
Over £3,000 has been raised for Lake District mountain rescue teams after the launch of a Channel 4 documentary series.
Team members from across Cumbria feature in the new show – Lake District Rescue – which gives viewers an inside look at rescues through bodycam, drone and camera footage.
Episode one is currently available on catch-up on All4 and follows teams as they help a man with a dislocated shoulder in Eskdale.
Richard Warren, former chair of the Lake District Mountain Rescue Association, said the first episode of the new show has also helped boost fundraising efforts.
Mountain rescue are entirely volunteer run and led and the Lake District’s teams need £1 million in donations every year to operate the service.
Richard said: “We’re very pleased with the documentary. A lot of effort has gone into organising it and getting things done and there have been all kinds of challenges to face including the safety of the film crews and the environment up there.
“We’ve also had a good response to it on social media too and we’ve raised around £3,000 through fundraising after the first episode aired.
“But the primary purpose of it was to give recognition to our 400 volunteer men and women, nobody gets paid so it’s nice to to be recognised, whether it’s in books or documentaries.”
All incidents featured in the four episode series are real and were filmed last year, when rescue teams experienced their busiest summer on record, with over 714 call outs recorded.
Alongside real footage of injured people and serious incidents in the fells, the documentary also features real 999 calls from across the Lake District.
Richard added: “We often get approached by people wanting to do documentaries, but they’ve never come to fruition because it is so difficult to get film crews in the right place at the right time.
“But we were approached by Sam Whittaker, who is managing director of Summer Films, the film company who did the documentary, and they said they’d had contact with Channel4 and had plans for how they wanted to do it.
“They provided bodycams and GoPros which team members wore on their chests and had a small team of three of them come out when we were paged for incidents.
“We had team members going up and saying to casualties ‘before we start, just to let you know we’re doing a documentary for Channel 4’ and they would say yes or no and film everything. Casualties were also approached afterwards for written consent.”

Richard added that the team were also able to review all the episodes before they aired to the public.
He said: “We didn’t want it to be sensationalised, we wanted to be seen as the professional organisation we are and we wanted to see the balance between the rescues and the communities we work with and it does have that balance.
“We want people who watch to appreciate that we are all volunteers. A vast majority of people think we are fully paid like Ambulance or Fire and there can be a degree of people thinking will be just in the valley bottom having a cup of tea and waiting for people to call.
“But the reality is a lot of our team members are employed or self-employed, which can mean losing a day of pay if they’re called out or they have to miss work.
“It has been a rewarding project and we are really looking forward to the next three episodes.”
You can watch the second episode of Lake District Rescue on More4 on Sunday April 14 at 9pm.
Richard added that while mountain rescue will always turn out for people who are lost or injured – teams are aiming to lessen the amount of people getting lost or injured through being unprepared.
You can donate to the Lake District mountain rescue’s current fundraiser here.