Many of the world's leading wildlife photographers worked for Survival, including Alan Root working with his wife Joan Root, Des Bartlett and his wife Jen Bartlett, Dieter Plage, Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, Nick Gordon, Richard and Julia Kemp, Simon Trevor, Doug Allan, Joel Bennett, Liz and Tony Bomford, Cindy Buxton, Bob Campbell, Ashish Chandola, Bruce Davidson, Jeff Foott, Richard Matthews, Hugh Miles, Michael Pitts, Maurice Tibbles and Barbara Tyack.

Commentary for Survival shows was voiced by many leading actors over the years, including Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, David Niven, Anthony Hopkins, John Forsythe, Stefanie Powers, Gene Kelly, Timothy Dalton, Jason Robards, Peter Ustinov and Richard Widmark.

For UK transmissions, the celebrity narrators also included Sean Bean, Richard Briers, Rory Bremner, Ian Holm, Andrew Sachs, Brian Cox, Rolf Harris, Dennis Waterman, Rula Lenska, Toyah Willcox, Robert Powell, Tony Robinson, Diana Rigg and Gaby Roslin, along with naturalists Sir Peter Scott and David Bellamy.

[1] The first Survival, broadcast on 1 February 1961, featured the wildlife of London and was introduced by Buxton standing beside the lake in St James's Park, on a derelict bomb site and at other locations accessed in his Bentley.

[3] The deputy editor of Rediffusion's current affairs programme This Week, Colin Willock, was loaned to Anglia for The London Scene and stayed to head Survival's creative team.

[8] Willock, who had a background in magazine journalism and was also a keen naturalist and wildfowler, used his punchy writing style to create scripts that complemented innovative camerawork and skilful editing.

As general manager and later executive director, Hay had responsibility for overseeing budgets and maintaining logistical links with film-makers in the field, as well as scanning the rushes that arrived in the cutting rooms.

JWT also provided writers to adapt Survival shows for American audiences - Frank Gannon, Ken Thoren and Jim de Kay - while leading Hollywood actors were routinely engaged for the commentaries.

They included two series titled The Survival Factor on ITV (renamed Wildlife Chronicles for American transmission), the first narrated by the then James Bond actor Timothy Dalton and the other by singer and actress Toyah Willcox.

[29] Survival Specials continued to be commissioned, and generally achieved good audience ratings, although as stand-alone programmes in an increasingly volatile schedule, their slots were vulnerable to change or cancellation.

Survival broke with tradition and engaged an on-camera presenter when Gaby Roslin fronted a six-part series of half-hour shows in 1995 under the title Predators, screened by ITV in a Sunday evening slot.

The capital was chosen because television viewing was concentrated in urban areas and demonstrating how creatures like foxes, Arctic geese, herons and even a puffin shared the living space with the citizens of London, had obvious appeal.

Apart from a few feral pigeons, some ducks in St James's Park, and a fox let out of a laundry basket on a wild night in a quiet street just off Hampstead Heath, the wildlife scenes had been shot anywhere but in London.

A tense score from John Dankworth emphasised the dramatic footage, the production having, in Willock's words, "the roar, dust and danger of the chase in every frame", including a sequence where the truck he occupied came under sustained attack from an angry rhino.

[19] The Year of the Wildebeest (1974), Safari by Balloon (1975), Mysterious Castles of Clay (1978), Two in the Bush (1980) and A Season in the Sun (1983) African films shot through the lens of Kenya-based film-maker Alan Root, working with his then wife, Joan.

Mysterious Castles of Clay, by contrast, showed wildlife in intricate detail in and around termite mounds, revealing the insects' highly organised society and skills of construction.

After their partnership ended, Alan Root continued his association with Survival as a cinematographer, producing his own films and guiding the early African work of camera team Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, while latterly also acting as adviser to the series.

As the then chairman of the British Appeal of the WWF, Prince Philip agreed to present and narrate Survival’s one-hour documentary as a means of drawing attention to the importance of protecting the islands’ ecology.

[39] The World of the Beaver (1970), The Flight of the Snow Geese (1972), The Lions of Etosha (1982), Survivors of the Skeleton Coast (1991) Multi award-winning films shot by Australian camera team Des Bartlett and wife Jen, whose work did much to cement the popularity of the series with American TV audiences.

[2] Orphans of the Forest was voiced by Peter Ustinov and followed a scheme to help endangered orangutans in Sumatra by taking animals kept in captivity and rehabilitating them for a return to the rainforest.

[6] In Mzima: Haunt of the River Horse, Deeble and Stone used the latest diving technology and developed new filming techniques to capture close-up footage of crocodiles and hippos.

(1991), Creatures of the Magic Water (1995), Jaguar - Eater of Souls (2001) Nick Gordon was a film-making explorer, dubbed an Indiana Jones for his exploits in the demanding and often dangerous environment of the Amazon rainforest.

[46] As well as showing the wildlife they encountered en route, Mysterious Journey told the story of their contact with the Murle and Kichepo tribespeople who hunt the antelope for food.

The women were filming penguins when the island was invaded, and although Argentine troops never reached their remote location in St Andrew's Bay, the pair were cut off for almost a month until being rescued by a helicopter from HMS Endurance.

[50] Battle of the Bison Forest (1984), Hunters of the Silver Shoals (1996) Tony Bomford, another of Survival's long-serving cameraman, was assisted on most of his early films by his first wife Liz, and also by Tim Borrill.

In 1984, Bomford became one of the first wildlife filmmakers to shoot a major documentary in Communist eastern Europe when he gained rare footage of the European bison and Przewalski's horse in Poland's Bialowieza Forest, ancient hunting grounds of Polish kings and Russian tsars.

He had an especially close affinity with the Shetland Islands and, in 1994, shot Hunters of the Silver Shoals looking at the delicate marine food chain and charting the impact on the environment of the 1993 oil spill from the tanker MV Braer.

He was diagnosed with bone cancer after a fall while filming in India, and died in 2001[51] Killer Whale (1987) The first British television show to be screened simultaneously across the continent of North America, shown by the CBS network in the US and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in a Friday evening slot in 1987.

[10] The Nature of Russia (1992) Following the signing of a co-production agreement between SAL and Soviet broadcaster Gostelradio in 1988, cameras teams went to Siberia, the Volga, the Steppes and the forests and mountains of the Russian Far East to capture images of stunning landscapes and creatures seldom filmed before.

His close association with the gorillas had a tragic end when the main stars of his film, three silverback males and a female, became victims of the Rwandan Civil War that spilled into the national park.