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The overall At-Bristol complex reflected Bristol’s political and economic elites’ aspirations to consolidate the city’s reputation as the high-tech regional capital of England’s West Country (Bassett, Griffiths, and Smith 2002a). However, Wildwalk’s actual exhibits were more of an expression of Bristol’s growing cultural industry, in and for which the BBC’s NHU was to play a leading role. By the 1990s, Bristol had become a world center for the making of wildlife and natural history firms, something akin to a “Green Hollywood” (Bassett, Griffiths, and Smith 2002b, 167).

Christopher Parsons was a leading figure in the field, a founding member of the NHU who rose through the ranks to become executive producer and who, together with Sir David Attenborough, effectively put the NHU on the world map of wildlife TV production. As I noted earlier, it was Parsons who proposed and then promoted Wildwalk. This being so, a genealogical link between Wildwalk and the NHU may be established via his career, and via the series and genre that earned him global recognition: Life on Earth, widely regarded as the first of the “blue-chip” wildlife documentary blockbusters (the expression “blue chip” is used within the wildlife TV industry to refer to the documentaries with the highest production values).

Parsons joined the BBC in 1955 as an apprentice film editor. In the two decades that followed, he rose to become first a producer, and then an executive producer of BBC wildlife programs. Like Attenborough before him, part of Parsons’s early reputation was built via TV shows based on expeditions to collect wild animals for zoos. Parsons worked with Gerald Durrell, the wild animal trader turned world-renowned conservationist. With Durrell, Parsons traveled to Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and Sierra Leone to produce two series, Two in the Bush (1963) and Catch me a Colubus (1966). As I will explain in the next section, these and much later interactions with zoos would have their own impact on Wildwalk.

While Parsons’s early career included a number of successful series, he is best known as the executive producer of Life on Earth (1979). Parsons referred to the program as the first of the BBC’s wildlife “megaseries” (Parsons 1982, 308). Years later, a time line by the BBC of major events in the corporation’s history suggested that “Although natural history programmes had been seen on BBC TV before, it wasn’t until David Attenborough started this epic series that the genre really took off. Revealing life around the globe through beautiful photography and compelling and intimate commentary ...”⁵ Thanks in no small part to the series’ success, the NHU nearly doubled in size and was granted status as a BBC department (as opposed to a unit), with Parsons as the department’s first director from 1979 (Parsons 1982, 351).

Although the opening titles of Life on Earth called it “A Natural History by David Attenborough,” an idea echoed by the quote above, Parsons played a key role in designing the program. He also proposed that Attenborough be the presenter of the new series, and by so doing effectively launched the latter’s career as the face of BBC wildlife television. Twenty years after it was first broadcast, Parsons’s series would also constitute part of the template for Wildwalk.

Life on Earth traced the rise of life on the planet, beginning with the simplest single-celled organisms and finishing with the most complex ecosystems. Together with The Living Planet (1984) and Trials of Life (1990), the series produced a virtual version of what can be described as a heterotopia of nature (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 47–49). Michel Foucault conceived heterotopias as real places that act like “counter-sites”:

a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. (Foucault 1986, 24)

As examples of such sites, Foucault referred to holiday villages and gardens, but also to brothels, cemeteries, museums, prisons, and even ships.

The concept of heterotopia can be extended to include what can be termed heterotopic practices (Alfonso and Lindahl Elliot 2002). In contrast to Foucault, I regard both heterotopias and heterotopic practices as being culturally specific: they involve a comparatively recent form of globalization, and constitute a central aspect of the mass mediation of nature (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 48–49). Heterotopic practices work to produce heterotopias in virtual sites, as opposed to the “physical” geography of an actual place envisaged by Foucault. News genres are perhaps the most obvious example of such sites; however, a case can be made that the media of mass communication as a whole are premised on a heterotopic spatiality.

I describe as heterotopias of nature all those sites which ostensibly bring together in one place the natural worlds, or at any rate, “representative samples” of such worlds (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 129). Two examples of such heterotopias are zoological gardens (an institution included by Foucault in his own typology of heterotopias) and natural history museums. If there are heterotopias of nature, there are also heterotopic practices that specialize in the virtual representation of nature. One way of thinking about Life on Earth’s innovative qualities is that its different episodes took the spatiality of heterotopias of nature to wildlife television in a single series – one that boldly set out to represent, as the title itself proclaimed, “life on earth.”

By the mid-1970s, wildlife documentary production techniques had long incorporated the techniques of observation associated with realist cinema. Such techniques included what the film theorist Noël Burch has described as the “ubiq-uitisation” of the cinematic observer and, with it, the “centring of the subject” (1990, 202–233). Simplifying somewhat, the former aspect gives the illusion that the camera narrator can travel, indeed can simply be, anywhere; the latter encourages spectators to at once project themselves into, and identify with, the world shown on the screen.

