Two of the entries put forward by Tigress for the 2014/2015 RTS West of England have been nominated!
Firstly, the superb Monty Halls has been nominated in the Best On-Screen Talent category and is up against some very worthy opponents. Monty has been nominated for the Monty Halls’ Dive Mysteries series and the Divers’ Graveyard episode was put forward to showcase his talent. Monty dives Egypt’s Red Sea to investigate the curse of the Blue Hole. With up to 100 deaths at this one site, what sinister forces make a dive into the 400 foot deep abyss the most dangerous on earth?
Also nominated for Best Short is Electric Flowers, an insert produced for The One Show. We’ve known for some time that flowers advertise to bees by appealing to their sense of sight and smell , the brighter and more scented the flower the more pollinators it will attract. A recent study at Bristol University has discovered that bees can also sense an electric field – and they use it to find the best flowers to pollinate. George McGavin investigates.
Both are up against some very worthy competition from the great and the good of the Bristol television production scene. The winners will be announced at the Gala Awards Party and Presentation Ceremony being held on Sunday 8th March at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre.
Tigress Productions have been nominated for a Panda Award for Man, Cheetah, Wild. The film was made for Discovery and was completed in 2013. The nomination is in the Presenter-led category, with Kim Wolhuter being the featured presenter.
In Man, Cheetah, Wild, we see Bush Man and maverick film maker Kim Wolhuter wis the trust of a female cheetah and her 5 cubs, spending 18 months living and running alongside them. In the Malilangwe Game Reserve, Southern Zimbabwe he chases off lions, stands up to rhino and faces death, following the daily life as the cubs turn into fully fledged predators.
The winners will be announced during the Wildscreen Festival 2014 in October.
Edward VIII: The Lion King nominated for FOCAL International Award
Tigress show ‘Edward VIII: The Lion King’, which aired on Channel 4 in May 2013, has been nominated for a FOCAL International Award in the Best Use of Wildlife and Natural History Footage category. The Awards Ceremony will be taking place on 30th April and winners will be announced then.
Nomination received for Naked & Marooned with Ed Stafford in WoE RTS Awards
‘Naked & Marooned with Ed Stafford’ has been shortlisted for a Regional Royal Television Society Award in the Specialist Factual category. The winners will be revealed during a gala ceremony on Sunday 9th March at the Bristol Old Vic with Carol Vorderman hosting.
Tigress Productions are also sponsoring the Media Effectiveness award in this year’s West of England RTS Awards and Dick Colthurst, MD, will be presenting this award on the night.
The shortlist for the Broadcast Awards 2014 has been announced and Tigress Productions have received a nomination for ‘Naked and Marooned with Ed Stafford’ in the Best Popular Factual category.
The awards ceremony will take place on 5th February at the Grosvenor House Hotel and the winning productions will be revealed then.
Former British Army Captain, Ed Stafford was the first person ever to walk the length of the Amazon, but surviving completely alone on a desert island is his biggest adventure yet. Can he last 60 days on an uninhabited Fijian island with absolutely nothing? No survival tools, no rations, no clothes, no film crew. It’s a daunting challenge and nobody’s ever done it before. In fierce tropical heat he has only hours to find water before dehydration ends his attempt before it’s started. He must master the island – and his fears – to find food and water, light fire, build a proper shelter and progress from mere survival to the point where he could live there forever. Filmed entirely by Ed himself, there has never been a more authentic survival series on TV.
Monty Halls investigates the world’s greatest underwater mysteries from what’s killed more than 100 divers in Egypt’s notorious Blue Hole to what sank a perfectly preserved ghost ship discovered at the bottom of Lake Huron with the lifeboat still attached and no sign of her crew? In Namibia, he and his expert team of deep divers explore a desert sinkhole in search of a safe said to hold £60million worth of gold dumped by the retreating German Army in the First World War. And in Japan he braves dangerous currents to investigate claims of a civilisation lost beneath the waves.
Kate Humble and Simon King report from Zambia, following the lives of the animals living along the Luangwa River at a critical time in the seasons.
It hasn’t rained for 7 months and every animal, large and small, is locked in a struggle to survive – the elephant and her new born baby, the tiny lion cubs threatened by a power struggle in the pride and the hundreds of hippos and crocodiles squashed uncomfortably close as the river bed dries up.
