for the city’s reputation for high-tech science and technology, and a historic harborside designed to attract heritage tourism. This meant that, even as Wildwalk was fronted by a late nineteenth-century leadworks made with the rubble of gray Pennant sandstone and quaintly decorated with Bath stone quoins and dressings, there stood just behind this building an impressive ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) roof which covered the attraction’s tropical house. This dramatic contrast was a visible manifestation of an architectural formalism that undermined several aspects of the building’s function, a factor which itself may have weakened the attraction.3
Problems like these notwithstanding, I shall make the case that perhaps the main reason why Wildwalk failed to fulfill its potential was that its exhibits engaged in problematic dynamics of transmediation (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 47). Such dynamics are a key aspect of mediazation, and involve the transposition of aspects of a mode of representation or display from one context to another. As I began to note above, Wildwalk attempted to recombine elements of various genres in order to create a peripatetic version of a wildlife TV documentary. I use “peripatetic” in reference to the walked nature of the attraction, but also to refer to the original etymology of the word, which invokes the legend of Aristotle teaching while walking around the colonnaded Lyceum in Athens. Wildwalk was designed to teach visitors about the evolution of life on earth, and more specifically, about the evolution of biodiversity on the planet. It is on this level that it is possible to identify and analyze what were at once the most provocative, and arguably the most problematic, aspects of Wildwalk’s design.
The analysis I offer will intertwine two methodologies. The first, a social semeiotic4 approach drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, will identify the characteristic signs employed by each of the different modes of representation and/or display, and will chart the changes produced by their transmediation within Wildwalk. The second methodology will employ a genealogical mode of inquiry to at once problematize and historicize those same modes (Foucault 1984).
Wildwalk and the NHU’s blue-chip wildlife documentaries
The overall At-Bristol complex reflected Bristol’s political and economic elites’ aspirations to consolidate the city’s reputation as the high-tech regional capital of England’s West Country (Bassett, Griffiths, and Smith 2002a). However, Wildwalk’s actual exhibits were more of an expression of Bristol’s growing cultural industry, in and for which the BBC’s NHU was to play a leading role. By the 1990s, Bristol had become a world center for the making of wildlife and natural history firms, something akin to a “Green Hollywood” (Bassett, Griffiths, and Smith 2002b, 167).
Christopher Parsons was a leading figure in the field, a founding member of the NHU who rose through the ranks to become executive producer and who, together with Sir David Attenborough, effectively put the NHU on the world map of wildlife TV production. As I noted earlier, it was Parsons who proposed and then promoted Wildwalk. This being so, a genealogical link between Wildwalk and the NHU may be established via his career, and via the series and genre that earned him global recognition: Life on Earth, widely regarded as the first of the “blue-chip” wildlife documentary blockbusters (the expression “blue chip” is used within the wildlife TV industry to refer to the documentaries with the highest production values).
Parsons joined the BBC in 1955 as an apprentice film editor. In the two decades that followed, he rose to become first a producer, and then an executive producer of BBC wildlife programs. Like Attenborough before him, part of Parsons’s early reputation was built via TV shows based on expeditions to collect wild animals for zoos. Parsons worked with Gerald Durrell, the wild animal trader turned world-renowned conservationist. With Durrell, Parsons traveled to Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and Sierra Leone to produce two series, Two in the Bush (1963) and Catch me a Colubus (1966). As I will explain in the next section, these and much later interactions with zoos would have their own impact on Wildwalk.
While Parsons’s early career included a number of successful series, he is best known as the executive producer of Life on Earth (1979). Parsons referred to the program as the first of the BBC’s wildlife “megaseries” (Parsons 1982, 308). Years later, a time line by the BBC of major events in the corporation’s history suggested that “Although natural history programmes had been seen on BBC TV before, it wasn’t until David Attenborough started this epic series that the genre really took off. Revealing life around the globe through beautiful photography and compelling and intimate commentary ...”5 Thanks in no small part to the series’ success, the NHU nearly doubled in size and was granted status as a BBC department (as opposed to a unit), with Parsons as the department’s first director from 1979 (Parsons 1982, 351).
Although the opening titles of Life on Earth called it “A Natural History by David Attenborough,” an idea echoed by the quote above, Parsons played a key role in designing the program. He also proposed that Attenborough be the presenter of the new series, and by so doing effectively launched the latter’s career as the face of BBC wildlife television. Twenty years after it was first broadcast, Parsons’s series would also constitute part of the template for Wildwalk.
Life on Earth traced the rise of life on the planet, beginning with the simplest single-celled organisms and finishing with the most complex ecosystems. Together with The Living Planet (1984) and Trials of Life (1990), the series produced a virtual version of what can be described as a heterotopia of nature (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 47–49). Michel Foucault conceived heterotopias as real places that act like “counter-sites”:
a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. (Foucault 1986, 24)
As examples of such sites, Foucault referred to holiday villages and gardens, but also to brothels, cemeteries, museums, prisons, and even ships.
The concept of heterotopia can be extended to include what can be termed heterotopic practices (Alfonso and Lindahl Elliot 2002). In contrast to Foucault, I regard both heterotopias and heterotopic practices as being culturally specific: they involve a comparatively recent form of globalization, and constitute a central aspect of the mass mediation of nature (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 48–49). Heterotopic practices work to produce heterotopias in virtual sites, as opposed to the “physical” geography of an actual place envisaged by Foucault. News genres are perhaps the most obvious example of such sites; however, a case can be made that the media of mass communication as a whole are premised on a heterotopic spatiality.
I describe as heterotopias of nature all those sites which ostensibly bring together in one place the natural worlds, or at any rate, “representative samples” of such worlds (Lindahl Elliot 2006a, 129). Two examples of such heterotopias are zoological gardens (an institution included by Foucault in his own typology of heterotopias) and natural history museums. If there are heterotopias of nature, there are also heterotopic practices that specialize in the virtual representation of nature. One way of thinking about Life on Earth’s innovative qualities is that its different episodes took the spatiality of heterotopias of nature to wildlife television in a single series – one that boldly set out to represent, as the title itself proclaimed, “life on earth.”
By the mid-1970s, wildlife documentary production techniques had long incorporated the techniques of observation associated with realist cinema. Such techniques included what the film theorist Noël Burch has described as the “ubiq-uitisation” of the cinematic observer and, with it, the “centring of the subject” (1990, 202–233). Simplifying somewhat, the former aspect gives the illusion that the camera narrator can travel, indeed can simply be, anywhere; the latter encourages spectators to at once project themselves into, and identify with, the world shown on the screen.
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