A DOCUMENTARY about ants, filmed by staff at the University of Gloucestershire has been nominated for a top award.

For a month, Professor Adam Hart of the University of Gloucestershire and entomologist Dr George McGavin captured every aspect of life in a colony of ants.

They used time-lapse cameras, microscopes and radio tracking technology to bring us a unique programme revealing the working of one of the most complex societies in the natural world.

This programme, Planet Ant: Life Inside the Colony, was broadcast on BBC Four in March 2013 and has now been nominated in the category of Natural History and Science, for a prestigious Royal Television Society Programme Award.

It is competing with the David Attenborough series Africa and the Channel Four documentary How to Win the Grand National.

The awards will be presented by comedian Tim Vine at a ceremony in London on Tuesday, March 18.

Professor Adam Hart said “It is a great honour for a programme I co-presented to be nominated alongside Sir David Attenborough – I am hoping to meet him at the award ceremony”.

Adam Hart is Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire, and also lectures in ecology, evolutionary ecology, statistics, research methods and animal behaviour.

He has presented or contributed to a number of documentaries for the BBC TV and Radio, including On The Trail of the American Honeybee, about migratory beekeeping and Raising Allosaurus, about the prospect of bringing extinct animals back to life.

He most recently featured on Chris Packham’s BBC 2 documentary series Inside the Animal Mind.