75 cameras capture every moment as it happens through the last days of the longest dry season in memory to the arrival of the rains that will change everything.
BBC Two – Episode 1 – 8.00 pm – Sunday 3rd November 2013
Never before seen home movies shot by the controversial Edward VIII reveal the untold story of his extravagant safaris with the real life cast of “Out of Africa”, complete with adultery, champagne and specially built airstrips. At the height of the Great White Hunter era, Edward turned his back on big game hunting and championed conservation instead. Inspired by his safari guide, Denys Finch-Hatton – played by Robert Redford in the Oscar winning film – he put down his rifle and picked up a movie camera, pioneering the photographic safaris we all know today.
A series of explosive fires are ravaging pig barns across North America, causing millions of dollars of damage and burning thousands of hogs alive.
A colossal fire in 2005 destroyed a family hog farm over night. The barn was razed to the ground and every pig inside killed. There was no evidence of arson. An investigation was immediately launched and after exploration a suspect came to light – methane gas. Formed in a years worth of pig manure collected beneath the barn, this lethal gas could easily catch light on the heater systems used within. It seemed like an obvious cause, but didn’t fit all of the evidence.
A twist at the scene of another fire had a disturbing edge – a perfect circle of dead pigs. The cause, another deadly gas emitted from manure; hydrogen sulphide. It kills through respiratory paralysis, but more worryingly still, it is highly corrosive and eats away at the electrics. As the wiring degrades, the electric unit overheat and creates hundreds of potential ignition sources.
As the devastation continued victim farmers reported a strange gloopy foam that appeared in the manure pit prior to the fire. The foam was 60% methane making it highly flammable. With the right trigger, it released flammable gas, if the gas hits an ignition source it is capable of creating an unstoppable fire, killing thousands of hogs.
So what creates the foam? Scientists are going to extraordinary lengths to find the explanation as Farmers are left living in fear that the fires could break out again, destroying their livelihood.
In the South Indian state of Kerala during 2009/10 a series of dead elephants are discovered by forest guards – each has died in suspicious circumstances. Finding so many corpses in the popular Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary is a huge shock for those who protect these endangered animals, and for Scientists worldwide.
There are around 900 Asian elephants in this Sanctuary and it’s extremely rare to find them dead. Normally around 3 or 4 die each year, mostly from old age.
Kannan, a tribesman with 30 year’s experience, is one of those tasked to guard the 350 square mile Sanctuary. On March 16th 2009 he’s distressed to discover two elephant corpses on the same day. No one in the Sanctuary has experienced anything like this before. Yet the tally of deaths keeps rising. And just five weeks later the body count stands at seven. All bar one are female and none are old.
Why are so many elephants dying in their prime, and why are nearly all female?
Conservationists are forced to become investigators. With no witnesses and scant evidence, the truth of what’s happening is hard to determine. They must urgently examine a range of threats facing their prized elephants.
One threat echoes fearfully around the Investigators’ minds: poaching. In the last 60 years India’s elephant population has halved, much of it due to poaching. Periyar Sanctuary has suffered from the worst of this, leaving it with a uniquely distorted nature.
As the mystery of the deaths deepens the State Government is forced to send in a team of scientists. They reach a shocking conclusion, proving, ‘without doubt’ they say, that a male elephant has warped from sexual aggressor into serial killer – a deduction that’s not only alarming, but also unprecedented.
However, Dr. Ajay Desai – a biologist with vast experience of elephant behaviour – thinks they may have underestimated this crisis. And when a tribal fisherman witnesses one astounding event Desai gets his proof, revealing both the truth of what is happening in the Sanctuary, and why. It offers a revelation arguably more shocking than the forest guards, the investigators, or the committee of scientists could ever have imagined.
About Dr Kate Evans :
In January 2002 Kate Evans started research on elephants in the Okavango Delta, with the help and support of Randall Moore of Elephant Back Safaris (EBS) and the Ministry of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism. The research is focused on adolescent male elephants and the transition from herd to bull life with an emphasis on research into the viability of releasing elephants into the wild from a captive environment. The charity Elephants For Africa was set up in December 2007 to support the research, a scholarship program for local students and an outreach education program.
