Christopher Parsons
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Christopher Eugene Parsons OBE |
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|---|---|
| Born |
23 August 1932 Winchester, Hampshire, England |
| Died | 8 November 2002 (aged 70) Littleton-upon-Severn, Gloucestershire, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation |
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| Known for | Head of the BBC Natural History Unit |
Christopher Eugene Parsons OBE (23. August 1932 in Winchester, Hampshire – 8 November 2002 in Littleton-upon-Severn, Gloucestershire) was an award-winning English wildlife film-maker and the executive producer of David Attenborough's Life on Earth, widely regarded as one of the finest and most influential of nature documentaries. As a founding member and a former Head of the BBC Natural History Unit, he worked on many of its early productions and published a history of its first 25 years in 1982. Besides television, he was also passionate about projects which helped to bring an understanding of the natural world to a wider audience, notably the Wildscreen Festival and ARKive.
After obtaining a degree in science from the University College of the South West of England, Exeter, Christopher Parsons joined the BBC in 1955. He began as an apprentice film editor at the newly formed West Region Film Unit in Bristol, England. Here, he worked on a wide range of programmes in the fledgling medium of television, including some of the BBC's earliest natural history films. In 1957 he was one of the founding members of the BBC Natural History Unit, becoming a pioneer of the genre alongside names such as Peter Scott, Tony Soper, Pat Beech and Eric Ashby. His early work included roles editing and producing Look, the Unit's first series, which was presented by Scott. In 1963 he produced the Unit's first film in colour, The Major, though it was another four years before the programme could be transmitted in colour. Parsons accompanied his friend Gerald Durrell on animal-collecting expeditions to Australia and Sierra Leone to produce the television series Two in the Bush (1962) and Catch Me a Colobus (1966). In 1968, he became series editor of The World About Us, a new strand of nature documentaries commissioned for BBC Two by then controller David Attenborough. The strand was renamed The Natural World in 1983 and was still on air as of 2012.
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