By deploying such techniques as part of a heterotopic practice, Life on Earth appeared to give television viewers the capacity not just to travel to any part of the natural world in the proverbial blink of an eye, but to travel across time. As Attenborough put it in his memoirs, “Sometimes I came back having been filmed speaking the first half of a sentence that fitted neatly on to a second half that we had filmed on another continent two years earlier” (2002, 294).

If ubiquitization enabled such seamless transcontinental narrative displacements, it also allowed the series to reveal, equally effortlessly, the most recondite “secrets” of nature (for the gender politics of this discourse in wildlife documentary, see Barbara Crowther 1995). The audiovisual narrator took its cotravelers, which is really to say covoyeurs into all manner of natural spaces never before seen on television and, in some cases, never even studied by scientists: a Kowari (Dasyuroides byrnei) giving birth to her pups is one example highlighted by Parsons himself in his memoirs, True to Nature (1982, 319–322). These and other innovations were highly acclaimed; if Parsons and the NHU had already produced a number of well-received series, Life on Earth inaugurated a period during which the BBC came to be regarded as the world’s premier natural history broadcaster.

Now the burgeoning cultural authority of the BBC’s blue-chip wildlife documentaries was undoubtedly bolstered by the remarkable technical ingenuity of the programs, the beauty of their images, and indeed Attenborough’s oft-celebrated style of presentation. It is, however, clear that this authority also relied on a problematic form of naturalism. To explain how and why this is the case, a somewhat detailed excursus on the blue-chip documentaries’ characteristic naturalism is now required.

The naturalism in question has often been conceived as a form of representation that is, as the title of Parsons’s (1982) memoirs says, “true to nature.” Within the wildlife filmmaking industry, such a truth has often been portrayed as being both “science-based” (Davies 2000) and the outcome of the exploitation of the ostensibly objective qualities of cinematographic technologies – qualities thought to be capable of revealing “nature itself.” As Colin Willock, the head of Anglia Television’s competing Natural History Unit once put it in his own memoirs, “Nature as it really exists is our line of business” (1978, 41).

Aspects of this understanding of the cinematographic/televisual process go at least as far back as the emergence of photography, and involve the myth of the pencil of nature (Lindahl Elliot 2008, 11; see also Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 145). I refer to Henry Fox Talbot’s term for the new art form whose execution took place “without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil” (1844, 1). Versions of this discourse continue to this day and cannot be entirely dismissed. From the perspective of Peirce’s semeiotic theory, a case can be made that blue-chip wildlife documentaries do have an indexical dimension. Indexes are signs that, in Peirce’s vocabulary, refer to an object “by virtue of being really affected by that Object” (Peirce 1998, 291). Peirce explains that indexes are actually modified by the object; as such, they can be said to characterize the semeiotics of documentary films, which ostensibly involve a natural process: light reflects off the surface of an object, and makes its way into a lens which refracts it onto a photosensitive surface which is transformed accordingly. Thus, it can be argued that there clearly is an indexical relation between the cinematographic image, and whatever object(s) it represents.

It would, however, be a mistake to reduce documentary films to a matter of indexes. In the case of the natural history documentary, at least four levels of the filmmaking process work to embed any indexes within cultural forms, or what Peirce calls symbols – signs which refer to the objects that they denote by virtue of a “law” or “rule,” or a social convention (Peirce 1998, 292). I have described the four levels in some detail elsewhere (Lindahl Elliot 2008); here it suffices to list them. The levels in question build on the work of Gilles Deleuze (1986) and are the frame, or a single image captured by cinematographic means; the shot, in the sense of multiple frames giving rise to movement; the montage, the linking of two or more shots; and the narrativization, which is to say the forms used to organize frames, shots, and montage into a story.

For each of these levels, it is possible to claim that wildlife documentaries of the kind produced on film by the BBC (and indeed other organizations such as the National Geographic) are purely indexical. However, on each of the levels, it is the symbol that arguably prevails: for example, even if what is “in” the frame interacts with what is beyond the frame – the “out of field” – framing is always partial insofar as it involves not only selection, but also a symbolism in the Peircean sense of a convention. There is, for instance, a relatively restricted menu of subjects thought to be worthy of a wildlife documentary; over the decades, megafauna and apex predators have been represented out of all proportion to their numbers relative to the earth’s biodiversity.

On the level of the shot, the cinematographic management of movement is also the outcome of a selective and a symbolic process: the filmmaker chooses some movements and not others, and engages in a variety of practices that work to relate those movements to a “whole” in accordance with particular conventions. The trailers for the BBC’s major documentary series are a particularly good example of this relativity, revealing the extent to which the genre privileges what I term a hyperkinetic nature (Lindahl Elliot 2008), that is, a nature that is not only dynamic (as any natural phenomenon invariably is) but appears to be engaged in a constant process of visible physical displacement. Hyperkinesis works to intensify the natural world for a TV world that demands this kind of intensification. But, in so doing, it transforms the character of objects not otherwise associated with hyperkinesis: for example, The Private Life of Plants (1995), one of the BBC’s very few series concerned mainly with plants, used time-lapse photography again and again to make plants fit the generic requirement for hyperkinesis, and, in so doing, arguably made them “behave” more like animals (Lindahl Elliot 2001).

