Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this week is the wildlife cameraman Doug Allen. He has spent 30 odd years

capturing unique footage of animals in some of the most remote and least hospitable places on earth.

If you've watched fuzzy little polar bear cubs frolic in the frozen wilderness or

slick killer whales eerily circling their prey.

Chances are the spell-binding footage is his.

David Attenborough, a long-time collaborator, describes his work simply as extraordinary. A marine biologist he first made a living diving into the icy

rivers of Scotland searching among the muscle beds for pearls, a useful early lesson in

patience and coping with the extreme cold.

His subsequent dedication to a working life in the wilderness has bagged him a slew of

baffters and emies, but there has also been an emotional toll. He has coped with

periods of depression and is twice divorced. He says big animals are my passion. I

particularly love working with large mammals because they're

intelligent and you can develop a relationship with them. You've also said

Doug Allen that Polar Bears are among your favorites because these are your

words big sexy charismatic animals that

will each you if they get a chance and I wondered in there with the big

sexy charismatic and the leach you that's almost the perfect combination for a

wildlife camera person is it? I like big animals also

because they're easier to focus on than small things. Right in the undergrowth.

...