Launched as a TV show on the Glorious Twelfth of August 2009, Fieldsports Britain is the world’s most popular weekly TV show about hunting and shooting, with more than 200 million views over its lifetime on YouTube alone (as at 2025), increasing at a million a month. Thanks to the extraordinary reach of YouTube, its viewership exceeds almost every TV show on the BBC and ITV.
Its network, Fieldsports Channel, came about thanks to a chance meeting between David Wright and Charlie Jacoby. Then an ITV news producer, David was making a film about wild boar in the South-East of England. Charlie – then editor of Sporting Rifle magazine – advised David’s production team.
With readership deserting newspapers and magazines in favour of social media in the early 2000s, the two of them saw a future for specialist consumer magazines as ‘magazine’ TV shows on the internet (certainly not on YouTube, they decided – that was for skateboarding cats, not serious documentaries – and that was the first of many mistakes they made).
Happily, the core idea endured, and both Fieldsports Channel and its flagship TV show Fieldsports Britain are among the most recognisable hunting/shooting media in the world, combining groundbreaking TV entertainment with product placement for advertisers and, from 2018, including media campaigning on hunting and shooting sports funded directly by viewers.
While BASC, for example, is the British ‘ministry of shooting sports’, Fieldsports Channel is a ‘BBC’ for hunting and shooting. Fieldsports Channel celebrates its sector and, by reaching far more than hunters and shooters on YouTube and other social media, it aims to change the wider public social licence towards acceptance and understanding of hunting and shooting, and its value as the only self-funded, practical conservation tool, protecting habitats and enhancing nature.