What is true of frame and shot is also true of montage and narrativization. Much of the narrative logic of blue-chip wildlife documentaries rests on the production of “Hey Mays.” Unlike, say, a fictional film that has been minutely scripted far in advance of the actual filming, blue-chip wildlife films tend to involve a tactical editing process. The editors must build a story, or rather a string of “mini-stories,” constructed around whatever shots the wildlife cinematographers have been able to obtain. Such mini-stories must be compelling in the context of a TV medium where a ruthless competition for audiences prevails. Over the years, this has meant that the editing has often been structured as strings of scenes designed to provoke responses of the kind “Hey May, come and look at this,” and these have been achieved via anthropomorphic narratives of predation, familial relations, or humor (Lindahl Elliot 2001; 2006a).

By anthropomorphism, I do not mean the common sense understanding of the term which suggests that it occurs only when someone explicitly projects human values onto nature. Instead, the etymology of the word (anthropo, “man” or human; morph, shape) suggests that, despite its indexical qualities, any aspect of a wildlife film as film must be anthropomorphic if only because it involves humanmade technology that imposes not just a story but humanized forms by way of the levels of frame, shot, and montage onto whatever nature is represented. From this perspective, the problem is not to find ways of avoiding anthropomorphism, but to consider what forms of anthropomorphism do a better job of representing nature for a given context (Lindahl Elliot 2001).

The more general point I am leading to is this: the paradigmatic technique of observation employed by the BBC’s blue-chip wildlife documentaries revolves not around the index, but around what Peirce terms the dicent symbol: a representation which is really affected by what it represents but which, at one and the same time, projects onto the object of representation a conventional association of ideas (Peirce 1998, 295). While the NHU’s wildlife documentaries are celebrated for their indexical qualities, their success was also a matter of their symbolism, and with it the manifold anthropomorphic transformations imposed on the natural world. Such transformations have ranged from relatively subtle semeiotic refigurations of the kind just outlined on the levels of shot and frame, to the construction via audiovisual montages of what can be described as the blue-chip narratives’ leitmotif: a sublime, sublimated nature apparently devoid of any modern human intervention – not least that of the filmmakers themselves.⁶

It is on this level that the documentaries’ heterotopic function becomes fully evident. As noted earlier, for Foucault heterotopias involve the juxtaposition of worlds, but this in a manner that simultaneously represents, contests, or inverts what is juxtaposed. Series such as Life on Earth not only appeared to bring together all the “real sites” of nature, but did so in a manner that involved an ideological inversion: more often than not, the filmmakers went to extraordinarily lengths to eliminate any evidence of modern human intervention in habitats which had in fact been modified, however subtly, by such intervention.

This inversion has nevertheless gone largely unnoticed. Even today, criticism of the genre tends to be centered on the numerous “fake” zoo scenes introduced by the filmmakers to scenes ostensibly shot in the wild (see, e.g., Singh 2011). In the late 1980s, when Parsons’s idea for Wildwalk started to come to fruition, even these relatively crude interventions were generally not acknowledged or debated. In the United Kingdom, the BBC’s blue-chip wildlife documentaries commanded not just a remarkable cultural authority but huge audiences. Overseas, the success of the NHU’s output translated into a significant profit for the BBC via series that were often coproduced with US organizations. In 1996 a new joint venture with Discovery Communications (Animal Planet) generated wall-to-wall wildlife TV (Cottle 2004).

In this context, it is hardly surprising that Parsons’s proposals were well received by Bristol City Council. If Parsons could bank on the global success of series such Life on Earth, he could also bank on the success of his ventures within Bristol itself, including the Wildscreen Festival, which he cofounded with World Wildlife Fund founder Peter Scott in 1982. This festival doubled up as an international trade show, complete with its own version of wildlife film Oscars, the “Pandas.” It also gave Wildwalk its first, and somewhat misleading, name (Wildscreen@Bristol).

While the NHU’s cultural authority in Bristol generated goodwill for Parsons’s project, its blue-chip documentaries’ characteristic naturalism may have led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the challenges of transmediating the blue-chip documentary mode of representation to a museum. As I explained earlier, the documentaries suggested an effortless representation of “nature itself.” To anyone not familiar with the extent of the transformations produced by the programs, or indeed the unique mobilities afforded by the medium, the idea of a “museum counterpart” of series such as Life on Earth might well have seemed not just desirable, but eminently plausible, with its success virtually guaranteed. If so, the very naturalism that was such an integral part of the success of the blue-chip genre may well have been the beginning of the undoing of Wildwalk.