Defending Criticism
As Head of the Natural History Unit, Nightingale faced down criticism over the issues of viewer deception and value for money for licence fee payers.
In 2007, because of a lower than expected licence fee settlement, the BBC announced major cutbacks across its factual production departments, including budget and staff cuts at the Natural History Unit. The cutbacks were highly disapproved of by veteran broadcaster and natural history enthusiast David Attenborough, a long-time collaborator with the NHU.
The following year, Nightingale defended the Unit against accusations of profligacy with regard to the production costs of the Big Cat Live series. According to newspaper reports, a production team of 94 people was based in a luxury hotel in Kenya during three weeks of filming.
Film techniques used by the Natural History Unit came under close scrutiny in 2008 following a number of scandals in which other programme-making departments in the BBC were revealed to have 'deceived' viewers. Examples of the use of tame animals (a red fox in The Nature of Britain) and studio sets (deep sea life in The Blue Planet) to simulate footage from the wild were brought to light. Nightingale rebutted accusations of misleading viewers, arguing that it is almost impossible to film certain sequences in the wild and that the Unit is open about its methods.
Read more about this topic: Neil Nightingale
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