A three-time Emmy and multiple British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) winner, King is the cameraman behind Planet Earth’s celebrated great white shark breach, co-presenter of Big Cat Diary, and principal cinematographer on The Blue Planet. His talk drew on decades of fieldwork across four continents, revealing the habits, the close calls, and the philosophy behind his approach to filming wildlife. He stressed that patience, prolonged observation, and non-intrusion are fundamental principles of his work, allowing animals to behave naturally without disruption or interference.

King credited “the amazing naturalist” Mike Kendall, with whom he spent two years exploring the British countryside, as the most formative mentor of his life. King’s own career began aged just 10, when he was cast in a BBC drama called The Fox. The role required a fox to live with him for a year. “All I wanted, of course, as a 10-year-old boy, was to look after the fox. I didn’t care about the programme.”

It was the beginning of King’s lifelong practice of earning the trust of wild animals through patience rather than intrusion. He described spending months with dingoes in the Australian outback and developing a precise ritual of imitating meerkat calls and actions in South Africa that allowed him to sit alongside creatures that had never before encountered a human being. That same technique is still used by the reserve for eco-tourism today.

“They still use exactly the same movements and sounds. With hindsight, I wish I had used the sound of a chicken. I have visions of tourists going across the Kalahari pretending to be chickens!” King joked on stage.

King’s account of Big Cat Diary — the BBC series he co-presented alongside Jonathan Scott for about 12 years in the Masai Mara — highlighted his core belief that the animals, not the presenters, should always be the story.

“We had a very clear idea of what mattered, and that was the lives of the animals. All we humans did was facilitate the astonishing drama of their lives. Whatever the human visitors saw was absolute reality — the truth of an event.”

He added that each animal should be treated as an individual with its own behaviour, instincts, and character, rather than as a symbol or spectacle.

The most emotionally charged segment of the talk concerned two cheetah cubs, Toki, and Sambu, whom King helped raise back into the wild in Northern Kenya after their mother was killed.

He trained them to recognise danger by imitating the warning rumble their dead mother once made. “While Toki was killed by a lion at just over two years old, Sambu lived to nearly nine. One of the difficult parts of the job is learning that caring for and documenting wild creatures also means accepting that you cannot always save them,” he said, holding back tears. The experience, he noted, forced him to reflect deeply on the limits of human intervention in nature and the ethical complexities of conservation work.

It was not always a case of unlikely friendships with wild animals either, King said, recounting the times he was attacked by a cheetah that turned out to be rabid after contracting the disease from a jackal kill, and the time he was almost run over by a mother rhino while protecting her calf.

King also revisited the technical challenges behind some of his most celebrated work. Filming the great white shark breach for Planet Earth — a sequence no one had ever captured in real time before — required a prototype high-speed camera with no viewfinder, cables running to a computer in the boat’s cabin, and King himself strapped to a modified motorcycle wheel to stay upright on deck.

The team forgot to include a trigger for the camera and improvised with a doorbell from a local shop. He described these challenges as part of a broader responsibility to innovate without compromising respect for the natural environment being filmed.

The sequence, narrated by Biologist Sir David Attenborough, became one of the most-watched wildlife clips in history, due to the efforts of the man who has spent 45 years getting dangerously close to wild creatures — not for spectacle alone, but to deepen public understanding of the natural world and humanity’s relationship with it — with the scars, stories, and footage to prove it.