Chris Packham was probably born to make nature television. In a 40-year career on both sides of the camera, he has worked on dozens of wildlife shows, and even before he presented this year’s Earth documentary series, he was being talked about as “the new Attenborough”.
He’s a gifted communicator. But for much of his life, he struggled with social interactions and experienced mental health problems. In 2005, after two years of therapy, he was diagnosed with what was then called Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism (the term is no longer used). Twelve years later, he made Asperger’s and Me, a documentary that related his experience and which sharply criticised practices intended to “cure” people like him.
This year, he has followed that up with Inside Our Autistic Minds, an intriguing and sometimes moving two-part documentary in which four very different young people diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder are helped to each make a short film explaining their experience. Packham, now 62, relates to them through his own experience of autism – which he describes as both a help and a hindrance to his work.
Russell Brown, who has two adult autistic sons, talked to him about autism, life, the new series and what comes next. This is the edited transcript of the interview.
One thing I’m interested in is how you came up with the format and the idea of making the films in particular. How did you develop the idea?
Well, a few years ago, we made a programme about my own diagnosis, which was categorised at the time, going back a while now, as Asperger’s. And we were keen to do a follow-on programme where we could explore the broader themes of an autistic experience, and therefore involve other people.
One of the key things we were wanting to communicate was how the condition can affect people’s day-to-day lives in quite specific ways – and we wanted those to be quite separate and identifiable for our audience. So there’s a little bit of artifice there, because normally these things would perhaps impact in a more complex way.
So, we reached out to a very large community in the UK, using social media, including my social media feeds, and we had about 3500 responses. That set us a challenge of finding four potential contributors who would be happy to speak in relative isolation about one of the traits which manifest in their lives and the impact that has had.
What was essential is that they were going to be very confident, to be able to speak about that openly. And also that their friends, family, colleagues, whatever, would be equally supportive through that. Just as we’d done that, Covid hit and we were into a succession of lockdowns. That prompted enormous disappointment, but it did give us a longer time to review that list of 3500 candidates and make sure our casting process was really complete.
One of the joys of working on the series and one of the reasons why it I think it was successful was that we did find those four individuals, along with families, colleagues and friends who totally bought into our project and really wanted to utilise the opportunity to express what aspects of their life were like, so they would be more comprehensible to the viewers. The commitment they showed through what was quite a long project because of the Covid impositions was fantastic. In a way, that helped, because it meant the production team and I had longer to get to know everyone. So we were all on the same page and very confident going into each part of the of the programmes.
So, the idea then was, “okay, how are we going to articulate this for our viewers”? Because sometimes, particularly young autistic people do have problems explaining what their day-to-day lives are like and what impacts negatively or positively. So, we thought, well, we’re in the television business, we tell stories visually. Why don’t we see if we can make four very tailored films, entirely originated, directed, narrated around the contributions of the contributor? And we would work with them, put teams in place to envisage what they were saying, then offer that to them and they can modify it.
They were very much empowered by the process of making those short films. We put a 3 minute limit on it, so that we could keep them quite constrained and focused on one thing. From my point of view, as I was with the first documentary we made, I was insistent that the programme would focus on some of the abilities that the condition had given to our contributors, as well as some of the more disabling aspects of it and the difficulties it presents. It needed to have positive outcomes, as far as I was concerned.
By the time we’d got all that agreed and in place, we were working with a fantastic director, Joe Myerscough, who I’ve worked with before on other projects, not about neurodiversity. He and I worked well together, trusted one another, we knew what each other’s strengths were. That’s how it started. It was a real staggered start due to the pandemic, and then we moved into shooting, and we shot it over quite a long period of time, which is unusual for a documentary like this.
It was clearly important to give the people you featured agency. I thought the point where Murray says, “I would like to choose the voice actor who represents me”, seemed really important.
Yeah, it was. One thing I ought to add is that when we were recruiting our production team, we reached out to as many neurodiverse people as we knew, or could find, so they could play a role in it. So, here was a programme that was being made by autistic people with autistic people to address those conditions.
