Born London

Lives Central London

Life and career Peter Scoones is one of the few British divers whose name is recognized all over the world. As the UK's foremost underwater cameraman, he has pushed the boundaries of documentary making, consistently filming sequences that have captured the public imagination. Brought up in London, his father was the company secretary of the tea importer Hornimans. An early interest in the sea led Scoones to study naval architecture, but he didn't get a chance to dive until he went to Singapore as a staff photographer with the Royal Air Force. His training instilled a technical knowledge, which underpinned his artistic instincts, and he was inspired to build a housing for his 8mm Bolex camera. A few years later, when he was posted to Aden, he used the same system to make his first major film, Breathless Moments, which won a gold medal at the First Brighton Film Festival.

His big break in natural history television came when David Attenborough hired him to film the prehistoric coelacanth fish in deep water off the Comoros Islands. His specially made low-light camera was lost during filming, but Scoones trip was salvaged when fishermen brought up a live coelacanth, giving him the opportunity to film it as it was released into the sea. Since then, he has established himself as an exceptional talent in the competitive world of natural-history film-making. Using a digital Betacam in his own housing, he works alongside his partner of 18 years, the underwater photographer, Georgette Douwma. His work for the BBC's Natural History Unit encompasses landmark productions including Reefwatch (1988), Seatrek(1990), Life in the Freezer (1993), and the classic Great White Shark (1995), which ranks alongside Blue Water, White Death (1971) in the pantheon of shark documentaries.

Most recently, he has been busy filming for the BBC's major new series, Blue Planet, which is due to be aired this month. He has two children, Fiona and Robin, from a previous marriage.

Passions Visual media.

What prompted you to take up diving?
It was Hans Hass. I didn't meet him until much later, but is television programmes inspired me as a child. I knew I wanted to do something similar, but it wasn't until I got to Singapore with the RAF that I managed to get under the water. While we were there, colleagues in the Navy unofficially taught us to dive using oxygen rebreathers.

Where did you train and when?
I and some FAF colleagues formed a BSAC branch in Singapore and I trained with them.

What are your qualifications?
I progressed from snorkelling to BSAC second-class diver. Training is a way of life for a lot of people, but I wasn't so bothered. Singapore had a typical BSAC regime of the time, in that it was generally held that experience was more important than doing lots of courses. Nowadays it seems to be tests and more tests. What you get in the end are divers with all sorts of qualifications, but not much actual diving experience.

How many dives have you done?
I've got no idea whatsoever. Let's see - I do three dives a day on average, so that's about 60 dives per month. In a typical year, I'll do about 300 dives, so that means I must have done about 10,500 dives in 35 years of diving.

What is your best diving experience?
That would be my first-ever dive, in Singapore. The visibility was terrible, but I saw some batfish, gorgonian coral and even a few reef sharks. Sharks, for heaven's sake! It was an astonishing experience, because I had presumed that you had to be some sort of superman to indulge in the same activities as Hans Hass, yet there I was.

Seeing fish and coral in the water for myself as amazing, but these days such experiences are poured over people like a shower.

What is your worst diving experience?
I was doing a job once for a company that lays cables, which involved filming a plough-like machine that was supposed to dig an underwater trench in Lyme Bay, Dorset. The chap in charge insisted that I be tethered on a rope, as that was the way commercial divers operated. Obviously, I would rather have been free, but he persuaded me to be tied to the end of this wretched rope, and the inevitable disaster happened. My rope got caught by a submersible, which dragged me up to and nearly underneath the plough! Well, someone cut me free in the nick of time, but it was a near miss, so I resolved never to be tied to a line again. Ropes and lines are all well for commercial divers, but I'm a cameraman, and I've got to be free to get the shots. I prefer to be in charge of my own destiny.

Where have you dived?
It may be more practical to discuss, where I haven't dived. Funnily enough, I've been all around the rim of the Pacific, places such as Papua New Guinea, California, Cocos Island, Australia and so on. However, I've never been to the central Pacific. It's a big blue gap in my diving career. More and more, I find myself diving alongside tourists. They are generally a benign presence, but they can scare the big animals away. When the gulf War broke out I went to the Red Sea on the Lady jenny and I and the people with me were the only divers there. I did a dive at Ras Mohammed and there were a lot of grey reef and silky sharks near the reef - it was just like the old days. I believe that the sharks are still there, but they choose to keep their distance from masses of divers.

Who is your regular buddy?
Goergette Douwma, my partner. Apart from keeping me happy, she helps to reassure those operators who won't let you in the water unless you have a buddy. My feeling is that modern training has missed a point: no matter whether you have a buddy or not, you are always effectively diving on your own and you have to be self-reliant. We use underwater hooters to communicate and we've worked out our own code. We spend long periods out of sight of each other, but my directional hearing is pretty good underwater, so I can usually follow the sound of the hooter until I find Georgie.

Why do you dive?
My target now is exactly the same as it was when I first started. I want to share these sights with other people, and filming for television archieves that objective. It's very fulfilling to contribute to the making of a documentary and hugely satisfying to see the finished article when it is broadcast, even if the editors sometimes do strange things with my footage!

Where do you want to dive next?
Now that the filming for Blue Planet is over, I will have more time for my own projects. I'm in the process of making my own film and will be revisiting some of my favourite locations, such as the Red Sea, the Maldives and Indonesia. The next project that I will be involved with will be a trip to the Egyptian Red Sea. I've invited some people to come along and share the liveboard - it's always nice to have some extra eyes in the water, and I can use that opportunity to bounce a few ideas around the boat.

What equipment do you own?
Generally, whatever's in the shop whenever I decide to buy something. I use a Scubapro first stage because its light and cuts down on luggage weight, and an Oceanic second stage, which is very small and doesn't get in the way. I tend to buy wetsuits on the run, when the previous one finally falls apart. At the moment, I use a Picasso single-skin wetsuit for cool water. They are of a type used frequently by spear fishermen. I'm not against spear fishing as such, but it's certainly true that fish tend to be very wary on a reef where one has been recently speared by someone using scuba. The fish associate divers with the sound of a mortally wounded fish.

What music would you put on a liveboard compilation tape?
I usually take some Wagner, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and some New Orleans jazz. Tchaikovsky is my favourite. My first underwater film used his Nutcracker Suite as the soundtrack.

Have you a dive tip that has helped you?
For underwater photographers? Keep it as a hobby. It's getting more and more difficult to eke a living out of this, because there are so many people trying to do it now. And to those who still want to get involved, my advice is not just to be labelled as an underwater photographer. There are some interesting stills photographers out there, but a lot of the work is very similar because it's the same subjects again and again. I recently saw some impressive photographs of ballet dancers taken underwater, using a style some of us tried in the early days - a lot of underwater photography is just reinventing the wheel, but it's a welcome break from macro shots of pawns.

What is the most interesting underwater animal?
The next one! Everything needs to be done again. I've filmed all my main targets, but I'm always looking for some more interesting action. If I find a commonplace creature that is showing some sign of behaviour, then that's my favourite creature. When I was filming mantis shrimp off Papua New Guinea, that was my favourite animal; when I was filming giant cuttlefish off Australia, that was my favourite animal, as long as it was performing. Essentially, I'm after sex and violence, because that's what animals do.

Which figure, living or dead, would you like to take diving, and why?
Everyone who has never been for a dive, really. My purpose is to take people into my world who would otherwise not go there. It's a very personal world, a very intimate world and one that needs to be shared. My work is not aimed so much at divers, but at the general public.