Oral History
View the oral history of Barry Ernest PaineBarry Ernest Paine
Well known for his narrations of BBC wildlife programmes, Barry Paine was also a producer, lecturer, science writer and actor. As well as working for the BBC, Barry has worked for several other television production companies around the world, such as National Geographic and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
A biology graduate, Barry Paine joined the BBC in 1961, working in radio as a studio manager and announcer. Although fascinated by cinema from an early age, Barry was not initially interested in television and disapproved of his parent's decision to buy a television set. However, after moving to Bristol in the winter of 1961/62, he increasingly encountered television and eventually joined BBC2, where he was trained in camera work, sound recording and film editing during a three year traineeship. At the end of his training, Barry started work with the Bristol film unit. Here, he was trained on the job working on Animal Magic with Johnny Morris, and had roles such as second camera, filming the washing of the elephants at Bristol Zoo.
Barry Paine joined the Natural History Unit in 1965 and produced the animal behaviour series Life in the Animal World with Desmond Morris for three years, a fortnightly series that alternated with a scientific series from London called Horizon. Desmond Morris was very familiar with just about every major ethologist at that time - people like Niko Tinbergen, Alister Hardy, Ernst Mayr, Peter Scott and Konrad Lorenz, and most contributed to the series.
In 1969, Barry moved over to The World About Us, which was the start of a long career with the series that took him all over the world. His favourite programme of the series - The Rotten World About Us - was very important to him as he had waited over twenty years to do it. However, they practically wrecked the OSF laboratories during filming as they filled the entire premises with fungal spores. Barry continued to work on The World About Us until 1987, spending a short period as its executive producer when Chris Parsons went abroad for the Life on Earth series. During this time, Barry realised that the executive side of the industry was not for him, and that scriptwriting and voicing was what he enjoyed. Barry won the Glaxo Travelling Fellowship ABSW (Association of British Science Writers) Science Writers' Award in 1978 for The World About Us programmes.
Always keen to be a performer, Barry decided to resign from the BBC in 1982 to become a freelance guest producer, presenter, writer and narrator and to give him the chance to do more acting. Asked to narrate the entire series of The Natural World when it started in 1983, Barry believed that such a series should have more than one narrator. Therefore, although often described as the voice of The Natural World, he would describe himself as a voice for the wild, as he has earned his living through writing and film-directing, giving a voice to the wild animals and plants that can’t speak for themselves.
Barry continued to work with wildlife subjects right up to his death contributing to talks for charitable events.
Barry died in the early hours of 10th October 2011
View the oral history of Barry Ernest Paine
