Simon King (television)

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Simon King is a British television presenter and cameraman, specialising in wildlife programmes.

Simon King was born in Nairobi, Kenya on December 27th 1962 but moved to the UK in 1964 and was raised in Bristol. He has been working in the field of natural history film making for almost 30 years. He began his career as a child actor at the age of ten in such films as The Fox and Secret Place. In 1976 he accompanied naturalist Mike Kendall in the BBC series Man and Boy, in which they searched the country for Britain's wildlife.

In 2007 it was announced that King and an assistant had been attacked by a rabid cheetah in Kenya while filming for Big Cat Diary. They were given rabies jabs and did not develop the disease, although the cheetah itself later died.Source: BBC

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[edit] First television films

In 1979, he made his first film for television - The Willow, a study of the wildlife which surrounds a willow tree. This was shown in The World About Us series, as was his following film Hidden Land, a study of the wildlife which exists around the hotels in Spain's Costa del Sol. He has since gone on to produce in excess of 80 natural history films as principal cameraman, director, producer and many more as presenter.

[edit] Presenting and filming

Simon made two series of King's Country and a series of King's Country Diary for the BBC. He was also responsible for the annual BBC2 Christmas dramatised wildlife documentaries including Rannoch the Red Deer, Dusk the Badger, Shadow the Peregrine and the award winning Aliya the Asian Elephant and Tyto the Barn Owl which won an RTS Technical Excellence Award, a Japan Wildlife Festival Environmental Award and a Silver medal at The New York Festival of International Programming.

He presented the highly successful six-part series King and Company and A Walk on the Wildside which was two and a half years in the making. Since 1992, Simon has worked out of the BBC's Natural History Unit on programmes such as Nature Detectives and Wild Nights with Simon King and won a BAFTA for his camerawork on Life in the Freezer.

As well as being a regular presenter on BBC2's Tracks, Simon fronted Watchout on the same channel and filmed all over the world for Hot Shots, a series which looked at the making of natural history films.

He has been a regular presenter on the Natural History Unit's Live Watch programmes and fronts Big Cat Diary, which follows the progress of lions, leopards and cheetahs in the Masai Mara Game Reserve. Recent projects include principal camera credits for Wild Africa and The Blue Planet. He is on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine.

More recently, Simon has been a co-presenter in Springwatch and Autumnwatch with Bill Oddie and Kate Humble. Whilst Bill and Kate remain on the farm in Devon, or at the WWT reserve Martin Mere near Southport, Lancashire, Simon roves round the country for weeks at a time, and has presented from places as far flung as Shetland and Mull, to places more familiar such as the London Wetlands Centre and the Somerset Levels.

[edit] From scuba diving to composing music

However, Simon's skills are not limited to film making. He has written one book, a number of forewords, scripts for BBC1 films narrated by David Attenborough, and is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. He is also a qualified scuba diver and enjoys wildlife photography, art, and composing and arranging music.

[edit] Private Life

Simon is married to his second wife Marguerite, a talented film maker and camera operator with whom he often works. He has four children, 3 from his first marriage: Alexander born ’86, Romy born ’89 and Greer born ’95 and a daughter, Savannah, born August 2006 to Marguerite. Apart from watching wildlife he lists his hobbies as drawing and painting, playing my Irish flute, swimming, walking, archery, yoga, astronomy, gardening, cooking and reading.

[edit] Programmes

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