“We’ve got a primal fear of Lions and Tigers and Bears… But we welcome them into our homes” says wildlife filmmaker Gordon Buchanan ahead of 2026 tour
Gordon Buchanan has had more cause than most to exclaim “Oh my!” in a career that’s charted the lives of some of nature’s most charismatic beasts, who have in turn inspired his latest live tour Lions and Tigers and Bears, which hits the road for a second time in January.
Wonderfully well timed, given the hugely successful Wicked cinematic releases, Gordon took inspiration for his tour from the iconic movie The Wizard of Oz and the famous line “Lions, and tigers, and bears… Oh my!”
Hailed as Scotland’s own David Attenborough, Gordon Buchanan has most recently been seen tracking lions, leopards and cheetahs in Botswana, for BBC One’s Big Cats 24/7 – with series two on screens early next year, and filming on series three recently completed.
“I’m really excited about doing the tour again! 2025 has been a crazy year, starting with the first outing of the tour, and I’ve rounded it off with filming again in Botswana, then also in Kenya, and now I can count down to the first show back on tour,” he said.
“I’m very spoilt seeing lions and tigers and bears in the wild – so it’s exciting to have the opportunity to tour the country and share these stories with thousands of people, being able to give them a sense of what it is like to get up close to polars in the Arctic, how fast you need to run to escape a sloth bear and what it’s like to bottle feed grizzlies.
“Knowing that the show has been a success, and that audiences had a great time, makes it easier to prepare and look forward to going back out there. One of the joys of a live tour is seeing people leaving with a smile on their face, having had a fun, inspiring and uplifting evening, and I can’t wait to experience that again.
And he’s got a theory why people continue to be fascinated by big cats and bears.
“These iconic creatures are seen as these predators who are out to get us,” Gordon explains. “And with that comes a primal fear which dates back to the caveman – when our biggest fears weren’t job security and mortgage repayments, but actually surviving those big animals with teeth and claws.
“Going back into pre-history, humans lived alongside lions and bears – using knowledge and fear to stay safe.
“But funnily, these animals are also welcomed into our homes. Go into any family home and there will be a number of bears… We still have a big box of teddies from when the kids were small, and there are lions and tigers among them as well.
“Bears have infiltrated our lives – think Paddington, Rupert, Fozzie! Even Gentle Ben way back on TV – not that that featured the job as such, but I remember watching and thinking that’s what I want to be, up close with the bear, and it represented wild parts of the world for me.”
Gordon’s incredible 30-year career capturing the lives of Mother Nature’s greatest beasts on camera began thanks to a chance meeting in a local pub on the Isle of Mull with one of wildlife filmmaking’s greats, acclaimed survival cameraman, Nick Gordon.
From school days spent ‘disinterested, and daydreaming about the outdoors’ to an award-winning CV, Gordon is now passing on his love for wild creatures to his artist daughter, Lola.
“I took Lola out to Botswana with me for her art, and it was incredibly special to introduce her to that place and the lions I’ve come to know out there,” he said of their recent adventure.
“When you do a job like mine, there’s an assumption you always take your kids and family along, but my wife Wendy has her own business and can’t just up and off. We have always had a very structured home life, alongside my career.
“But this time with Lola has been like a full circle moment; the two passions of my life, my family and my career, coming together for the first time. And it has been wonderful. I knew bringing Lola would put a different spin on it, but I didn’t anticipate just how special it would be.
“A lot of her art so far has had animal themes, which is maybe not too surprising, but seeing her in the environment I’ve come to know so well, I can see a potential shift in her work.
“Sitting and watching a lion or baboon with your grown-up child, through their fresh eyes, has been really lovely and makes me realise how fortunate I am to have experienced what I have in my career.”
In 30-plus years with a camera in hand – with TV series Big Cat Diary, Lost Land Of The…, the Family & Me series, and Our Changing Planet on his resume, both filmmaking and the planet have changed hand-in-hand under Gordon’s watchful gaze.