Murray was a great case in point. Murray is an extremely articulate, intelligent, young man, who obviously is non-speaking. But his capacity to communicate was profound. His language is very precise. He yearns to be able to speak to you. We then reached out to autistic voiceover artists, actors, presenters and we put little samples together of their voices and we gave them to Murray so he was able to hear them and imagine which voice he would like to use to express himself in the film. That was an implicitly important part of that process to empower him, to make sure he was maximising his capacity to be able to express himself in a way which, unfortunately, otherwise he wasn’t able to do.
It seems it was important to also emphasise the range of experiences that people have. I mean, on one hand you’ve got Murray – but then there’s you. You’re a successful TV presenter, you’ve done things that people can only dream of.
Indeed. Well, as you know, it’s a spectrum condition. And we have a saying here and maybe it’s used in your autistic community as well. And that is, if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.
But there are commonalities of traits. And one of the interesting things from my perspective was that I don’t always get on with other autistic people who have similar traits to myself. But in this context, we all got on extremely well. And one of the things that was heartening from the contributors is that many of them said to me, either privately or publicly, it’s been a real pleasure working with you, because it’s allowed me to identify the fact that I’m not alone in feeling this way, thinking this way, sensing the world this way.
Just having those conversations with other people, in a way where there was time for us to explain what our world is like to one another, was really important. But yeah, that breadth, we wanted a breadth. Obviously, we were very, very keen to address some of the problems when it comes to diagnosis and implementation of care for women who are autistic. And then we also wanted to do as much as we could with young people.
There are limits to how we can work with young people, particularly vulnerable young adults, when we’re making a documentary. So Ethan as a student was perfect. Anton was a working young person. Flo was a late-diagnosed autistic woman. And that fitted, unfortunately, a pattern we see frequently here, and that is that women are diagnosed late. The consensus is that they’re better at masking, which can be an exhausting process and leads to all sorts of other mental health issues. We need to focus a lot more on care for young women who are autistic. And again, we wanted to make sure that we could get that message out, which was something we hadn’t been able to do in the first documentary, of course – because I’m male and I had a different experience.
Flo’s masking game is amazing. You have no idea, until you see it, what her natural resting state is.
I think that it’s extremely common. And it’s obviously a very useful tool when autistic people are young, and particularly, if they’re struggling with their peers. The ability to copy and mimic behaviours in order to basically exercise an easier progress through that part of life is probably essential for many young people.
But the problem is, and as I experienced, you’re doing two jobs at once. You’re managing yourself – essentially, the masking – and you’re also trying to do whatever you’re trying to do, which is either be educated, function in a social situation, or maybe in my particular sense, working in a team of people, when, previous to that, I’d been essentially isolating myself to avoid conflict. Doing those two things can be quite exhausting, it can be quite punishing, because you want to succeed in your ability to integrate through your masking behaviour. And very often, you don’t, you fail, because it’s an imperfect art. And then that can cause all sorts of problems of lack of self-worth and so on.
One thing I can say as an older autistic person is that some of the things you initially start to consciously mimic, or do, become habitual. And then, eventually, you’re not even thinking about them, and they become much easier. But of course, that’s a painful process. And it’s not something we should expect people to have to go through in order to live their day-to-day lives. It may well be an eventuality, but that doesn’t mean it’s a tolerable eventuality, particularly when some people are put in an even more stressful situation because of the complexities of their day to day lives.
Again, we go back to women. Many women go through the process of maturing – education, getting work, starting a family, and only then, after they’ve had a family, do they get a diagnosis. Well, by then, many of them unfortunately are exhausted and they do present with mental health difficulties.
The metaphor I came up with my kids was that it’s like trying to play a high-res video game on a computer without a graphics card. Everyone else has a graphics card and my kids were trying to do it all on the CPU [central processing unit].
Yep, I think that’s a fair analogy. You’re struggling to find points of contact, context and reference – tangible things which you can identify, which you are able to implement in your codes of behaviour in order to ameliorate the amount of disruption that is caused by others’ perception of you, and your presentation of personality and character, in what is a very volatile environment, particularly for young people.
For every youngster, however they are disposed, the teenage years are tumultuous, and unfortunately, invariably difficult – probably more difficult now, with the advent of social media and all the other pressures that can weigh upon young people, than they were when we were kids. Very often it’s about grappling and looking for those things and then trying to implement them. I mean, I failed.
Initially, I fought against it; I fought to be independent and different. I was supported by punk rock, believe it or not, which coincided with the first peak of difficulty in 1976 and 77, and I found some solace in the individualism that I could project because of the punk rock movement.
