David Cobham © David CobhamThere can’t be too many people who could boast friends as different as poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, sportsmen Fred Trueman and Donald Campbell, naturalists David Attenborough and Chris Packham, and film stars Orson Welles and Peter Ustinov. Yet David Cobham’s key professional relationship was with the author and naturalist Henry Williamson, with whom he worked on both The Vanishing Hedgerows (1972), the first BBC programme to focus exclusively on environmental issues, and Tarka the Otter (1979), the feature adaptation of Williamson’s Hawthornden Prize-winning account of river life in north Devon.
Cobham had met Hughes and Plath while studying natural sciences at Cambridge and apparently opened the bowling with Trueman (possibly for MCC), although he never got to play for his beloved Yorkshire. He encountered Campbell after quitting Pearl & Dean to film documentaries like BP’s Muloorina (1964), which chronicled Campbell’s attempt to break the land speed record in Bluebird.
Attenborough was so impressed with Cobham’s eye for detail that he commissioned him to make one of the BBC’s first colour wildlife films, The Goshawk (1968). The following year, Cobham persuaded Welles to narrate To Build a Fire, which he had adapted from a short story by Jack London. He spent the next few years with the BBC Natural History Unit, producing such notable items as The Unofficial Countryside (1975) and The Private Life of the Barn Owl (1977), which made pioneering use of night-vision equipment borrowed from the army and drew a fan letter from a young Chris Packham.
He also won a BAFTA for Amundsen (1975), which formed part of The Explorers series. But it was The Vanishing Hedgerows that earned Cobham the trust of Henry Williamson, who presented this combative study of farming’s impact on Britain’s endangered species. Having had an application to become a Disney cartoonist rejected, Cobham must have derived singular satisfaction from the fact that Williamson chose him rather than the American studio to bring his 1928 classic Tarka the Otter to the screen.
Scripting with Gerald Durrell after Williamson’s first draft weighed in at 400,000 words, Cobham spent two and a half years working with a young otter named Spade and finished shooting on the very day that Williamson died.
Exquisitely photographed by John McCallum and narrated by Peter Ustinov, it remains a model wildlife picture and eased Cobham into children’s television. Starting out with Brendon Chase (1980), an adaptation of a novel by BB (aka Denys Watkins-Pitchford), Cobham oversaw shows like Seal Morning (1986), Out of Sight (1996-98) and Bernard’s Watch (1997-2001).
He also won an Emmy for Woof! (1989-97), during the filming of which he met second wife Liza Goddard. In later years, he campaigned to raise awareness of the plight facing Britain’s birds of prey and wrote two acclaimed books, A Sparrowhawk’s Lament (2014) and Bowland Beth: The Life of an English Hen Harrier (2017).
