Gordon Buchanan is what’s called a super- recogniser. That means the 52-year-old wildlife presenter and cameraman from Scotland has a near-unfathomable recall of faces he has seen only fleetingly. In tests at the University of Greenwich, he has memorised thousands of humans after only having looked at them once. Buchanan also scored well on chimp faces, but drew a blank with pugs. “What I learned from that particular study is that pugs really do all look the same,” he notes drily.
For the most part this isn’t an especially useful – or monetisable – skill. The day before we meet, he was walking down Byres Road in Glasgow’s West End with his wife, Wendy, when he noticed two people who looked familiar. “That’s the couple who are in the Airbnb,” he told Wendy, referring to the property they rent out at the back of their house. Buchanan had never met them; he was just going by the thumbnail photograph that was on the woman’s profile. Wendy knows well enough by now not to question his random spots, but Buchanan scrolled through his phone to prove his point. “Definitely her!” he said.
But Buchanan has started to appreciate that being a super-recogniser does have benefits for his day job. For years, he was one of the world’s top natural history cameramen, shooting sequences for the Planet Earth and Frozen Planet series. Then in the 2000s, at first reluctantly, now without the arm-twisting, he moved to the other side of the camera, too. Buchanan was a natural: with his silver-fox looks, gentle Scottish bonhomie and deep knowledge of the subject, he has become something of an all-action Attenborough (a description he would hate).
Buchanan has carved a reputation for being preternaturally calm and fearless, especially on his …& Me films for the BBC. In one particularly memorable scene from 2012, he sat alone in a Plexiglas box in Svalbard for 40 minutes while it was thoroughly worked over by a 1,000kg polar bear, all the while providing upbeat chat. In another tense sequence, he sat on the ground on Ellesmere Island in Canada – no box this time – while a pack of Arctic wolves circled him, scarcely a metre away.
For Buchanan, in these moments, eye contact, noticing the tiniest details and forming a connection with the animals can, quite literally, be life-or-death crucial. He began to really appreciate this in Botswana, where he has spent a decent chunk of the past two years following lions, leopards and cheetahs in the Okavango Delta for the BBC series Big Cats 24/7.
“When I first arrived, I thought the people I was working with had this supernatural ability to find these lions,” he says, over a bowl of bisque at a seafood restaurant in Glasgow. “But now I know what the system is. You tune into that whole environment. And if you hear a little baboon bark half a mile away, it’s like, ‘OK, well, why is that baboon barking?’ Then you’ll find a set of lion tracks and half an hour later, you’ll find the lion. If anyone observed that and you didn’t explain the process, they’d be like, ‘Why did you suddenly just go from going north to going west, and then you found it?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, the baboon told me it was here.’ It’s not rocket science.
“People are generally oblivious to what’s going on around them,” Buchanan goes on. “I’ve always been hyper-vigilant, if you like. It feels like a bit of a superpower, this ability just to see the world a little bit more vividly than other people. For everything to be interconnected.”
Buchanan has a couple of theories about why he is like he is, both going back to his childhood. He’s been reflecting on that period a lot of late, mainly because he was working on his memoir, which is out now and is called In The Hide: How the Natural World Saved My Life. When he started writing it, he – and probably his publishers – imagined the book as a grand adventure story, full of tales of derring-do: “Biggles but better,” says Buchanan, a nod to the fictional, archetypally British thrill seeker from the WE Johns stories. But Buchanan is a thoughtful soul, perhaps thanks to all those weeks spent crouching in the wilderness waiting for, say, a Gobi bear to reveal itself. And the result is a much more engrossing, and surprising, read because of it.
“Personally, I find those types of memoirs boring,” he says. “I want to learn something that I don’t know.”
