Doug Allan

Doug Allan films wild animals in cold places. If you’ve ever been amazed by footage of polar bears in a nature documentary, it’s probably been filmed by him. His perfect temperature, he says, is -18°C. Allan trained as a marine biologist and commercial diver. Diving was his first passion, where he learned about survival in cold places. His big break came when a TV crew turned up in Antarctica, where Allan was working, to film a wildlife documentary. ‘I ended up taking the crew to different places, and after 48 hours I realised that being a wildlife cameraman ticked all the boxes: travel, adventure, underwater.’

He is now a top cameraman and has worked on many major TV wildlife series. ‘I came along at a good time. When I started, hardly anyone had been to the Antarctic. You had coral people, elephant people, chimpanzee people. I just became the cold man. It was like all these amazing sequences were just waiting to be captured on film.’ The camera and communications technology was very basic when he started 35 years ago. ‘It is certainly easier to film today. If you shot something then, you had to remember it. Today, with digital technology, you can shoot a lot and look at it immediately. You used to have to think what shots you needed next, and what you had missed. You shot less. Film was very expensive. Today you can have too much material.’

‘My value is field experience in cold conditions. I have a feel for it. I have spent so much time on sea ice it now feels like crossing the street. I do get cold toes but the poles are healthy places. There are no leeches, no diseases or mosquitoes.’ Wildlife filming, Allan says, is full of great successes, but also failures and embarrassments. Once, he was in the Orkneys to film kittiwakes. Unfortunately he could not identify which birds they were.

When Allan recently got permission to film sequences for a major TV series in Kong Karls Land, a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean, he did not expect an easy assignment. It is a world of polar bears and is strictly off limits to all but the most fearless or foolish. Usually -32°C in April, the wind is vicious and hauling cameras in the deep snow is a nightmare. After walking five or more hours a day and watching polar bear dens in the snow slopes for 23 days, however, Allan had seen just one mother bear and her cub. By day 24, though, he says, he was living in bear world, at bear speed, with bear senses.

‘We find a new hole and wait. We shuffle, hop, bend, stretch and run to stay warm. Five hours of watching and then with no warning at all I catch a glimpse so brief that I almost miss it. But the camera’s locked on the hole on full zoom and my eye’s very quickly on the viewfinder. Nothing for a couple of seconds and then an unmistakable black nose. Nose becomes muzzle, grows bigger to become full head and in less than a minute she has her front legs out and is resting on the snow in front of the hole. She’s looking at me but she’s not bothered. I’ve just taken a close-up, thinking this can’t get much better … when she sets off on a long slide down the slope. I’d swear it’s partly in sheer pleasure,’ he recounts, adding that two cubs then appeared at the den entrance. ‘Clearly it’s their first view of the world … It’s show time on the slopes and we have front-row seats.’

Now Allan would like to make his own film about climate change in the Arctic, talking to the people who live there and experience the impact of it first hand. He says he would be able to make an extraordinary documentary.