Michael Lachmann obituary

The television producer and director Michael Lachmann, who has died aged 54 in a mountaineering accident in the French Alps, helped to turn the former pop musician and particle physics professor Brian Cox into a TV presenter known for bringing science documentaries into a new age. Lachmann also took the pig farmer Jimmy Doherty around the world to explore the pros and cons of GM foods, and made thought-provoking programmes on great scientists and the space race.
His skill in popularising science without dumbing down included placing Cox inside a derelict Rio de Janeiro jail for a sequence in the 2011 BBC Two series Wonders of the Universe. Cox sprayed chemical element symbols on the walls, and Lachmann had the building dramatically blown up. The four-part series attempted to answer the question: 'What are we and where do we come from?' In Stardust, the episode directed by Lachmann, he and Cox travelled not only to Brazil, but also to Kathmandu and Chile, to reveal the origins of humans in distant stars.
Both had previously worked together on Wonders of the Solar System (2010), with Lachmann, as lead director, making two of the five episodes filmed in extreme locations on Earth to explain how the laws of physics carved natural wonders. This breakthrough series for Cox attracted more than 6 million viewers on BBC Two, and Lachmann used CGI techniques to tell the story. It also won two Royal Television Society awards, in the best presenter and science and natural history programme categories.
Cox regarded Lachmann as fun to work with and said his 'visual imagination and ability to tell a story without intellectual compromise were second to none', adding: 'I never quite knew what he would dream up to illustrate an idea: an exploding prison in Rio, a race around Rome in a vintage Fiat 500, a journey of a thousand metres below the waves in a 1960s submersible.'
The pair's collaborations continued through episodes of Wonders of Life, Science Britannica and In Search of Science (all 2013) before they made the single, feature-length documentary Brian Cox: Seven Days on Mars (2022), with Lachmann negotiating access to Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mission control for Mars 2020. They spent a week filming the surface of the red planet through the eyes and instruments of the Perseverance rover as it searched for evidence of long-extinct life.
Lachmann was born in Cambridge, to Sylvia (nee Stephenson), a doctor, and Peter Lachmann, an immunologist who at the time was assistant director of research at the Cambridge University department of pathology. On leaving the Perse school, Cambridge, he gained a degree in natural sciences and zoology from Peterhouse, Cambridge, and a master's in science communication from Imperial College London. He entered television with an independent production company, McDougall Craig, as the researcher on a 1996 programme for Channel 4's science series Equinox, about how social status affects human health.
Moving to John Gau Productions, he was assistant producer on the three-part documentary Plane Crazy (1997), for Channel 4, and the US network PBS, about a resident of California's Silicon Valley who claimed he could build an aeroplane in his garage in 30 days. When progress was painfully slow, Lachmann and the director, Paul Sen, worried about meeting their shooting deadline – then had the idea of turning it into a story of failure.
In 2000, Lachmann joined the BBC to work as assistant producer on Walking With Beasts, the sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs. Screened the following year, it traced the story of life on Earth from the death of the dinosaurs to the dawn of the age of man, using CGI animation and pioneering red-button features. The six-part series won Bafta's interactive/enhancement of linear media award.
Lachmann then became a founding member of the BBCi department, the corporation's first foray into interactive and streaming TV services, working on other projects before producing and directing programmes, including episodes of the science series Horizon (from 2008 to 2018). Jimmy's GM Food Fight, in 2008, brought with it controversy. Lachmann, whose father had been an advocate of genetically modified crops, followed Doherty – an organic farmer – on a quest to Argentina, Pennsylvania and Uganda to assess whether the crops could feed the world or start an environmental disaster. When some anti-GM campaigners complained about bias, the BBC rejected the criticisms, asserting that the programme was 'carefully balanced to take in both sides of the debate' and had concluded that 'any future development of GM should be done with great care'.
Later, Lachmann made the Horizon film Should I Eat Meat? How to Feed the Planet (2014), presented by Michael Mosley, who destroyed some myths in the 'meat-eater versus vegetarian' debate.
His standalone documentaries included Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race (2014), contending that the Soviet Union was the real pioneer during the cold war, and The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice (2015), with Alice Roberts and Neil Oliver telling the story of Queen Boudicca's revolt against the Roman army.
Lachmann was series editor for Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors (2018), which put more myths to bed, this time about these early humans often depicted as 'apemen'. An anthropologist, Ella Al-Shamahi, revealed that 2% of most people's DNA comes from Neanderthals, and motion-capture animation transformed the Lord of the Rings actor Andy Serkis into one. From 2015 to 2020, Lachmann was also series producer on The Sky at Night.
To mark the first anniversary of the death of Stephen Hawking, he wrote and directed the Emmy-nominated Einstein and Hawking: Unlocking the Universe (2019), looking at how the two scientists' theories revolutionised human understanding.
More recently, away from the BBC, Lachmann was the writer and director of Spacetime Capsule (2024), a series for Chinese television that explored China's latest advances in science and space technology.
Lachmann's 2002 marriage to Lisa Suiter ended in divorce. He is survived by their sons, Dexter and Max, and by his mother, brother, Robin, and sister, Helen.
• Michael Alan Lachmann, writer, producer and director, born 20 August 1970; died 8 June 2025

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