Buchanan was born in Dumbarton, not far from Glasgow, the third of four children. His father was a mechanic, who then moved into running pubs and hotels; his mother worked, for a time, at an engineering company that made submarines. His parents separated when Buchanan was young and he moved with his mother and siblings to Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. His upbringing there was pretty lawless: he and his brothers all had air rifles – without their mother’s knowledge – and would shoot at each other with impunity. When he was a teenager, Buchanan bought a motorbike for £10: it didn’t have brakes or a clutch, and half the casing for the engine was missing, so you had to change gears manually, but it did go 75mph on Mull’s forestry tracks. His mum never knew about the motorbike, either.
This brings us to the first of Buchanan’s explanations for why he notices details others don’t: he was bored out of his mind for most of childhood. “Growing up in a rural community, you had to make your own fun,” he recalls. “And the funniest things are observing things your friends hadn’t: ‘I’m going to say that thing or point that thing out before anyone else does.’ It was all humour-based.”
Mull is a haven for wildlife: dolphins and whales pass by the coast, while white-tailed eagles soar above. “People often say, ‘So you were really into nature?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Was I?’” he says, smiling. “I wouldn’t have said so at the time. I wasn’t walking about with a little almanac and a species list. I just loved being outside, whether that was on a rope swing or climbing trees for fun. I was never: ‘Let’s go out and look for a porpoise.’ They were just, kind of, there.”
At this stage of the book – and our interview – he presents very much as the Buchanan you might recognise off the telly. The same ebullient chap who has to cajole two irascible camels across the Gobi desert (as he did in last Christmas’s My Epic Camel Adventure) or the one who has to master seven over-excited huskies on a trail across Canada’s Yukon (Snow Dogs from Christmas 2023). But there’s a darker part to his story and it’s the second reason, he believes, for his “hyper-vigilance”. On Mull, in 1980, when Buchanan was eight, his mother became involved with a charismatic, 21-year-old islander called Alastair. In the early days, Buchanan hero-worshipped Alastair, who was tough and charming and looked like Burt Reynolds, complete with bushy moustache. After a couple of years he became his stepdad.
By then, though, the relationship was beginning to sour. Alastair had a spiteful temper and the rows with Buchanan’s mother were getting out of control: eventually he would smash her over the head with an alarm clock while she slept. The family never spoke about what was happening at the time – and still don’t, really – but Buchanan is convinced that he developed a sensitivity and ability to read people back then that has stayed with him. “I needed to be observant of what the vibe was and try to see these things before they happened,” he says. “And I do put it down to those years.”
Buchanan had long-buried that aspect of his childhood, but writing In The Hide forced him to confront it again. He realised he felt weak, because he couldn’t stand up to Alastair and that sense of impotence had stayed with him. “I thought I was completely unmarked by that experience,” he says. “But then looking back on it, you’re like, ‘Oh God, everything makes sense.’ I’ve probably got – not probably, I definitely have – massive feelings of inadequacy. And a bit of an inferiority complex.”
When Buchanan started working as a cameraman, it was these emotions that powered his ascent through a ferociously competitive field. “That feeling of inadequacy has probably driven me a huge way through my career,” he says. “Trying to do something that I’m good at and trying to be better than other people. So I’m thankful for those feelings of inadequacy – as a 52-year-old man, I see it now. I never really took pride in any achievements. Until quite recently, if someone said, ‘What’s your proudest achievement?’, that was the worst question you could ask me. Ask me what my most perverted thought is, that’s easier!”
Buchanan’s break, when it came, had a hefty slice of good fortune. Aged 16, he landed a job cleaning dishes at a restaurant in Tobermory, run by an English couple, Ann and Nick Gordon. Nick was a wildlife cameraman and usually away somewhere far-flung (everywhere was exotic back then to Buchanan, who had never left Scotland). Bit by bit, Buchanan took an interest in Gordon’s work and, when he was 17, Gordon invited him to be a dogsbody on his next trip to Sierra Leone.
