Parry first appeared on television in 2002 in an episode of BBC1's
Extreme Lives series entitled "Cannibals and Crampons". He planned, filmed, directed and presented the documentary episode with his friend
Mark Anstice. The film was a first-hand account of their successful journey to climb
Puncak Mandala in the Indonesian part of
New Guinea. It is the
second highest mountain of Australasia but is little known and rarely climbed. Parry was chosen in 2002 to lead the
Children's BBC expedition show
Serious Jungle, taking four boys and four girls aged 11 to 15 to
Borneo to work with
orangutans. The show won the 2003
Royal Television Society Award for Best Children's Factual. Also in 2002 Parry appeared as the straight-faced instructor in three episodes of
Danger! 50,000 Volts! opposite
Nick Frost. The following year he made a return to the BBC1's
Extreme Lives series and made a programme with
Debra Searle about a 700 km canoe race down the
Yukon River in Canada entitled "Yukon Quest". The same year he returned to the
Children's BBC to lead a
trek for
Serious Desert taking a group of children to
Namibia's
Skeleton Coast to work with the endangered
black rhino. The show won the
BAFTA Award for Best Children's Factual in 2004. In 2004, Parry started filming the prime time
BBC2 documentary series
Tribe in which he lived with various tribal groups exactly as they do to better understand their culture. The first series of Tribe saw Parry living with indigenous peoples in
Gabon, India,
Indonesia,
Ethiopia,
Mongolia and
Venezuela. Next Parry was chosen to lead an expedition across
Greenland in the guise of
Captain Scott for a period remake of Scott's fateful last trip to the South Pole entitled
Blizzard: Race to the Pole in 2006. The second series of
Tribe was filmed wholly in Ethiopia as a journey between three different tribal groups. The third series was filmed in Brazil,
Polynesia,
Siberia,
Bhutan,
Tanzania and
Malaysia. In 2008, Parry journeyed for seven and a half months through
Peru and Brazil for his series entitled
Amazon where he looked at such issues as
cocaine, oil, logging, slavery, dams, soya, cattle ranching and epidemics. He spent time with government officials, indigenous peoples, illegal loggers, drug manufacturers and cattle ranchers. In 2010, over the course of one bright Arctic summer, Parry immersed himself in the lives of people living in the Far North and in 2011 released a book about his travels. From the
Inuit of
Greenland to
Alaska whalers and gold-diggers, Canadian oil-men, scientists and bands of reindeer herders in the remote valleys of
Siberia, Parry encountered first-hand the threats to culture, landscape and wildlife of the Arctic. ==Film career==