Douglas Botting

Douglas Scott Botting (22 February 1934 – 6 February 2018) was an English explorer, author, biographer and TV presenter and producer. He wrote biographies of naturalists Gavin Maxwell and Gerald Durrell (the former also being a personal friend). He was the inspiration behind and writer of the 1972 BBC comedy show The Black Safari, a role-reversal comedy show with Africans touring England. He also featured in much other BBC programming, including Under London Expedition exploring the London sewerage system, as part of the BBC2 nature series The World About Us. He wrote numerous Second World War and early aviation books for Time Life Books. Botting took part, with Anthony Smith, in the first balloon flight over Africa.

Botting was born in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey; he lived in and went to school in Worcester Park. Having witnessed the London Blitz first-hand, he went on to make documentaries and write historical records of the Second World War and aviation. Botting got an early flavour of travel when he served as an infantry subaltern for the King's African Rifles in Kenya, as part of his National Service. He went on to study English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, during which time he undertook a pioneering exploration of the little-known island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean. His first book, Island of the Dragon's Blood, is an account of this trip.

During Oxford and post-Oxford years, he volunteered and worked in a variety of positions, including as a paramilitary ambulance unit member during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, as a private tutor to the Crown Prince of Nepal, as a worker in a leper colony in Biafra, and as a trainer for ex-head-hunter tribes undergoing re-training in the Venezuelan rain forest.

However, he chose documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism as his career. As a BBC Special Correspondent to the former USSR, he reported news events such as the first cosmonauts' homecoming and Fidel Castro's state visit, and was the first person from west of the Iron Curtain since the Russian Revolution of 1917 to travel voluntarily among the nomadic reindeer tribes of Arctic Siberia and the Gulag. Botting went on to make documentary films for organisations including National Geographic, the BBC, Time Life and Royal Geographical Society.

Among his other occupations was that of writing: Botting wrote a series of Time Life Books on the Second World War, early aviation and maritime vessels. His foray into investigative journalism included several other Second World War books, including the best-selling Nazi Gold: The Story of the World's Greatest Robbery - And Its Aftermath. His back-to-back biographies of Gavin Maxwell and Gerald Durrell also earned him praise.

He was the father of newsreader Anna Botting. His former wife is the broadcaster and company director Louise Botting.

Botting was an accomplished explorer in his own right. He undertook a systematic explorations of Socotra while at university, and was part of the world's first balloon journey over Africa, the first British balloon journey across the High Alps, and the first vessel ever to voyage by inland waterways from the Amazon to the Caribbean via the unexplored rain forests of the Casiquiare and Orinoco.