This is taken from The Guardian:

Barry Paine
Writer and narrator who was the voice of BBC natural history programmes
by Peter Jones
Friday 18 November 2011 17.22 GMT


In 1983, Barry Paine, who has died aged 73 after suffering a stroke, became the voice of BBC Television's The Natural World. In doing so, he turned from writing and directing his own wildlife films to writing and narrating for others. He liked, as he put it, "to give a voice to the wild animals and plants that can't speak for themselves but require a medium for that message to be disseminated as widely as possible – to you and to me. That is really what wildlife broadcasting is all about."

This was a time when critics customarily suggested that viewers turn down the sound to watch the stunning sequences without words or music. The challenge for wildlife film-makers was clear: having spent months in the field, they had to return to base, supervise the edit and the post-production processes and, in just a few weeks, produce a finely honed script to match the beauty and power of the images. That was how Barry became the wordsmith for The Natural World, joining the team in the cutting room and lending his skill to the process.

Barry enhanced more than 200 programmes from the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol as well as almost 50 independent programmes. He was a consummate performer and loved the theatre: in a powerful performance for Bristol Studio theatre as Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler, he showed us the other career he might have led.

This summer, in Bristol, Barry addressed a reunion for those who worked for the Bristol film unit from the 1970s to the 1990s. He wanted to thank the dedicated cameramen, film editors, sound recordists and managers for creating an outstanding centre of film-making excellence. In the course of his career, he had experienced many of their jobs himself: he had fed sound effects into live programmes, becoming known as "Manuel Dexterity"; he was a clapper-loader on Z-Cars; above all, as a cutting-room assistant, he had learned the basic grammar of film-making, even at times assembling film negative the hard way using a foot joiner.

Barry was born in Wanstead, Essex, and went to Wanstead high school. He took a degree in biology at Bangor University and moved to Bristol in 1962, early in his radio career. John Boorman, then head of films at BBC Bristol, encouraged him to make the move into television. Once trained, Barry began working on programmes such as Animal Magic and Catch Me a Colobus, a Gerald Durrell series produced by Christopher Parsons. In 1967 Barry became an assistant producer on the series Life with Desmond Morris, for which he interviewed some of the key figures he had until then only read about. In particular, he felt that interviewing the ethologist Konrad Lorenz in his Seewiesen lab while studying fish was one of the privileges of a broadcasting career.

Involved in the BBC's The World About Us from 1969, Barry was almost permanently on location. He might be expected to break a return journey from Australia at short notice to film for another month in the Seychelles. There was a succession of exotic locations: Borneo, Costa Rica, the Serengeti – a roll-call of the world's great wildlife reserves.

In 1973, the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol heard of an extraordinary development in the heart of Australia. The Simpson desert was blooming, an event that only occurs when enough rain falls to nourish dormant flowers. Barry was dispatched to make one of the BBC's first co-productions with the Australian Natural History Unit. The Year of the Green Centre was an outstandingly beautiful and unusual film, combining botany and zoology.

As wildlife film-makers pursued many exotic and tropical locations, Barry turned next to New York – largely at the behest of the broadcaster and author Kenneth Allsop – to produce a wildlife programme in one of the world's most urban settings. Barry and his assistant Sheila Fullom combed the city for wildlife, climbing the unfinished World Trade Centre and even descending into the sewers. Barry and Kenneth laboured long and hard to shape the final script and record it. As Kenneth reached the final page, he said, "That's the last film that Kenneth Allsop makes for the BBC." He bought some champagne, stayed a while for the sound mix, and announced that he wanted to go home to Bridport. He shook Barry's hand, saying, "Goodbye for ever". The programme was transmitted on a Sunday and on the following Wednesday, Kenneth's death was announced.

Between them, the two men had thrown open a new subject area for wildlife film-makers. Through the 1980s, films were made in churchyards, compost heaps, even stretches of motorway verge and railway sidings – the wildlife stories on our back-doorsteps.

The microscopic world continued to challenge film-makers. Barry had produced Killer No 1: The Flea in 1966, the first broadcast work of the renowned Oxford Scientific Films. Then in 1978 he turned to the world of fungi. The resulting programme, The Rotten World About Us, almost defeated Barry and the camera team. The production dragged on for over a year, a timescale we now take for granted. In 1979, we met for the first time over screenings of the rushes shot for this fungi project, which was shown as part of The World About Us, for which I was the series editor in Bristol. The Rotten World About Us was a triumph, with images of breathtaking beauty – some of wind-carried spores – and Barry's words were recognised for the vital part they played. The broadcaster Trevor Philpott wrote to him: "I would have given my right arm to have written that script."

Barry's strong links with the biological and earth sciences were taken a stage further in 1978 when he and his film crew joined the Royal Geographical Society's expedition to Mount Mulu in Sarawak, Borneo, where they found themselves in an extraordinary world of limestone pinnacles, secret rivers, huge caves and different kinds of tropical forest. Importantly, Barry had the expedition scientists to help and advise him – leading to novel sequences that might otherwise have been missed. Some of the scientists and naturalists on that expedition went on to form the Rainforest Club of which Barry was a proud member.

In 1964 he married Jill Cheadle; they later divorced. Barry lived in the Somerset village of Blagdon, where he became a much-loved local figure, delighting in recording audio books of local interest. In 2000 he scripted two major millennium projects: Our Dynamic Earth and Wildwalk, both dealing with evolution and diversity.

• Barry Ernest Paine, narrator and film-maker, born 20 October 1937; died 10 October 2011