It was a gruelling assignment, mainly to film the critically endangered western chimpanzees in the Upper Guinean forest belt. Within two days of leaving Scotland, Buchanan had caught dysentery, was vomiting every hour, and had seen a dead body. A few weeks in, he started dreaming of inflicting semi-serious injuries on himself that would require being flown home. But Buchanan stuck it out for 18 months – until a civil war kicked off – and reflects now that it was the “making of me”.
What Buchanan mainly learned from Gordon was how all-consuming the job of being a wildlife cameraman is – and also that it can have a catastrophic impact on your relationships (though that lesson would take longer to sink in). But, after an apprenticeship of a few years, Buchanan had seen enough to know it would become his calling. It may seem like a lonely profession, spending months in remote outposts, but he insists he rarely feels that. “You would think doing this job that you’ve got a lot of time in your own head,” he says. “Whereas actually you don’t. Because you’re opening your eyes and your ears and all your senses to what’s in front of you. So it’s escaping from yourself.”
The only activity he’s experienced that comes close is transcendental meditation. “It’s a massive holiday from the stress and anxiety and problems you have,” says Buchanan. “That’s why it appeals to me so much.”
Buchanan slipped into presenting when he was filming some reclusive leopards in Sri Lanka. Worried that they would not have enough material, the producer suggested that he supply his own commentary to bolster the footage. His laconic delivery worked and he was asked to do more. “For years I wouldn’t call myself a presenter,” says Buchanan. “It was a slightly dirty word. If somebody asked me what I did for a living, I’d say ‘wildlife filmmaker’. Presenter wasn’t how I wanted to be seen.”
The emergence of Buchanan, the presenter, coincided with the boom in public interest in natural world films. In 2009 and 2010, he worked pretty well incessantly: on Springwatch and Autumnwatch; filming black bears in Minnesota and then heading straight to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, where he became the first person to capture the tigers there on film, a moment that reduced him to tears. In the jungle in Papua New Guinea, he unearthed a new species, the Bosavi woolly rat.
But the work was taking a toll, certainly at home, where Wendy, who runs a successful television production company, was left to look after their two children, Lola and Harris (who are now 21 and 19). In 2011, Buchanan had a “sort of breakdown, burnout episode”. He also accepted that he suffered from depression – like his father and grandmother before him – and probably had for most of his life.
Was that a shock for Wendy? “I think it all probably made sense,” Buchanan replies. “It probably made sense for everyone who knew me.”
Buchanan decided then to reduce his workload, reassess his priorities. “It is an industry that is fraught with marital breakups,” he says. “I’m trying to think of all of the cameramen that I knew of Nick [Gordon]’s generation when I was younger, very few of them are with their wives and partners. And I just hadn’t thought ahead: How do I achieve my career ambitions? But, more importantly, how do I achieve my ambition of actually being a good husband and father?”
That balance is much better now, Buchanan thinks. And he manages his mental health with daily workouts: gym one day, swimming the next. “It’s 70% wanting to be healthy for now and for the future, and 30% pure vanity,” he accepts. Buchanan started to go grey at the temples in his 20s – his father had turned fully grey at the same age – and freaked out a little. In the event, he didn’t turn fully silver until his 40s, and he quite likes it now. A few years ago, he found himself putting on weight, but he has kept it in check with a regimen of exercise, cold showers and cutting back on the nightly cans of BrewDog.
“I realised that I’d stopped looking in the mirror,” says Buchanan. “And one night I stood in front of the mirror, with boxer shorts on, and I just looked like someone’s dad. It was like, ‘Fuck that! I love being someone’s dad, but I don’t want to look like one.’ So I checked myself.”
Our lunch is long finished and we head out into Glasgow’s late afternoon. As I’m about to jump in a cab, Buchanan tells me I can check in with him if I have any factual queries. But then he stops and looks a little rueful. “You know we were talking about vanity and I said I’m 30% vain?” he says. “It’s actually 40%.”
In The Hide: How The Natural World Saved My Life by Gordon Buchanan is published by Witness Books at £22. Buy it from guardianbookshop.com for £19.80