Anne Sommerfield, a director of Animals With Cameras, says ‘we were just the best candidates’

BBC One will break new ground next week by broadcasting its first major natural history series written and directed entirely by women.

The programme, Animals With Cameras, also features a diverse cast: its meerkats, chimps, cheetahs and penguins all turn camera operators to capture unprecedented footage that will help scientists understand and protect threatened species.

Women in broadcasting will be celebrating the landmark series amid ongoing concerns about the underrepresentation of female directors in film and television – none won any awards at the most recent Baftas or Golden Globes.

On the David Attenborough-fronted Planet Earth II, more than half the production team were female; other wildlife series have had all-female producers. But it is understood that Animals With Cameras, which airs on 1 February, is the first major BBC One nature show to be entirely written and directed by women.

The decision was not deliberate, according to one of the directors, Anne Sommerfield. She and her colleagues Hannah Ward and Clare Dornan were “just the best candidates for the job available at the time”.

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But Sommerfield told the Guardian that it was an important moment. “The fact it was an all-female-directed series is a really encouraging sign,” she said. “I hope it inspires younger female film-makers to pursue their dreams.”

Making the series was “an enormous technical challenge” and required “a lot of patience”, she said. “There were many sleepless nights for Chris Watt, who made the cameras and modified or repaired them in the field. He made 66 cameras – more than half of them were lost or broken by the animals.”

The BBC came up with the idea of attaching tiny cameras to the creatures after talking to scientists who wanted to use lightweight gadgets to enter animals’ worlds. “We were guided by the scientists … we had the technology,” said Sommerfield, adding that the main motivation behind the experiment was the opportunity to benefit science.

One of the many firsts in the series, which is fronted by the cameraman Gordon Buchanan, is its footage of newborn wild meerkats. With the help of Cambridge University scientists, the newborn pups were filmed inside their burrow via a collar camera on a meerkat. This revealed that they communicate with their parents from birth by chirping.

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“We had to have cameras that were under 5% of meerkats’ bodyweight, and that had lights and recording devices that were less than one-fifth the size of an iPhone,” Sommerfield said. “It had to be voluntary, they had to be 100% comfortable. I was director of casting; like people they are all individual characters. The animals were treated far better than the humans!”

She said the animals’ self-shot footage was often ruined because dirt or smears would get on the camera lenses when they fought with or cleaned each other. “There was a lot of trial and error, and thousands of hours of film had to be assessed, some of which was blank or unusable.”

Animals With Cameras also features a chimp collecting water to wash its hands; the first footage recorded by a camera mounted on a cheetah; and extraordinary underwater images of a gull snatching a fish from a penguin’s beak.

Natural history programmes are currently proving popular with viewers. Blue Planet II was the most-watched television show of 2017, and Planet Earth II’s footage of iguanas being chased by snakes was voted Bafta’s “must-see moment” of last year.