'My husband chose penguins over the birth of our son': Life as a cameraman for Sir David Attenborough

Lindsay McRae spent 11 months filming emperor penguins in Antarctica. Photo / BBC

Cameraman Lindsay McCrae and his wife Becky reveal what happens when Sir David Attenborough calls - and the reality for those left behind.

Mating is a lonely game in the world of emperor penguins. After laying her egg the female passes it to the male and waddles off to sea. While she hunts, he waits, with the egg incubating deep within his fat folds for months on end until the baby hatches.

When wildlife cameraman Lindsay McCrae discovered his new wife Becky was pregnant with their first child, they chose to do things rather differently. He left her at home with the proverbial egg and flew off to Antarctica to spend a year filming the emperor penguins. After watching the birth via a laptop screen in a research station on the ice, it was seven more months before he returned home to meet his son, Walter for the first time.

Professionally speaking, his decision was vindicated. He won a Bafta for his film, which appeared in the 2018 Attenborough series, Dynasties, was watched by eight million people – many of whom praised him for breaking the golden rule of wildlife film-making by stepping in to save a group of penguins and their chicks from freezing to death in a storm-ravaged ravine – and has just been published by Hodder as a beautifully illustrated memoir, My Penguin Year.

Personally, he told Reverend Richard Coles on Radio 4's Saturday Live, preparing to leave his pregnant wife for the closest place you can get to space without leaving Earth, was the hardest period of his life: "If I think about it now," he said, "I feel ill."

But what of his wife, left behind to cope with new motherhood on her own?

I suggest to Becky and Lindsay, over a cup of tea in her parents' home in Northamptonshire, that a new behind the scenes slot should be installed at the end of each episode of Attenborough's new series, not so much to detail the exploits of the cameramen and women who are fulfilling their dreams in distant climes but the loved ones they leave behind to do so. Both admit it is an occupation which has a high rate of relationship attrition.

"When his phone rings I think, 'Oh God… Where is it going to be and how long for?'", Becky, 35, says. "Our lives can change on a phone call, really. It did this time."

It helped Lindsay's cause that when he and Becky first met (he as a cameraman, she as a researcher on an Autumnwatch shoot in London's Richmond Park) he told her his dream commission was to film emperor penguins in Antarctica. When a producer on the BBC Natural History Unit commissioned the 11-month trip, he says he knew he could not refuse.

But things got complicated. In the summer of 2016, shortly before the pair were due to get married, and with Antarctica now looming on the horizon, Becky underwent an exploratory operation which discovered she had stage-1 endometriosis, which can cause complications with fertility. The doctor advised her to begin immediately trying to get pregnant as she had "a short window" to conceive.

The pair married in the Lake District (where they lived at the time) in July that year. Nobody mentioned the upcoming trip in any of the speeches, despite the hotel coincidentally having three penguin statues on a nearby balcony. A few months later Becky discovered she was pregnant.

By that point, Lindsey, who has just turned 30, was undergoing final preparations – training on a glacier at 3,000m in the Austrian Alps – and decided not to tell his bosses at the BBC until he was already out in Antarctica, for fear of them pulling him off the trip.

The departure date, the couple agree, was the worst day of their lives. Becky had moved down to her parents' home, where she was to stay until Lindsay returned. He says the image of his pregnant wife in tears waving him off at the window will stay with him forever.

The reasons for the length of the trip were twofold: to record the entire breeding cycle of the penguins, but also because the severity of the Antarctic winter, where temperatures plunge to -60C, means that from February until November you are effectively stranded on the ice. Lindsay waited until the last plane in or out for eight months had taken off before emailing his producer in England to admit that his wife was pregnant.

He was part of a three-man film crew staying on an isolated German research station with a dozen or so scientists. Aside from his immediate colleagues and the station commander he didn't tell anybody else that he was about to become a father. "I didn't want anyone else to worry," he says.

Satellite internet at the station enabled the pair to speak every day during the pregnancy. A few days before the due date in mid April, Lindsay had his laptop plugged in downloading episodes of Traffic Cops to watch when the next storm blew in – Becky, trying to reach him to tell him her waters had broken, found the line blocked.

Lindsay McCrae poses in the winners room at the 2019 British Academy Television Craft Awards. Photo / Getty Images

Eventually she got hold of another member of the team. Unable to do anything, thousands of miles away, Lindsay decided to go out and film on the ice, but told the station commander to radio him if he received any news. At around 3pm the call came through and he raced back on a skidoo: "I logged on literally seconds afterwards and I just heard Walter crying," he says.

Later he celebrated with a party on the station and released a weather balloon with his newborn son's name scrawled on the side, but admits now to experiencing a strange sense of dislocation.

"For me I didn't feel a great deal at that point," he says. "I felt so removed from the whole thing. I was emotional but I wasn't experiencing the birth of my first child."

Becky, meanwhile, could only focus on the fact she was now a single mum for the next seven months. "When you love somebody so much and they're missing from something it's really hard," she says.

Within days Walter was struggling to feed and was briefly readmitted to hospital. At that stage Becky was so emotional she could not even speak to her husband. Even with the support of her parents, with Walter struggling to sleep, she reached a tipping point at six weeks.

"I rang Lindsay and said I can't do this on my own anymore. I don't know what to do. Going into your bedroom on your own every night is really hard. You just want someone lying next to you to talk to."

To ensure Walter knew his father's voice, she played recordings of Lindsay reading Beatrix Potter and endless videos. Despite establishing a connection from afar Lindsay admits he was worried about his homecoming. "I had read horror stories of people returning from isolation and coming back a different person," he says.

An inquisitive summer visitor to the Emperor colony. This Adélie would keep @WillPLawson @christmannphoto & myself company whilst filming on chilly summer days for @BBCEarth Dynasties series! pic.twitter.com/0qLB31XH24

— Lindsay McCrae (@badgerboy05) November 22, 2018

As it happened, he touched down at Heathrow to be met by his wife and infant son and swept him up in his arms. "I had never held a baby before," he says. "But I constantly felt guilty so I thought this is my turn now to step up."

The pair now have a second son, six month-old Ernest. Lindsay has been away again, notably last year for three month-long, back-to-back shoots with one night at home in between. But second time around he at least ensured he had booked the whole month off when Ernest was due to be born.

"My mum and cousin had been really amazing birth partners so I said to Lindsay you need to step up," Becky says. "When he was born I gave him to Lindsay to place to skin to skin and he put him under his t-shirt and sat there bawling."

Sometimes, when the phone rings and she notes that far-off glint in her husband's eyes, she admits to a passing thought that perhaps she should have married an accountant.

"But I would choose you with all that," she says, turning to Lindsay. "You're such a great dad. I would rather have you with all that c---."

My Penguin Year by Lindsay McCrae is on sale now.