“Wildlife documentaries used to be about pointing at a lion, and saying ‘that’s a lion’,” he said. “Now they are about their behaviour; how they live and interact in a modern world, some with humans, some in a fully wild environment.
“Lions and tigers and bears are all very much animals which have been shaped by the landscape and climate of where they are living.
“Polar bears in the Arctic are a real embodiment of that part of the world. They are one of these big key species which are truly part of their environment and shape their environment, and have had the biggest change in their environment with climate change; they are the animal most of us automatically think of when we think of that.
“The single biggest problem facing the planet and all its wild places and species is not actually climate change itself – it’s humans, it’s population growth.
“More and more land is being taken from the wild for food production, more minerals are being mined for things we want, and that takes away from the wild environments in a practical, physical sense, while also contributing to climate change as a side effect.
“In Africa, lion and cheetah numbers have massively declined. During the past 50 years with population growth, their habitats have been land-grabbed to provide homes, farms and food for humans.
“In North America, grizzly bears roamed all over from Alaska to California 1,000 years ago – even 500 years ago – they were part of the USA wherever you were.
“Big animals need big landscapes, and they are disappearing. That is the fear for the future.”
When Gordon met Nick Gordon, then looking for an assistant for an expedition to Sierra Leone, he felt his ‘horizons were limited’, and school careers advisors had gasped when he wanted to do ‘something different to farming, fishing and forestry’ – common occupations on Mull.
“Being a wildlife camera person sounded like the best job in the world, exploring, travelling, going to places few people would go to. Amazing!” he said.
“I knew I wanted to break away. Mull is a remote, small community, but I knew there were places much more remote.
“I always had a desire to follow a passion – even if I didn’t know what it was yet. But I wasn’t going to settle for the options I had on the island. A lot of young people don’t think it’s an option to do anything outside the ordinary, but I always felt that I would find something to play to my strengths.
“If I hadn’t met Nick, if he hadn’t been looking for an assistant and taken the risk on a 17 year old still at school, life could have been very different.”
Another moment when ‘life could have been very different’ was one of Gordon’s most famous on-screen encounters – coming face-to-face with a polar bear, through a Perspex box as it sniffed around the edges picking up the scent of a possible kill.
“Survival mode definitely flicked on!” Gordon recalls. “I was completely awestruck, but terrified at the same time. But there wasn’t much I could do other than let it play out, interpret the experience and film it, while talking about what the sense of being that close to a polar bear felt like.
“If you are holding a camera, it can – sometimes helpfully – make it seem unreal, like you’re almost watching it through a screen yourself, like the eventual viewer.
“By contrast, I have seen grizzly bears up close in wild places, on foot with no vehicle around. That is a really lovely feeling. You’re not terrified, you’re reading the behaviours of the animal. If it starts to show aggressive behaviour, you react, but if there’s nothing between you and the grizzly but 20 metres of grass – you just pay huge attention to their behaviour and accepting what it could do and how it could go wrong… That’s what you’re doing as a filmmaker at the time in that moment.”
While getting up close to some of the world’s wildest animals, Gordon has also seen huge changes to the natural environment first hand.
“In the early 1990s I spent a lot of time in the then-vast wilderness of the Brazilian Amazon – I remember flying over unbroken forest for hour after hour as we flew. This heart of South America was wild,” he recalls.
“I did the same journey a few years later, and that forest was gone. In that landscape there were species of plants, mammals, insects, fish which were completely unknown to science – lost before we even knew they had ever existed.”
And despite that stark observation, Gordon remains hopeful for the future: “There are amazing things being done to renature, rewild parts of the world. We need to celebrate the things being done to support nature.
“The bad news is going to tell itself anyway. I have a platform, and while others may give a less cheery view, the positive can and will inspire young people.”
For more information and to purchase tickets for Lions and Tigers and Bears with Gordon Buchanan go to www.gordon-buchanan.co.uk