But then, when I got to university, I’d kind of given up because I was failing so repeatedly when it came to trying to orchestrate any functional social relationships with people of my age that when I went to university, I would say “20 pence, please” twice a day to a bus conductor. What I did to get through it was completely isolate myself from everyone of my age. I didn’t talk to any fellow students, I didn’t integrate with them, I didn’t go to the bar, I didn’t do any of those things.
I was very determined to make sure I could complete my education. I’d become aware of some of my limitations, I knew that I was a very unhappy young man, to some extent fragile, but I was equally determined. I knew I needed a degree in zoology, and I had to get it somehow. So the only way I could figure of protecting myself through that process was to basically not engage with people, because if I did, it always turned out badly.
But then, coming out the back of that, a couple of years after leaving university, I did need to integrate with people because I started working in television. And that meant I needed to be a functional part of a team. Again, I was able to identify that I could see why people were thinking about employing me, and what therefore they might want me to add to the process. And adding to that process meant that I had to be part of a functional team; I couldn’t just stand on the outside and throw bits of me into the pot.
So that became, again, a really challenging period in my life. I was then, day to day, running through lists of things which I thought were the appropriate codes of behaviour to make this an easy process – and basically a lot of the time failing. Obviously, I’m 62 years old, I still fail now, I will still say things and do things, think things, which people will deem inappropriate, difficult. Obstreperous, whatever. And I have to apologise. The difference is that I now work with teams of people with whom I can say, “I’m sorry, you know why I did that, and I know it was disruptive, and I’m sorry about that, I just lost myself for a moment.”
My turning point with my own kids was realising, “oh, the reason you’re not acting as I think you should is that your experience of the world is completely different to mine, and that explains quite a lot.” You use that word “experience” often, don’t you?
I do. I mean, I think we are very absorptive, you know; we take everything in. And we’re very conscious of all of those elements. From my point of view –it’s something that we discussed in the series as well – where there’s a commonality about mine and the contributors’ types of autism is that we have sensory sensitivities. Mine are primarily visual and smell, less acoustic. Ethan, as we saw in our series, is very, very impacted, both negatively and positively by sound and, in his case, music. And that can really shape our experience with the world, because it can be really challenging or it can be a very positive thing.
The challenging aspect, if we look at myself, is that complex visual environments, with multiples of colors, shapes, forms, textures and so on, are quite challenging, because I take all of that in very quickly in great detail. The beneficial side of that is that I see all of that and retain that visual information, and in my field – I’m trained as a zoologist, I broadcast primarily about natural history, biology, science – being able to recall all of that and articulate which bits of it are of interest in quite defined detail is actually an asset to me. That doesn’t mean that sometimes it isn’t uncomfortable, but once I’ve got past that and it’s been processed, it can be a very useful thing as well.
It’s not so much of an asset professionally, but I have a keen sense of smell. I don’t know whether it’s any keener than anyone else’s, but I use it more, I’m more conscious of the smell of things. It’s always been very useful in the natural world -- animals, plants and fungi, they all have a very distinct smell. So, being able to identify them, find them, and note changes in those different smells has always been useful.
Our younger son is the one who tells us when it’s time to change the water filter – and he’s always right.
Have you struggled in your career sometimes with things not going exactly as you want them to, and not being able to move past that, because that’s something I’ve seen, particularly in my younger son. He did very well on a digital media course last year - he topped the course in two disciplines. But, boy, it was a struggle, because in every problem he had with the course structure, he wasn’t necessarily wrong, but where I might be able to suck it up and move on, he couldn’t do that. That seems like it could be difficult in a TV career, because you’ve got lots of gatekeepers.
Yeah, I think there are two aspects that are worth noting, and maybe that’s why they manifest in your son and people like myself. And that is that firstly, we’re very task-focused. We like to have very defined, clear tasks, so we can envisage how we would approach and solve them. Maybe your son was being set coursework, and if there was ambiguity in what was expected of him, he might therefore be struggling to complete those tasks, because he is not entirely sure which bits he’s meant to do. He wants to maximise his capacity, he wants to do well, he’s being educated, he’s being tested. Therefore, if it’s very defined, it’s easy, because it’s easy to keep that focus. And if it isn’t defined, then certainly when I was in education, I used to struggle with that. Someone would say in geography, go home and read about Australia. And it’d be like, read what about Australia? About its sporting heritage, its history, its culture, the aboriginal peoples, its landscape, the weather? I mean, what do you want?
