This week’s Earth Day issue has a very special cover featuring the Springwatch star.

By Katelyn Mensah

Published: Monday, 15 April 2024 at 16:30 PM


“Every single one of us can count – but now is the time to stand up and be counted…”

Chris Packham has issued a rallying cry as he graces the cover of this week’s special Earth Day issue of Radio Times magazine.

The Springwatch presenter is one of the country’s biggest champions of the natural world, and in addition to starring on the front of the latest RT, he will be sitting in the editor’s chair for a week too.

Many of the features inside the new issue – out on Tuesday 16th April – are devoted to some of the issues Chris holds dear and wants the public to know more about.

You can get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Chris shooting his Radio Times cover in the video above.

Speaking of the vision behind the picture, Chris said: “I’ve been working over a number of years with a fantastic photographer, Richard Ansett, he and I had been discussing an idea of a pastiche on an ecclesiastical picture with a figure that was sort of lending itself to Saint Francis. But, tongue in cheek.”

They had always been discussing doing a shoot in that way and, as Ansett explains in the video, Radio Times backed the idea and the cover was born!

In the cover, they are playing with the notion that the naturalist is “the face of a lot of people that are working really hard to try and change things in the environment”.

The Earth Day special issue of Radio Times magazine is out on Tuesday 16th April 2024 – subscribe to Radio Times here.

Chris Packham Radio Times cover

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