Chris Terrill

Chris Terrill is best known as an adventurer and documentary maker although he is trained as an anthropologist and geographer. When filming, mostly, in hostile environments or extreme conditions, his method is to immerse deeply with a community in order to see the world through its eyes. Famously he did this with the Royal Marines before deploying to Afghanistan when he went through the full 32 weeks of the hardest military training in the world to become the only civilian ever to win the iconic green beret on merit by passing the grueling commando tests. He was 55 when he did this and so he also became the oldest person ever to pass the tests including military personnel. Since then he deployed seven times to the front line in Afghanistan making a number of acclaimed films for the BBC, ITV, Sky and Chanel Five. He is a Royal Marines Ambassador; a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society; a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Fellow of the Maritime Foundation who recently gave him a life time achievement award for his work on the high seas. He has also recently been awarded an honorary doctorate by Durham University for ‘pioneering work in anthropology and filmmaking’.

A trained anthropologist, professional adventurer and explorer, Chris is one of the country’s leading documentary makers with a string of awards to his name including an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism and a Royal Television Society award for innovation. On the one hand he has a reputation for making revealing films about distinct communities in unusual places but on the other hand he has a reputation as the thinking man’s TV tough guy although he is not a conventional presenter figure - far from it. He lets his pictures do the talking.

An academic with a zest for adventure he has filmed all over the world from war zones to famine zones and from the bottom of oceans to the tops of mountains. He has gone undercover as an animal trader and a woman trader to expose the real bad guys. In addition to his time in front- line warzones with the Royal Marines he has spent three years of his life in warships on the high seas. In addition, he has pitted himself against hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis and firestorms in his search for adventure and, above all, the most compelling human stories about people living in extremis. But Terrill, who always works solo. does not limit himself to the obvious TV adventures and has taken his camera into many places just to seek out stories that seldom see the light of day: He went to prison for 8 months in order to understand how prisoners feel and think; he trained with a premiership football team to understand the mindset of a professional footballer. He has even worked as a front-line firefighter pitting himself against wild forest fires in southern California in order to capture the most authentic footage possible.