28/07/2026
Over 150 documentaries in, and every now and then comes a series you can be genuinely proud of — not just for the craft, but for what it says.
ITV’s Force of Nature, produced by Plimsoll Productions, is one of those. The Savage Seas episode, produced by Rob Morgan, gave me the opportunity to document something I’ve been quietly watching for over 20 years: a single colony of clownfish and the anemone they call home.
Over three summers, we filmed their complete life cycle — and documented how the anemone and its tenants responded to coral bleaching. The anemone species they live in can survive for over 80 years. I’ve been visiting this colony for nearly a quarter of that.
We experienced three back-to-back bleaching events during filming — two from heat stress, one from freshwater flooding caused by a cyclone. Compounding environmental stresses that science has long warned about, unfolding in real time in front of my camera.
We also pushed the boundaries of underwater motion control, using bespoke rigs built by Biopixel Oceans Foundation’s own robotics specialist, Prof Matt Dunbabin. The RED RAPTOR system allowed higher resolutions and frame rates, and Laowa probe and macro lenses let us enter the anemone’s world in a way that simply hadn’t been done before.
But the experience wasn’t only technical. There was a summer when I jumped in and found the anemone bleached white again — this time not from heat, but from floodwater that turned the sea a deep green. It nearly broke me. The people who live and work on this reef carry the weight of watching it change. That toll is real.
The film shows the reef recovering — because it did. But I also appear in the final episode, Into the Extreme, and what I say there is something I’ve come to understand slowly over two decades: each time the reef recovers, there is less. Less diversity. Smaller colonies. Fewer places that match what people expect the reef to look like.
Recovery and loss are happening at the same time. That’s the honest story.
