Temperamental, unpredictable and camera-shy. The stars of People Like Us, ITV’s new wild-life series, which begins on Tuesday at 10.5, have all these traits. Among them, also, are stars with a sting.

The series, filmed and directed by 28-year-old cameraman Norman Langley, will include shots of bumble bees building a home, jackdaws swooping on a herd of deer and swarms of ants at work and play.

But how, I asked Norman, do you film the life of an ant? Or a pair of jackdaws perched perilously 50ft. above the ground in an old priory?

Everything, he assured me, was achieved by a combination of logic, instinct and supreme patience. I would rather put it down to ingenuity and clever improvisation.

The series compares the animal society with the human society, hence the title. The programmes will be looking at various kinds of animal societies — from the insect to the ape — and will show how the individual fits into the remarkable pattern that nature has evolved.

The first programme deals with bumble bees. They will be seen flitting over the ground, house-hunting. Their site might be an old mouse-hole, a tussock of dead grass, a discarded sack, or an old tea-chest in a shed.

“We ran and crawled over fields and streams trying to shoot them,” said Norman. “To do close-ups I had to get within two or three inches with my 63 mm. lens.

“Of course, it takes time. Six months on and off to film the bumble-bee story.”

Part of the bumble-bee story was shot indoors, with the bees in specially constructed hives with glass fronts.

Here, for the first time, Norman encountered his biggest problem of the series. How to get the subject used to the powerful light needed for filming?

“After a while,” he said, “the honeycomb in our beehive used to melt. And the bees were buzzing around frantically trying to do running repairs.

“In the end we tried to cool them off with strategically placed fans.”

Norman and his team had to take several close-ups of clusters of flowers swarming with bees — and it was then that he discovered the sting in his “stars.”

“We were all a bit apprehensive,” he said. “More so after the technical adviser got stung!”

Norman — six years working on programmes like Animal Story and Breakthrough — found the trickiest subject in the six-programme series was the ant.

“They disliked the heat, too,” he said. “We could never get them used to it.” Shooting was divided between an ant-heap in a Surrey wood, and an artificial nest of plaster, sandwiched between glass.

In the programme dealing with the jackdaws the problem facing Norman was how to get up to them in their castle at Ripley, Surrey. In the end, the team built a scaffold and used a massive 600 mm. lens to get close-ups.

The jackdaws also provided one of the most unusual shots in the series. In Richmond Park — a few miles from Ripley as the jackdaw flies — they were filmed swooping down on deer, stealing tufts of hair from their backs to line their nests.

Oddly enough, the deer seemed resigned to losing their winter coats this way.

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A GIANT yellow bulldozer squeals and rumbles its way along a slum street. It snatches at a steel cable girdling a derelict house.

The crumbling roof sags, rotten walls totter and the eyeless sockets of windows are swallowed up in a cloud of brick and plaster dust.

It’s the end of a street. The end of a lifetime. The houses were bad. So was the past.

For nine weeks these yellow giants fascinated director-producer Norman Swallow as he headed a team of 26 technicians following in their destructive wake.

He watched the heart being torn out of the slums at Oldham, Lancs, where 1,000 houses are due for demolition.

His recordings and impressions will be screened as The End of a Street on Wednesday.

The project started on June 1. Swallow went out into the slum streets and picked his “cast” from the people he met. And he talked to hundreds of people in St. Mary’s ward of the town.

You will meet people like Mrs. Ellen Cartwright — Nellie the waitress as they knew her — at the Canteen Inn which will shortly be bulldozed into a heap of rubble and memories.

Nellie wept when the bulldozer tore into her two-up-two-down at No. 27 William Street.

“I saw it go brick by brick … and I cried. All my children were born there,” she said. She vows she’ll return to St. Mary’s ward as soon as the new flats start going up.

The End of a Street is a kaleidoscope of fears and hopes, of crumbled wood and stifled sobs.

Like the man who tells: “I was married there. My father lived there, my mother. My children were born there. It’s like someone you love being hurt.”

A community spirit existed there that can’t be traced on the new estates. There was Alice Buckley. Plump, jolly and homely.

When a pensioner was made homeless across the street, she took him in. “Like a stray dog,” she joked. “And he’ll come with me and my husband whenever we move.”

The lodger is 72-year-old Billy Travis, a bright-eyed little man in muffler and cloth cap, who was known throughout the district as Billy Borndrunk.

“Beer? I thrive on it,” he roared. “And I take my nickname in good part. I’ve had some good friends in these parts.

“But I’ll survive. As long as there’s a pub, a dart-board and a box of dominoes.”

Norman Swallow said: “We found lots of old people who did not want to go but after they had got a new council house they agreed it was like being on holiday for always.”

The End of a Street shows how much the problem is one of age. In a forum of five teenagers, college girl Anne Greaves pointed out: “Some old people are snobbish. And I can understand their point of view when they have no roots in their new surroundings.”

Schoolgirl Christine Cottrill detests her home town: “I don’t want to stay and live in it. It’s a dirty grimy hole. There are too many mill chimneys.”

The youngsters long for coffee bars, dance halls and amusements that cannot be found on new estates. But they are 4-1 in favour of staying in Oldham.

You will also see the “planners” — the men at the town hall who govern the people’s fate.

Of his title, Norman Swallow said: “The word ‘end’ means not only the physical destruction of the houses but the deeper destruction of the society they represent. Friendships are smashed as well as buildings. It is a dramatic moment in their lives.”

The programme, which has taken six months to produce from the original idea to the final editing, considers the wholesale destruction of 1,000 homes and its effect on 4,000 people. Swallow calls it, arguably, the town’s second Revolution.

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