Move over, every polished presenter who ever read a script about badgers: Britain has chosen its new natural-history heartbeat, and he’s a 6-foot-6 Sudanese-Scottish giant who learned to track lynx before he could drive, cries when otters hold hands, and once spent 42 straight nights sleeping in a hide just to film pine martens falling in love.
Last night, BBC One dropped the first trailer for Hamza’s Wild Britain (a six-part landmark series launching spring 2026), and within four hours it became the most-watched BBC trailer in a decade. The final 15 seconds alone have been viewed 28 million times: Hamza, knee-deep in a Highland river at dawn, whispering so gently the microphone barely catches it as a mother otter teaches her pup to swim literally inches from his face. No music. Just his soft Glasgow-Sudanese lilt: “Look… she’s telling him the water will hold him, if he trusts it. Same thing my mum told me when we arrived in Scotland and I couldn’t speak a word of English.”
Hamza arrived in rural Northamptonshire from Sudan at age eight, speaking no English, clutching a bird book his father gave him “because birds don’t care what language you speak.” By twelve he was the weird kid cycling ten miles before school to photograph kingfishers. At sixteen he won Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year with a shot of a fox cub yawning that looked like it was laughing at the universe. University (Bangor, zoology) was just an excuse to live closer to puffins.