Springwatch co-hosts Michaela Strachan and Chris Packham have entertained nature-loving audiences for years, but their on-screen chemistry belies occasional off-screen disagreements. Strachan, a presenter on the BBC show since 2009, has revealed that the pair sometimes lock horns behind the scenes.
Heated Debates Over Content
Speaking at her one-woman show, Not Such a Wildlife, at Blackheath Concert Halls in London, Strachan described their dynamic: “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.” She recounted a specific incident where Packham wanted to film the corpse of a dead bird, a proposal that left 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,” Strachan said.
She 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.”
A Partnership Forged Over Decades
Strachan and Packham first worked together on the BBC children’s wildlife series The Really Wild Show in the 1990s, establishing a TV chemistry that would later be revived on Springwatch. Their bond extends beyond professional collaboration, as Strachan revealed how Packham supported her during a cancer battle.
The 60-year-old, who became a grandmother last year, recently disclosed a second cancer scare, 12 years after her initial breast cancer diagnosis. She underwent a double mastectomy in 2014, just seven weeks before a Springwatch series began. “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,” she said.
“I got through the three weeks and by the last day I felt utterly exhausted and my tank was completely empty. 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 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. Chris and I have been supporting each other for 35 years.”