The second thing, which I think is really important, is about being in control and being able to control aspects of your environment, whether they’re physical, mental, emotional, temporal. And in education, I think that’s very difficult for young people because they don’t have control over that. They’re told when they have to attend their lessons or lectures, they’re told when they finish, they may not have finished their task, but they may be told they’ve got to stop, which always caused trouble for me.
And the more you’re able to take control of your life the easier it becomes, because you can make sure there are places within your life where you can reduce anxiety; you can find respite and solace. And you’re not in conflict. That’s quite difficult to shape as a young person, because of all the constraints of living with other people in the family context. It’s more difficult in a broader education sense, because it’s not about you as a person, it’s about all of the students.
So, in TV, yeah, there has been that. But I think that I’ve always been very analytical; I’ve always looked at things and broken them down. Enormously self-critical, but also trying to understand the context of why things aren’t working, how things do work – and why, therefore, I’m not working in them. It’s almost like there’s a half-finished jigsaw, and I look at the half-finished jigsaw and see how jigsaws work, what the image is, what the process of completion might be. And I might be the bit of jigsaw that doesn’t at that point fit in.
Then I think to myself, okay, how am I going to change my bit of the jigsaw, so it fits into that process and, and helps the thing come to fruition? A lot of that was internalised – it wasn’t in outright conflict with my fellow professionals. A lot of it was agony for me behind the scenes, a lot of self-loathing, self-punishment, disappointment, frustration, feeling that I wasn’t able to do my job properly. Those all presented as difficulties and, and ultimately that sometimes leads to … autism is not a mental health issue, but it can precipitate those. I remember periods of being very depressed because I felt that I wasn’t as functional in the workplace as I wanted to be.
I’ve got to be honest with you. Only on a few occasions has it transpired that there were people who were blocking me – and I’ve been fortunate I’ve been able to overcome those with without conflict. And then, of course, following the diagnosis, and I made the diagnosis public – which again, I think I was able to do because I was I was older and more confident – my colleagues have been enormously supportive. I work in an industry which does its best to try to understand what often very minor changes for people like myself can do to present much more positive outcomes.
I like that you included parents so closely in the series, because sometimes I feel in the social media discourse about autism, parents are portrayed as the villains, or not understanding. But you are quite kind to Flo’s mother, who didn’t quite get it.
I think that comes from my own experience and sympathies for my own parents. I mean, I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, nothing was known about autism within the public sphere at that time. My parents probably thought that I was an obsessive. My mother called me the most tactless boy in the world. They were certainly aware of the fact there social norms that I didn’t conform to, they would often see me reacting quite aggressively to situations which were overwhelming.
But of course, like every other parent, it was the first time, they had no points of reference. And it was the 1960s and 70s. They weren’t having conversations with other parents about the difficulties they were having with their kid, because they would have seen that as embarrassing. When I was having what we now call meltdowns, publicly, my mother was terribly, terribly embarrassed by that. She didn’t have the capacity to express or explain to passers-by why her son was trying to destroy a supermarket.
So I completely empathise with the predicament that my parents and my teachers were in at that time. This is a generational thing, too – my parents, like many of their age, all over the world, had been through significant traumas, due to their being children in the Second World War. And mental health, therefore, was not something that was talked about in our house. It was, like, pull your socks up and get on with it. That wasn’t allowed to manifest itself, because the things that had happened to them, from their point of view, had been far more traumatic than anything that could be happening to us.
So, the difficulty with those generations is that they didn’t talk about mental health issues. They didn’t accept that they were even tangible and real. And those conversations couldn’t take place. Much later in life, when it was clear that I had mental health difficulties sometimes on account of the autism, the conversations with my parents were difficult.
So of course, when we met with all of the parents of our contributors, I sympathised with them. What was heartening was that, for example, Flo had been masking for years, she hadn’t spoken to her mum, even when she’d realised what was going on. She didn’t feel confident to do that. She was thinking that her mum might feel let down or betrayed or had been misled There was a lot of emotional turmoil going on.
