Off Air... with Jane and Fi - OFF AIR... EXTRA (with Planet Hope)

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Welcome to a Friday special! This week's bonus episode features an interview with Tom Whipple, science writer for The Times and the host of Planet Hope - a podcast series brought to you in paid partnership with Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative. He told us about his experience interviewing BAFTA and Emmy-winning wildlife filmmaker, Bertie Gregory for World Environment Day. You can listen to that episode here: https://pod.fo/e/42831f. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail]. Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi. Times Radio Producer: Hannah Quinn Podcast Producer: Eve Salusbury Executive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to this bonus Friday edition of Offair with Jane and Fee. We've got a little bit of something environmental and natural to tickle your ears with today. Yes, it's a podcast we think you should know about. It's a good one, isn't it? It is because it is looking towards the trajectory of optimism. It's called Planet Hope, isn't it, Jane? Optimism. We don't do a lot of that, do we?

But we are interested in our planet and in the environment. and I think you'll enjoy hearing about Planet Hope. Fans of David Attenborough documentaries may remember this iconic moment from the BBC Seven Worlds One Planet. Bertie tries enticing the belugas closer with some tunes of his own. Despite some questionable singing, it seems to be working. Once reeled in, he shares the secret. The moment I started singing Adele, they just went crazy.

It's the chorus. That's what gets them. Every time. That was wildlife filmmaker Bertie Gregory, singing to a pod of Baluga whales in Canada. It was an early career highlight for Bertie, who's fast become one of the rising stars of wildlife filmmaking after winning major awards as a teenager and going to work with National Geographic the day after graduation. Gregory is now fronting his own wildlife documentaries.

And for his work on one of those shows, Secrets of the Penguins, Gregory was named one of Rolex's National Geographic Explorers of the Year for 2025. And for Earth Day, he joined the Times science writer Tom Whipple on the podcast Planet Hope to talk about some of his adventures. Planet Hope is brought to you in partnership with Rolex and its perpetual. Planet Initiative. And Tom can talk to us now. Hello, Tom.

Hello, hello. Now, look, we need to know more, with the greatest respect to you. We need to know more about Bertie because he just sounds remarkable. Well, look, he's got an enviable job and chatting to him, I definitely thought that maybe I'd gone into the wrong profession.

He started his career as working with National Geographic, filming leopards and elephants and things like that. And he's, you know, he's a lad from Reading, so it's not like he grew up in the African savannah. But he's into animals and into photography and has managed to do what I suspect many, many people want to do, which is combined the two. There seems to be a perpetual search for the next David Attenborough.

Does that, do you think, weigh a bit heavily with Bertie? Does he want to be his own species? as well. Well, I think there's one of the things about David Ashtonbury, who is obviously, you know, national treasure trademark, you mustn't say anything bad. It's an absolutely wonderful populariser of nature and has done absolutely incredible documentaries. But one of the things is, as he himself would say, is there are so many people behind that. In particular, there are the people who have to sit there for weeks at a time trying to get those spectacular three, four, five minute

images of animals doing incredible things, which David then comes and rates over. And one of the things that I have certainly appreciated more with the more recent David Adams documentaries has been those 10-minute segments at the end where we get to fight, we just go, we peel back the curtain and we get to go behind the scenes

Are we getting to see exactly how they got these shots? And you get a sense of the patient, the consistent and the sheer amount of effort that's gone into getting these. So I don't think Bertie would, maybe he does. I mean, who wouldn't want to be the next David Attenborough, but I don't think Bertie has gone into it trying to do that. He's gone into it trying to do this very different but complementary thing, which is be part of that team who really get to sit there and understand the animals and have these amazing experience. Well, he's had so many incredible experiences. Which ones have really stuck with you, Tom? Well, chatting to him, I mean, he's got all of these, you know, whenever you work with big charismatic animals, they do big charismatic things. He talks about an early situation where an elephant turned up and

pushed its way into their car where his trunk and started getting at their food. And in fact, to the guy he was with. There's this amazing exchange where he's trying to, he's with Kumar, who's one of the local guides. And he says, I said to Kumar, just give it to him, give him the food. Give it to him, otherwise we're going to die. And Kumar turned around, said, but sir,

