Interview: Simon King - Born to be wild

Who, other than the softly-spoken film-maker, could persuade a wild deer to eat out of his hand? Who else would let prawns pedicure his feet? or adopt two orphaned cheetahs?

King, 46, has done all of this and more. He's lain motionless in the long grass in order to eyeball wild boars. He's camouflaged himself as a a bush to spy, unsuccessfully, on wild cats, and he's had amazing encounters with otters in Shetland where he's currently living with his second wife, Marguerite Smits Van Oyen, also a wildlifefilm-maker, and their three-year-old daughter, Savannah, while filming a new BBC series, Shetland Diaries, to be shown next year.

Although it would have been preferable to track down the 46-year-old presenter of programmes such as Big Cat Diary, Springwatch and Autumnwatch on a windswept Shetland shore, we meet in London, where King has scrubbed up nicely in a crisp white shirt. He still has a look of the boy who used to secrete long-dead things in his bedroom and who would sneak into his mother's kitchen to boil a badger's head to preserve the skull, not to mention pinning birds' wings from roadkill on the walls. Then there were the frogs, toads and newts.

"I simply can't remember a time when I was not captivated by the wild world around me," he writes in his memoir, Wild Life, which he'll be discussing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as well as telling how he gets such spectacular footage of the creatures with which we share our world for programmes such as Planet Earth and Blue Planet, for which he's won Emmy, Bafta and RTS awards.

Even as a toddler, he was the original wild child – so enthralled by the the natural world that, at the age of two, when his parents brought him and his elder sister, Debbie, home from Nairobi, Kenya, where he was born and survived sleeping next to a 6in-long, venomous centipede, he reckoned he could still easily fulfil his burning ambition.

"I reasoned that, with hard work and a great deal of luck, I might grow up to become an elephant. I could think of nothing I'd rather do with my time than patrol the African plains at a royal, sedate pace, together with the rest of my herd, pushing down trees and trumpeting as we reached a waterhole," he remembers.

Which presumably explains why he has such profound empathy with everything from spiders – he talks to them using a tuning fork – to the enraged elephants and rhinos who've charged at him, even the rabid cheetah that once savaged him.

Despite his early fascination with dead animals, his abiding interest lay with live ones, hence his desire as a six-year-old to be Tarzan. His Glaswegian mother – Eve Shulman, the daughter of a jazz musician, who was born and grew up in the Gorbals and whose three brothers made up the Sixties pop band Simon Dupree and the Big Sound – even made a chamois leather loincloth for him.

His childhood sounds idyllic. Does he regret the fact that children today are protected from such innocent pleasures? He replies that he wishes parents weren't so convinced that the world's a dangerous place.

"I think we live in an environment where we're sold fear; it's big business. Of course, tragedies happen, but I think it's a greater tragedy that our freedom and our liberty are curbed by the notion that it's better to be safe and sorry, rather than living with joy. I hope all my four children (King also has two daughters, 20 and 13, and a son, 23, from his first marriage) have enjoyed some freedom and independence."

King got his big break at the age of ten when he became a television star. Performing must have been in his genes, he acknowledges. His mother was a singer with a band. In Portsmouth, she met and married John King, a DJ with the British Forces Broadcasting Service in Nairobi. They returned to England when he got a job as a reporter for the BBC's Points West news programme in Bristol. Eventually, he became head of general programmes and started making award-winning natural history series.

Although his parents split when he was nine, his father, who died in 1999, remained present in his life. When he decided to produce and direct a new TV drama, The Fox, set on Dartmoor in Victorian times, about a young boy who finds a fox caught in a gin trap and tends it back to health, he couldn't find a young actor whose family would welcome a fox into their household – a prerequisite of the job. But there was Simon, who'd often lain in wait for foxes to come for the food laid out for them on the patio and observed them for hours on end.

Soon, his long-suffering mother had a couple of foxes peeing on her sofa.

Next, King became one half of Man And Boy, a TV series in which his friend and mentor Michael Kennedy had him accompany him on journeys of exploration of the British countryside. "The lessons I learned then stood me in good stead on the plains of Africa," he says.

By this time, he was "a natural history geek", experimenting with wildlife photography. Just before his 14th birthday, he got a Super 8mm film camera. His first epic featured sparrowhawks, grass snakes, water voles and fallow deer. "It was dreadful: birds of prey appeared as dots, and wobbly views of creatures so distant even I could not remember what they were gave way to achingly long pans across countryside," he recalls.

When his father – who pioneered shows such as Going For a Song, which evolved into Antiques Roadshow, was commissioned to make a film for The World About Us series, King was allowed to help Hugh Miles, then one of the world's leading wildlife cameramen, film a sparrowhawk's nest. As he lay still in the hide his imagination was flying: "The world of the sparrowhawk was occupying my every thought, and suddenly there she was. The hawk's yellow eyes drilled into me." He realised he wanted to spend his days as a wildlife cameraman. It's a calling to which he's brought great skill and a childlike sense of wonder.

The story of how he achieved all this is a heart-warming, engagingly honest read. Yet underlying the memoir is an undertow of sadness that his worldwide travels often took him away from his young family. "Of course, it's a big regret," he admits. "However, I know that I am now a little more wise and a little more able to respond to the things that are important in life, like spending time with my kiddie. I've recently been away from Savannah filming for four weeks and that's the longest we've been apart since she was born. I don't want to do that again. I want to be with my daughter while she's young – according to her she was tiny-and-a-half, but is now bigger-and-a-half – and completely in awe of everything. It's the most fulfilling, delightful thing to share that awe with her.

"But, yes, I can categorically say I'd love to have done more of that with my older children. We're all together now in a different way, though, and that's a comfort, since I share a lot with them."

Wild Life by Simon King (Hodder & Stoughton, 20). Simon King is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at 6.30pm on 16 August.

NORTH STAR

IN THE course of filming Shetland Diaries, the Kings have fallen in love with the islands, where they are planning to buy a house. He's also writing a book about their life there.

"The films are obviously about the wildlife, but they also nod to the people and the culture of this magnificent, magical place, and our existence as a family there. It's not an I'm-a-Celebrity-Get-Me-Out-of-Here island. We're not eating bugs just to see how much it makes our nose wrinkle. I'm just doing what I do, but in a place I love passionately and genuinely want to spend a lot of my life in."

"Shetland gets into your soul. It's not simply the wildlife; there's also this wild, rugged topography. It's virtually treeless, so it reminds me of some of the most remote parts of the world. Then, equally important, it's the people. They have an identity and a sense of community and a proud culture which is not exclusive. That's really rare, in my experience, in the British Isles. They're so delighted with their home they say, 'Isn't it marvellous! Join in, come to the party'."

So it's the pull of the magnetic north? "Yes, it is. I've felt drawn to Scotland since I first came when I was 11.

"But I suppose I feel an affinity with it because of my mother. It's part of my blood and my heritage, and I feel so welcome."