Tom Mustill on 'Inside Nature's Giants'

Johnian Producer / Director Tom Mustill (2002) talks to us about working on: 'Sperm Whale: Inside Nature’s Giants Special', to be broadcast on Channel 4 at 9pm this Sunday 7th August.

In this Inside Nature’s Giants Special, the BAFTA-winning team battle through the night against a rising tide to explore the mysteries of the largest predator on Earth - the Sperm Whale. With a team of diggers and a reluctant tree surgeon they discover how the whales survive their epic dives to feed on Giant Squid in the dark.

Tom Mustill describes the filming experience, how his time at St John’s has helped to prepare him for the gruelling schedules of TV production, and hints at what his future projects may involve:

'It's two AM on Friday night. Huddled in the dark on a beach near Ramsgate, ankle-deep in freezing mud, we're debating how to open the Sperm Whale. For the team that for the last few years has made Inside Nature’s Giants – a Channel 4 series investigating the workings of giant beasts – this is not a particularly unusual night.
 
Getting inside a 45ft long deep-sea hunting machine is tough, even with two diggers and a chainsaw-wielding tree surgeon. 8 hours pass, dawn breaks and the tide returns; we flee from the beach, the guts removed and the heart tantalisingly visible through the enormous flexible ribs. But hardly any anatomy has been explained to our cameras. 
 
We’d end up spending the next 12 hours getting into the whale, and the world you can see inside it forms the basis for this new programme. We’d leave the experience exhausted, stinking and exhilarated. Much like the end of Natsci Part II Zoology.
 
The television life has been more similar to life at St John’s than I’d anticipated when I got my first ‘running’ job. Reading endless research papers, photocopying, admin and making industrial quantities of tea form the backbone of the work, with occasional terrific field trips.
 
The brutal essay schedule and near-constant multi-tasking of Natural Sciences undergrad life have since proved vital preparation for the freelance television production world, which, so far, I’ve found an extremely rewarding adventure.
 
Through my job I have met fascinating (and often very odd) people and I’ve had to try to distil and explain non-trivial ideas in the limited language of telly; but most fun has been observing things I wouldn’t have been able to in any other way: Spending weeks trying to see wild chimpanzees hunt, or jumping into the open sea to film whales socialising.

The next episode is a Jungle Special, and I’m currently learning how to climb large trees using an enjoyable system of ropes attached to enormous catapults in anticipation of three weeks in the forests of Borneo. I can’t wait, and apparently neither can the leeches.'