we haven't had our breakfast yet. And he was like, I think we should give the elephant the food. But the one that actually, I remember watching this in the documentary at the time, and watching the 10 months. and it's behind the scene thing. But he went in search of fin whales, which are, they don't get as much publicity as blue whales

because they're cursed with being the second biggest animal on earth. But, you know, they're still quite a big animal. And he was sent out there with a team because there have been these rumours of a mass gathering of fin whales. And these are whales that really hit hard by whales. And this is an example of one of these things where they're doing photography, they're doing filming, they're trying to do something for the viewers back home, but they're also doing proper science. They're trying to find out new stuff that we're not sure about.

And they spent weeks there off the coast of Antarctica looking for this supposed gathering of Finn Wales. And they were running out of food, they're running out of fuel, they were on a, little sailboat and every morning he described how they got up and looked to the horizon to see if they could see where the fin whales were and finally was just days to go he got up as usual and the entire frame of his binoculars were just filled with this mist and it was a mist these jets of water from the whales and they went over and there were hundreds of these whales it was the largest gathering of great whales ever filmed and obviously it was was absolutely spectacular footage because alongside this where they were, there were

albatross, there were seals or penguins, there was this mist, it was this incredible spectacular of wildlife. But they were there, this is a good news story. We get loads of bad news story. This is a good news story because they were hunted into low, low numbers. And then humans came to get them, but actually we want to save whales. And the consequence decades on were what he was seeing there in the Southern Ocean. We can feel a bit powerless as individuals, can't we, Tom, against our ever-changing world. And I know that Bertie talks a lot about the things that we can do as individuals. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Well, one of the ones that I feel quite strongly about as well. I mean, in general, I should say, I am a bit of a skeptic that we can do much as individuals, you know, we can and we should recycle and all these things, but there has to be big technological changes and big systemic changes and all sorts of things so that making the right decision is the easy, cheap and default course. But there are things he pointed to, and one of those, which I think is really important and really easy, and is happening, is planting wildflowers. I don't know if you've noticed this, but we've seen one of these things

where the easiest course of action is wildflowers, because councils have suddenly realized it's cheaper not to mow. But also in gardens, we've realized that you can make this lawn, this weird happenstance of history where we decided the best thing to do with an open space was to create a closely shorn desert monoculture that we call a lawn, is changing. And what happens then is you get all of these other things. You get bees, you get insects, you get bats.

And if you do it right and pick the native ones, it's a very easy thing to do. It's easy because it's easy because often you just have to simply neglect things. And it's easy because at the end of it, you know, it was something wonderful. And if you change your mind from the idea that you should be seeing these perfectly striped squares to seeing something that's messy but got life on, then it can be a really glorious thing. Oh, dear. I'm really, really having issues with my easy grass at the moment, Tom, and you're not helping. Sometimes it does seem, though, that are little individual efforts.

and they are tiny. You know, I am a vigorous recycler. I haul my rubbish out to the big wheelie bin every Wednesday morning. Is it pointless? Because sometimes I do occasionally feel that I'm not having the slightest impact. I mean, here's my opinion. It's not pointless, but it's very far from enough. You know, we should do these things.

But if you're talking about something massive like climate change, well, this has to come from governments and it has to come from clever tech. We can see the successes within things like climate change, things like electric cars. Well, electric cars are doing well because it turns out you can make them cool, desirable, better than petrol cars. And so, of course, people buy them. And my view is we need to bend the arc of history so that we don't have to make hair shirt compromises in our lives. And actually, that's probably the only way we're going to achieve any of these things. Well, let's all bend together, Tom.

Thank you very much indeed. That's Tom Whipple. And you can hear more on the latest episode of Planet Hope, wherever you get your podcast from. Planet Hope is brought to you in partnership with Rolex and its perpetual Planet Initiative. Congratulations. You've staggered somehow to the end of another Offair with Jane and Fee. Thank you. If you'd like to hear us do this live, and we do do it live, every day, Monday to Thursday, 2 till 4 on Times Radio.

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