‘There’s a primal fear of big animals’: Gordon Buchanan talks beasts as Northampton date is announced

And now he’s set to share tales of Lions and Tigers and Bears on his biggest ever live tour – which has recently been extended to include Northampton.

Gordon has taken inspiration for his tour from The Wizard Of Oz and the famous line “Lions, and tigers, and bears… Oh my!”

And he’s got a theory why people continue to be fascinated by big cats and bears.

“They really are the animal kingdom’s iconic creatures, perceived to be these predators who are out to get us,” Gordon says. “There’s a primal fear of big animals with teeth and claws 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. Our great great great great great great great great grandparents 40,000 years ago would have been living alongside them, with their knowledge and fear to keep them 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 a 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.”

It’s 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, that Gordon – who’d spent his school days “uninterested, and daydreaming about the outdoors” – has now spent more than 30 years capturing the lives of Mother Nature’s greatest beasts on camera.

Gordon has most recently been seen tracking lions, leopards and cheetahs in Botswana for BBC One’s Big Cats 24/7. “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 talk to thousands of people about these incredible, charismatic animals,” Gordon said of preparing for Lions and Tigers and Bears with Gordon Buchanan.

“I enjoy being able to give people a sense of what it is like to getting 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.”

And 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 CV, both film-making and the planet have changed 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 the 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, lions 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.”

Alongside environment change, Gordon has seen huge advances in technology.

“When I started, we would film all the animals you could with the technology we had – we were shooting on film, only filming during the day. There was no thermal imaging, no drones,” said Gordon.

“Technology has made the impossible possible now. We can go to the depths of the oceans, the highest mountains – there’s not a living thing we cannot catch on film.”

A 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 the bear sniffed around the edges picking 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.”

Gordon Buchanan: Lions and Tigers and Bears comes to the Royal & Derngate on February 12, 2026. Visit royalandderngate.co.uk or call 01604 624811 to book.