Wurzels to emerge is the only question But they are, I personally and to any traditional Scottish music devotees, a lot of them are not fans but I went to see Pete and Diesel at the Barrowlands first time I'd ever been there it was just as things were unlocking after Covid and the place was full of all sorts of folk but a lot of kind of Hebridean types and Pete and Diesel came on our kids were with us, it was the first gig that we'd ever been to with our kids and we had one of the best nights ever, the air was livid with Hebridean saliva because everybody knew every single word to every single song and it was the best place to catch Covid because that's what I came away with.

11:44But it was an amazing night and they're a really cool band. Being a Chuketer is cool. We're the P and the D From Stornoway Town We're in a hired van That better not break down We'll stop for a smoke Some coffee and tea We'll reach in Bursniggy Grab a burger with cheese Well, go and pour yourself a little brandy Take it to the avi and give it laldi Go and pour yourself a little brandy Take it to the avi and give it laldi Pete and Diesel and Brandy in the Arry. So, Gordon Buchanan, tell me a little bit more about growing up on Mull. This is the late 70s and 80s. There was no downside to it at all.

12:29For a kid that loved being outside, that place was just an amazing you know an opportunity to kind of just explore the woods, sort of go out on boat, sort of visit islands walk up into the hills so that was all good in my book, it was a paradise for me but at school it wasn't my place and I think I'm fairly sure that I'm dyslexic so I think kind of the issues and problems that I had was probably because I had some learning difficulties that weren't recognised. So I just tried to fly under the radar and my days in school were kind of slightly spent planning what we were going to do after school and what we were going to do at that weekend.

13:14And it all was about doing stuff outdoors. I felt more at home there than I did anywhere. It was just my place. And the need to escape was because life at home was quite turbulent. So I think you were eight when your mother met and married a local man called Alistair. When did you first realise that he wasn't everything he seemed to be? With Alistair in the beginning, I think because I had this sort of empty space and was looking for a kind of sort of a father figure, you know, I think initially hoped that he could fill that void. But I think really quite quickly, I sensed there's something off about him.

13:59He kind of was I think really good at masking his issues and of his violent tendencies but as it just played out within you know really quite early on in the relationship there was sort of domestic violence that escalated at home. Did you witness what was happening? Did you hear it? Were you? Yeah I heard it and then there would be sort of could see that mum had bruising, she had a kind of a wrist splint on and then it got to a point that it couldn't, it really couldn't go on any longer. What was that? What was the worst point? I'd come home, I must have been maybe about 14, 15, thereabouts and I came home and there was blood coming down the stairs, the front door was open I think and up into my mum's bedroom and it was yeah, there was a blood soaked pillow and blood all over the bed and I thought he's done it and then the neighbour came over and had seen me and said she's in here, she's fine and then that, I don't remember what happened that night but I remember the next day just saying to my mum let's go to the police let's do it because next time it could be much much worse He'd attacked her while she was sleeping and it was at that point that she kicked him out Yeah, yeah.

15:26That must have had a profound effect on you. Yeah, I don't know what effect it has had on me and I kind of lost myself in the outdoors. I think that sort of, it all adds up that, you know, my love of the outdoors was about getting away from, get out of the house and get away from all of this. And what about your sense of yourself? Because, you know, feeling that, having a scary guy in the house when you're growing up into being a man yourself, that's quite challenging. It kind of wasn't a challenge in so much as I had a plan and the plan was to get bigger month by month, year by year. I don't mean we're working out, but just becoming an adult.

16:03And I thought as soon as I'm able, I'm going to, yeah, sort of exact my revenge physically on him. And I carried that feeling and that hatred of him for years or certainly for a few years. And I got to a point and I saw him one day and I thought he doesn't give a damn about me. He probably hasn't thought once about me and yet I'm the one that's walking about with all of this anger and so I kind of just let it go. So that was kind of a really valuable life lesson. It was like, why am I the one that's sort of twisted in knots here? I haven't done anything wrong, so I kind of, I just sort of let that slip away.

16:46Yeah, that's a form of forgiveness. And in some ways it's kind of really valuable. all of these sort of harder stones that life throws at you, you learn the most from. So I think, yeah, I can in some ways be grateful to him for kind of some valuable life lessons. Gordon, it's time for some more music. Your third disc today. What's next? Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix Experience. And it must, I'm thinking it must have been like the 20th anniversary of the Monterey Pop Festival. and I'd seen, so I didn't have any kind of like decent records in the house and didn't have any money to buy and there was no record shop on Mall.