Anton had been diagnosed quite young and his mother had worked enormously hard to explore and understand the impacts of the condition and how to help him and had radically changed the way that she lived. On one occasion, she was telling us that she dyed her hair, and then Anton came in and was desperately upset about that – change being the problem, of course – so she’d immediately gone back to the hairdresser’s and dyed it back again. So, you know, a lot of [the parents] were really giving and forgiving and struggling all the time to understand, as their children were maturing, how the condition was presenting and trying to work with it. They were amazing people and it was really heartening to see parents doing that.
Once parents empower themselves to want to acquire the knowledge and help the children or young people, they are probably the most significant force in their life, and making sure that we do allow access for information and education for parents is implicitly important, massively central to how we address this issue. Because those young people are going to be spending more time in the presence of their parents than anyone else.
I have to say, when we got our first diagnosis through – and like yours, it was called Asperger’s at the time – the only mention of Asperger’s in the media was in the context of Martin Bryant, the mass murderer in Tasmania. And now there’s you and your contributors, and lots of other TV programmes. That’s a really big beneficial change, isn’t it?
Yeah, we’re having more open conversations, we are effectively asking people to say, “Look at us, we’re different, mentally, we’re different.” Still the same species, still the same hopes and aspirations, still want to play a functional role in society. We want to have day-to-day norms that you would just basically expect. Because that’s what we generate expectations of, why shouldn’t we be able to do those things as well? To live independently, have stable relationships, get jobs, so on.
And it’s only through talking about autism that people will be able to see, understand and develop an understanding of that situation. I mean, sometimes in the past, we used to say that we would like people to tolerate us, and I don’t think that’s the right terminology. I think we want people to understand us – and those sometimes very minor differences and therefore very minor changes that they would have to make in their lives to massively improve ours. A lot of the time, it’s not big asks.
I think TV programmes like ours are there to promote conversations in offices, in schools, in homes, everywhere, so that people recognise that we have skills, abilities, ambitions, and to be able to realise those sometimes don’t cost very much.
I wonder if there’s a side benefit there – and I certainly got this from my kids – in understanding how we’re all different. Not in a “we’re all on the spectrum” way, because that’s stupid, but just in that our experiences of the world as people are different. I’ve found that a really valuable thing.
I think you’re absolutely right. I think that the autistic people I know [who have] commonality with my sorts of traits are enormously tolerant. We never harbour any discrimination whatsoever. As I often say when I’m campaigning environmentally, we’re one species on one planet with one big problem and one chance to sort it out. That sort of tribal aspect -- that kind of doesn’t exist for people like us. We’re far more tolerant of people who have different personalities, characteristics, ideals, ideologies, religions: it doesn’t matter. Those sorts of things can’t possibly be used in any discriminatory way; we’re really open to all of that. I can be a very impatient person, I can be really didactic, I have very strong ideas about what I think is right or wrong. But they would never be governed by a knee-jerk reaction to anyone’s outward appearance. And I don’t just mean physical, I mean, any aspects of that appearance.
I’m one of those people that if people say, “Oh, he or she, they’ve got a few problems and issues”, I always sort of think, right, well, I’ll make that judgment for myself. I’ll either learn about the media or public figure, or I’ll meet them, and I’ll make those judgments myself. We’re never going to be governed by that sort of stuff. Because I suppose we’ve been victims of it and therefore we don’t like it.
I’m also writing about Earth, and I talked to [executive producer] Rob Liddell and asked him about your succession of Fred Perry shirts. Is there a story there? Because I saw the shirts in episode two of Inside Our Autistic Minds and thought, oh, there are the shirts!
Well, as I mentioned, I was massively into the punk rock thing. For me it was a means of physically identifying – through my dress and appearance, haircut and whatever – to everyone else that I was different. And that was empowering, because I was coming to the realisation that there was a difference there, I didn’t understand why, I had no idea what was going on, I was merely a 16-year-old, and I was able to dress in a way which would separate me from other people of my own age. At that point, in the 70s, that was quite a powerful separating mechanism – people didn’t look like the way I looked at the time.
