Mike Salisbury helped shape modern wildlife television through landmark BBC series including Life on Earth, The Private Life of Plants, The Life of Birds, The Life of Mammals and Life in the Undergrowth.His work depended on patience, persistence and technical ingenuity, whether filming lions, polar bears, plants or insects.He helped make plants and other overlooked forms of life compelling on screen, using time-lapse and other techniques to reveal behavior most viewers had never noticed.Colleagues remembered him not only for his determination and talent, but also for his warmth, humor, generosity and mentorship of younger filmmakers.
To Mike Salisbury, patience was not a virtue so much as a working method. Lions did not hunt on cue. Plants did not move at a human pace. Polar bears did not respect production schedules, or much else. The task was to wait, improvise, and find a way to show television audiences that the natural world was stranger, livelier and more intricate than they had thought.
Salisbury, who died on May 13th aged 84, spent more than four decades turning that patience into television.
His route into that work was suitably unpolished, according to an obituary in The Guardian. He did not go to university. He worked as a mechanic with Voluntary Service Overseas in Africa, where he developed his interest in photography. Back in Britain, he pressed the BBC for a chance until Horizon gave him a brief research opening. He worked first on Parkinson, then on science documentaries, before moving to Bristol and the BBC’s Natural History Unit. There he found the place where persistence, practicality, and curiosity could become a career.