17:27So it was limited opportunity to listen to music. But I watched this documentary and I'd heard of Jimi Hendrix, but I kind of didn't really know anything about him. And that performance, I just thought he was the most charismatic man that I'd ever seen and just so flamboyant and the way that his guitar playing really kind of sung to my heart and I thought I'm going to emulate him so I bought a handmade guitar off of a boy at school for£10 and I plugged it into my mum's hi-fi and did my best attempt at trying to emulate Jeremy Hendrix playing which funnily enough I never succeeded in doing that.

18:16I can't find it, but I don't know why Excuse me while I kiss this guy

18:27Purple Haze, all around Don't know if I'm down to drop or down The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Purple Haze. Gordon Buchanan, tell me more about your time at school because, you know, you said it was tortuous. You've described it as tortuous. You said, you know, you're pretty sure you had undiagnosed dyslexia. It wasn't the right place for you. Yeah, I just would. I was probably late for school every day, messed about every day and spent every day daydreaming about getting outside. But then bizarrely, once I got to the end of fourth year when I could have left, I ended up staying on because I thought I wouldn't mind arsing around for another year because I haven't got a clue what I'm going to do.

19:17So by the time you hit your teens then, your future prospects weren't looking great. But things turned around for you when you met a wildlife cameraman and his name was Nick Gordon. How did you meet? I met Nick through his wife, Anne, her wife at the time. Anne ran one of the restaurants on the main street and I'd actually spent from the age of 11 until I was about 16 working at a trekking centre, completely falling in love with horses but not making a penny so I asked Anne Gordon if she had any jobs going in the restaurant she gave me a job washing pots and pans in the kitchen and then I got to know about Nick and this very charismatic windswept and interesting character that would sort of show up tanned and sun bleached hair and then he'd disappear off for another few months and he was a wildlife filmmaker and I thought that just sounds like the best job in the world and he had a den So his little office was full of all of these.

20:15He had mummified piranhas heads, huge anaconda skins. There was all of the camera equipment, which I felt really glamorous. That was like, I'm actually seeing a camera that is used to make TV programmes here. And loads of books and loads of really interesting photographs. And I just sort of thought, this is what I want to do. It's Indiana Jones, isn't it? I mean, that must have just seemed like such an adventure. Well, that Nick was, someone described him as, it was a Biggles but better, Indiana Jones but true. And he loved that more than he should have. But yeah, it was very intoxicating for a kind of kid that had no academic prospects, but had this desire and kind of self-belief.

21:01I kind of knew that I could do something and I could do something well. I just had to kind of bide my time and wait for it to drop on my lap. and then Nick made you an offer that changed your life. How did he pitch it to you? One afternoon, randomly, he said, how would you like to be my assistant? You know I've got this year and a half long project coming up in Sierra Leone. How would you like to come with me and be my assistant? So Sierra Leone, had you been anywhere else apart from going to visit your dad at this point? No, I'd never been on a plane, had never been to... I'd been to Glasgow.

21:39by this point, never been to London, so yeah, other than a school bus trip to Germany, I hadn't been abroad. And what was he actually going to film out there? We were based on an uninhabited island in the middle of the rainforest and the trip was split into kind of, I did come home halfway through which kind of in some ways made it all the worse because I had to go back after spending two months at home with all my friends but yeah, we just based ourselves on this island. It's called T.Y. Island. It's got the highest population of primates in the world. So there's 11 different species, but the most sort of noisiest and the most charismatic were chimpanzees.

22:17So we wanted to film chimpanzees and as many other primates as many other strange creatures that we could. Well, I'm desperate to find out what happened next, but first I want to hear your next piece of music. It's disc number four, Gordon. What have you got? My next choice is Heart-Shaped Box by Nirvana. This song really reminds me of that era of early 90s once I'd finished working with Nick and I came back from having spent two years in Brazil back to my family home and my mum had left. So we didn't move out but my mum moved out, she remarried a wonderful man who'd been my stepfather for over 30 years.

23:00So I came back home to a house with just Sandy, Stuart and Maggie and there's four of us as four siblings and that time was when we got to know each other as friends, not as siblings, that's when we got really close and Nirvana and all of that music that was on MTV in the early 90s is kind of the theme track to actually really getting to know and understand my siblings in a much, much deeper way.