I developed quite a keen interest in the way that my clothes would express my personality. And my sister [Jenny Packham, who has designed clothes for the Princess of Wales, Jennifer Aniston, Miley Cyrus, Keira Knightley and others] is quite a famous fashion designer in the UK, so there’s always been that backdrop of interest. I liked Fred Perrys because I started wearing them way back, and then they completely went out of fashion. But I started wearing them in the late 80s and 90s and at that point, they were very unfashionable, something your grandfather would wear. But I would wear them. I stuck with Fred Perrys and other retro sort of shirts. They’re a bit more modish in terms of youth culture than punk rock, but they’re perfect for sound men. They’re made of soft fabrics and the sound man can hide the microphone in between the buttons and there’s a nice little wind gag there.
If you put a radio mic on a T-shirt like this, it’s either going to stretch the neck down, or it’s going to make a bump, so you’re gonna see the mic. So, soundmen hate T-shirts, really. I’m always there to try to comply. So the fact that I always had a fondness for these types of button-up retro shirts, plus the fact that they’re a great asset for the sound man, means that I always wear them. I did notice in one review of the one of the programmes I did recently that the reviewer remarked on the fact that they were always buttoned up completely, and that’s just me being tidy. I like tidiness and, my trousers match my shirt, which matches my jumper.
Again, I think the way the way I’ve always dressed is partly an expression of some of my autistic personality. It’s not just Fred Perry. There’s a couple of other brands, one called Art Gallery that I wear a lot of in the UK, but they’re all the same sort of thing. I don’t wear jarring colors, everything has to match, everything is thought about, everything’s composed in that way for me to be comfortable. I was always comfortable in them – I could button them up and they looked neat and they were plain and I’d buy six of the same color, so I could wear the same shirt day in, day out. I like wearing the same clothes every single day. It’s not about impressing anyone else, I can assure you. I wore those Fred Perrys when people were taking the mick out of me for a long, long time!
We also see your record collection in the series. So, how do you organise your records? Is it straight-up A to Z?
Yeah, I’ve been looking at yours behind you …
I’m ADHD, so mine are organised by vibe.
It’s a challenge. I’ve got a large collection of punk rock, so they’re essentially alphabetical by band name. However, in the punk rock era, there were quite a lot of, as you know, small record labels, and they’d maybe only press, like, 25 copies. Step Forward and Rough Trade. I think I’ve got the first 20 Step Forward records and they are out of alphabetical order -- they go all in one block, numbered one to whatever. I do that for my small record labels, so they sort of come out of context, they’re kind of kept separate. They’re all in plastic sleeves, and they’re all facing the right way and the A side always faces the inside of the picture sleeve. There’s a meticulous order to them. And if I’ve got them out and I’m playing them, and anyone ever thinks about putting them back, they get short shrift. I’ll be putting them back, thanks!
Just finally, any concluding thoughts on this project? And whether there’s a next step, or what you’d like to see happen?
Well, we’re talking at the moment, me and people from the BBC. The format was very popular – the four contributors demonstrating their life experience. One thing that we are conscious of in the UK is that neurodiversity is broad – obviously, there’s ADHD, and my stepdaughter is severely dyslexic. And these are again conditions that are not fully understood by the general public. I’m not demeaning the general public, I’m just saying they’re not fully understood, because the point of conversation hasn’t really started.
So we’re thinking about doing another two programmes talking about other types of neurodiversity. Finding people who are able to express what that’s like on a day-to-day living basis, so the viewer can have a better understanding of how it impacts on their life. ADHD is one of the topics that we want to cover. Because again, there are misapprehensions. It’s a bit like when people have a perceived idea about what obsessive compulsive disorder is and they think, “That’s sort of being a bit tidy or something”, and we just want to address those. So, we’re having that conversation at the moment. and then we’re going to start talking with those communities to see if there’s a way whereby we could mimic what we did with Inside Our Autistic Minds, and find a way for them to be able to visually express that, so it can be communicated to our audience. If we do, we will be starting on it later this year.
I think I should finish up now, I can see we’re getting the wind-up. Thank you very much for your time and your work. I’ve really appreciated it and I could have talked for much longer.
Thank you very much, Russell. I much appreciate the opportunity. Please give my best wishes to your sons. And don’t let anyone else put any records away, because they’ll put them in the wrong place.
Inside Our Autistic Minds, BBC Earth at 9.30pm on Friday, December 15.
