In a film-making career of more than four decades, Mike Salisbury, who has died aged 84 after a brief illness, was series producer of some of the BBC Natural History Unit’s most groundbreaking and popular programmes. These included Kingdom of the Ice Bear (1985), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002) and Life in the Undergrowth (2005) – the “Life” series all authored and presented by his childhood hero, Sir David Attenborough. During the 1990s, Mike was series editor of The Natural World, steering this long-running series towards hard-hitting conservation issues.
A self-effacing man, Mike listened with keen interest at the Wildscreen Panda awards in 2006 as Attenborough listed the accomplishments of the winner of the award for outstanding achievement. Only when his own name was announced did he realise that Sir David had been talking about him.
