Wildlife film-making, TV icons and dance revolutions: Britain’s cultural pulse

The past week has offered a quiet but revealing snapshot of Britain’s cultural and environmental currents—one where global narratives collide with distinctly local voices, and where long-standing institutions grapple with questions of representation, legacy, and reinvention.

The quiet revolution in wildlife film-making

For decades, the African continent’s wildlife has been framed through the lens of Western documentarians, their narratives often shaped by outsiders’ perspectives. But a new generation of film-makers is challenging that dynamic. Pragna Parsotam-Kok and Noel Kok, South African explorers and founders of the Nature Environment and Wildlife Conservation Trust (NEWF), have spent nearly a decade building a network of African storytellers—one that now includes over 200 film-makers across the continent.

Their work, highlighted in a recent Guardian report, is less about spectacle than about shifting the power of representation. "When we started, there were almost no African wildlife documentary makers," Parsotam-Kok said. "We realised that if we wanted to tell our own stories, we had to create the infrastructure ourselves." That meant not just training film-makers but also securing funding, equipment, and distribution channels—resources that have historically been controlled by Western production companies.

The implications extend beyond the screen. Wildlife documentaries shape global conservation priorities, tourism economies, and even climate policy. If African voices are systematically excluded from those narratives, the stories told—and the solutions proposed—risk being incomplete. NEWF’s model, which combines film-making with conservation advocacy, suggests a way forward: one where cultural production and environmental action are inseparable.

Dermot Murnaghan and the weight of a television legacy

The death of Dermot Murnaghan at 68 has prompted an outpouring of tributes, not just for the man but for the era of British broadcasting he represented. Murnaghan, who spent decades anchoring news programmes for the BBC, ITV, and Sky News, was a rare constant in an industry defined by flux. His career spanned the transition from analogue to digital, from the dominance of terrestrial channels to the fragmentation of streaming—yet he remained a familiar, reassuring presence.

His passing arrives at a moment when British television is undergoing another seismic shift. The recent merger of Sky and ITV, the rise of on-demand platforms, and the decline of linear schedules have all raised questions about what public service broadcasting means in the 21st century. Murnaghan’s work, particularly his role in Sky News’s coverage of major events, embodied a particular ideal: that news could be both authoritative and accessible, serious without being solemn.

But his legacy also highlights the industry’s blind spots. While he was celebrated for his professionalism, the broader context of his career—one marked by the slow erosion of traditional newsrooms, the rise of partisan media, and the precarity of freelance journalism—reminds us that the institutions he served are no longer what they once were. His death, then, is not just a personal loss but a symbolic moment: a marker of the end of an era in British television.

When dance rewrites the rules of performance

At Tate Modern, a performance of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A has offered a different kind of cultural reckoning. First choreographed in 1966, the piece is a landmark of postmodern dance—a rejection of the virtuosity and spectacle that had defined the art form. Instead, Rainer’s work is deliberately unadorned: no music, no dramatic arcs, just three dancers moving through a sequence of gestures that feel almost mundane.

What makes the current revival striking is its setting. Performed in the Turbine Hall, a space usually reserved for large-scale installations, Trio A was watched not by a traditional dance audience but by tourists, children, and passers-by. Some lingered; others barely glanced. The piece, in its quiet way, became a provocation: What counts as dance? Who gets to decide? And why does it matter?

Rainer’s work has always been about democratising movement. By stripping away the conventions of performance, she invites the audience to engage on their own terms. In 2026, as debates about cultural access and elitism continue to roil institutions, Trio A feels newly relevant. It asks us to consider what we value in art—and whether we’re willing to meet it halfway.

The stories we tell—and who gets to tell them

These three threads—wildlife film-making, television journalism, and contemporary dance—might seem disparate, but they share a common theme: the question of who shapes cultural narratives, and whose voices are heard. In each case, the status quo is being challenged, whether by African film-makers demanding ownership of their stories, by the shifting sands of British media, or by artists like Rainer, who refuse to play by the old rules.

What’s striking is how these shifts are playing out in public spaces: on screens, in galleries, and in the pages of newspapers. They are not just artistic or environmental concerns but deeply political ones. Who gets to tell the story of a continent? Who defines what counts as news? What does it mean to perform—or to watch—when the boundaries between artist and audience are blurred?

The answers are still unfolding. But one thing is clear: Britain’s cultural landscape is no longer a monologue. It’s a conversation—and the voices joining it are growing louder.