Farewell Simon King, star of Autumnwatch

BBC2's Autumnwatch returns next week, but one of its star presenters, Simon King, will not . How will the show fare without him? The wildlife cameraman extraordinaire has been a fixture on Springwatch and the show it spawned, Autumnwatch, since 2005. Kate Humble and Chris Packham are the presenters, but King is the soul of the show – he's the one out there getting buffeted by gale-force winds, drenched in buckets of rain, and dreaming up soppy names for rutting deer. I always enjoyed spotting a dipper, but I never cared about them quite so much as I did when King told me about them . You can tell he's impossible to replace because the BBC has lined up a whole host of people to take over from him, including Gordon Buchanan, taking a break from spotting tigers up mountains , and new signing Nick Baker , who you may know from Channel 5 or – more likely – his shows' appearances on Harry Hill's TV Burp. If Baker's signing can bag Autumnwatch a few mentions on primetime ITV1, that can only be a good thing. But King's exit is a blow to the show, which changed its format last year. Instead of being presented "on location" from a wildlife reserve and stripped across a couple of weeks, it is presented from the BBC's Natural History Unit, once a week for eight weeks. If that wasn't to do with budget cuts then it certainly felt like it. Now King – off to pursue "other interests" – has gone as well. Still, I fretted about the loss of Bill Oddie last year, and the show has survived his absence – some might even say it thrived . Not only that, you get to spot song names by Packham's favourite bands . In this case: King's exit – What Difference Does It Make? • Autumnwatch returns to BBC2 on 7 October