23:36I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks I've been drawn into your magnet's darkest wrap Heart-shaped box by Nirvana So, Gordon Buchanan, at the beginning of 1990, when you were 17, you arrived on T.Y. Island where you and Nick pitched your tents and set up camp. What were the conditions like? We built a kind of little kitchen area. We built a shower out of a 45-gallon drum. So we made it really comfortable. In the old Tarzan films, his kind of posh pad when Jane used to go and stay with him, it was kind of a bit like that. I mean, initially we bought a load of food from Freetown, but we had a thing like, I'm going to say about 800 fraybentos pies.

24:33that are not the best when you even have an oven to cook them in. I feel like we should contextualise this. It's a pie in a tin. It's a pie in a tin that actually can be quite tasty, but we didn't have an oven. So trying to cook a free bentos pie over an open fire, it's not campfire food. So we ended up actually just kind of, the local guys that were working with us, they were eating all this kind of really delicious looking food and we were like, can we just eat with you? So I think after the first six months, yeah, we ended up eating with the men. But what about the emotional wrench of being away from home for the first time?

25:09How did you cope with that? Yeah, I think that because the story was good, and even in the local paper in the Oban Times, local lad is given the opportunity of a lifetime. So that story is good, and you don't really want to spoil it for anyone by saying, I was desperately homesick. Like, more nights than not, I was crying myself to sleep. but it was really tough because 17 is young and having no form of communication other than writing letters. It was really just... And I was cut off from everything and everyone that I knew. And I spent my 18th birthday in Sierra Leone and Nick said, just think, in the future you'll be able to tell people.

25:51I spent my 18th birthday on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Gola rainforest. And I was thinking, I want to spend it in a local pub with my friends drinking cider and blackcurrant. What about the highs? What were some of the best moments that you and Nick got to capture? I mean, there was so many of it. I definitely don't want to leave a big cloud over that period of time because I witnessed some incredible things. I mean, walking down a path one day and bumping into a fully grown male chimpanzee is just extraordinary. I think even just to sort of wake up in the morning to this dawn chorus of the wildest, weirdest sounding creatures every single morning.

26:35And then some night times waking up with these huge thunderstorms, like just sort of like these electrical storms that are right overhead. Yeah, incredible moments, incredible experiences. And because I promised Nick that I would see this year and a half through, he was pretty tough. He became one of my best friends, but he was tough on me. I could have forgotten about this. I looked back at my diaries and I was like, God, he was really hard on me. But he was quite early in his career, so he was worried about whether he was going to be able to make this film work or not. But at the end of the year and a half, he said, you've done incredibly well and I'd love you to work with me.

27:12And the next project was two and a half months in Venezuela. And I thought, that's easy. So I did that and then I went on to do another two years in Brazil, in the Amazon, where I was really cut off. So from the age of 17 until I was 23, 24, I spent the bulk of that time just in the middle of nowhere. How did that shape you? I mean, that's the time when most people are making mistakes, learning to socialise, as well as kind of deciding what they want to do with their lives. Yeah, I learnt about, I suppose, the benefits and beauty of solitude and self-sufficiency and not having to rely on other people.

27:56And I never find myself alone and think, I really need to be around people right now. But I often find myself surrounded by people thinking, I really need to be alone right now. Let's take a break for some more music. Your fifth choice today. What's next? Fifth choice is High and Dry by Radiohead For me it was about being young I was away from much of my youth Or that time when I should have been hanging out with my mates At college In 1994 I came back I went to Tea in the Park in 1996 I'd never been to a festival before And I went and Radiohead were playing at it and literally and metaphorically, the clouds parted as they started playing this song because I thought this is what it's like to be a young person.

28:50This is kind of what being young should be like every single day. If you can wangle a world where you don't have to work and you can just sit in this moment. I was coming out of a kind of hard place. I had alopecia at one point, so most of my hair had fallen out. And on that day, I was like, before going to the festival, So I was like, oh, it's looking good now. It's kind of grown back. So I was like, I think that whole day kind of wrapped up a huge amount. But just listening to Radiohead play that song on that day was nothing short of magic. Two jumps in a week, I bet you think that's pretty clever, don't you, boy?