Johnny Kingdom
Johnny Kingdom (born 23 February 1939) is an English wildlife filmmaker, specialising in his local area of Exmoor in North Devon.
Career
Kingdom has been a lumberjack,[1] a farm worker, a quarryman, a poacher and for over 50 years the gravedigger for his local parish,[2] but his overriding passion is filming the wildlife on his beloved Exmoor. He has been making films for over 20 years, with series and documentaries being shown on a number of British television channels. He lives in the village of Bishop's Nympton.
Johnny started his career in wildlife filming following a very bad accident whilst driving a tractor. The accident caused depression to step in which led him to suffer a really bad time in the coming months. He had numerous amounts of kindness shown to him from people from all kinds of walks in life. But none more than the man who changed his life, Roger Gregory. Roger lent Johnny his video camera, and this started Johnny on his way to a life in wildlife filming, and he has never looked back since.
His 2006 series Johnny Kingdom: A Year on Exmoor was shown on BBC Two and has been shown on UKTV People & UKTV Gardens part of the UKTV Network. The series coincided with the publication of his autobiography Johnny Kingdom - A Wild Life on Exmoor. One-off programmes have also been shown featuring visits to Lapland and to the Scottish Highlands. A new BBC series, Johnny's New Kingdom, commenced in March 2008.[2] In this, having now purchased 55 acres of land in his beloved Exmoor, Kingdom sets out to make it a haven for as much local wildlife as he can.
In 2015, he presented a 4-part series for ITV called Johnny Kingdom's Wild Exmoor airing on Monday nights at 8.00PM.
References
- ↑ Sale, Jonathan (2006) "My First Job: Johnny Kingdom, the wildlife film-maker, was a lumberjack", The Independent, 23 November 2006, retrieved 2011-07-17
- 1 2 Billen, Andrew (2008) "Horizon; Johnny's New Kingdom; Monster Moves", The Times, 5 March 2008, retrieved 2011-07-17