Michaela Strachan, a Springwatch presenter since 2009, described how the pair sometimes lock horns.
Their onscreen rapport has played a key role in making the BBC’s Springwatch such a hit. Now the duo are back, entertaining the nature-loving nation each weekday night on BBC2. But Michaela Strachan, has revealed that her relationship with fellow presenter Chris Packham, has not always run smoothly behind the scenes.
“We have heated debates because Chris is the scientific one and I am the soft underbelly of wildlife telly who gets involved with the emotional storylines.’
Strachan, a Springwatch presenter since 2009, described how the pair once locked horns over Packham’s wish to film the corpse of a dead bird, which left some of the younger researchers open-mouthed.
“There was one time when a buzzard started to bully its younger sibling and then peck it to death, I watched it on the cameras and it was brutal, as it was kicked out of the nest and onto the ground.
“Chris then wanted to put a camera on the corpse to see how it decomposed. I thought this was a step too far and I thought our viewers would be traumatised by this,” Michaela told an audience at Blackheath concert Halls in London, at her one woman show, Not Such a Wildlife.
She then added: “I won that argument, but we had this heated row and it did make me laugh because there were all these young researchers who were sitting there with their eyes getting wider, thinking, ‘I thought these two were friends and now they’re really fighting each other.’ But that’s what Chris and I do to make sure we get the best programme. We argue about the content.”
The 60-year-old who became a grandmother last year when her stepson welcomed a baby boy, recently revealed a second cancer scare, 12 years after her devastating breast cancer battle.
The BBC presenter who has worked alongside Chris Packham, 65, for more than 30 years, also told how her strong bond with the Wildlife expert and conservationist got her through filming when she was first diagnosed in 2014 before undergoing a double mastectomy.
“Springwatch can be a difficult show to do when you’re going through your own personal problems. I had my operation seven weeks before the series started. That didn’t give me much time to recover, I got through the three weeks and by the last day I felt utterly exhausted and my tank was completely empty and I sat in that morning meeting and tears started to come down.
“The only person who spotted it was Chris, he looked at me and he said: ‘The fact that you’ve got this far, after everything you’ve been through is incredible. We’ve got one more show to do and we can do it together and I’ll support you.’ That’s what we did and that’s what friends do and Chris and I have been supporting each other for 35 years.”
Michaela Strachan and Chris Packham first worked together on the BBC children’s wildlife series The Really Wild Show in the 90s. That early partnership is where they first established their TV chemistry, before reuniting years later on Springwatch.
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