Steve Backshall’s new book, Deep Blue: My Ocean Journeys, begins with a waltz beneath the waves off Vancouver Island off the coast of Canada. His dance partner is a giant Pacific octopus. One moment, writes Backshall, her body flows like muslin in the breeze. Next, it becomes as tense as a bodybuilder’s biceps. Back home, at his idyllic eco-house beside the Thames, the naturalist and presenter of the phenomenally popular Deadly 60 television series is wrestling with a rather less appealing apparition: the sewage flowing down the river.
At the start of the summer, Backshall was teaching his three young children to swim in the Thames. “Then we started getting quite bad smells,” he grimaces, as we sit, Backshall barefoot, in gentle summer rain beside this beautiful stretch of water west of London. “Can you hear it?” He listens with an adventurer’s keen ear. “That distant rumble, that’s the water treatment works outflow that should be a dribble thundering into the river. It’s absolutely bonkers. On big brownwater outages it’s quite literally floaters and chunks of toilet paper.”
Backshall recently went upstream with campaigners from River Action, an environmental charity, and tested the river outside the treatment works. They found 10 times the limit of nitrates – “off the scale”. Backshall is best known for his cheery enthusiasm for dangerous wildlife on our TV screens, but he is unexpectedly forthright about the state of British rivers. “We’re starting to hear of water companies brazenly taking vast profits over the few decades since privatisation – paying huge amounts of money to people at the top of the pile and leaving us with rivers full of shit. Thames Water were handed a series of fines amounting to £20.3m a few year’s back for outages here. Their reaction seemed to be that the fine was cheaper than what it would cost to repair the infrastructure. It just seems for so many big corporations that they are above the law.”
And so swimming with the roach and perch of the Thames – and teaching river swimming to five-year-old Logan and three-year-old twins Kit and Bo, his children with Olympic rower Helen Glover – is off the Backshall family planner for now. “People have got really sick swimming in the river recently,” he says. “But we still kayak and row as a family.”
Water is the force that has shaped Backshall’s life ever since he was taught to swim at Aldershot military baths. “The stuff that we were subjected to would nowadays be considered abuse,” he says. “You’d be treading water in your pyjamas – I would have been the age my little boy is now – and if you needed to come into the side you were pushed away with a big stick,” he laughs. “But it really worked. My sister was four years old and she swam a mile. It’s almost unbelievable.”
Alongside insisting that swimming must be learned as young as possible, Backshall’s parents gave him the gift of nature and travel. He attended a comprehensive school, but roamed free on his family’s smallholding, developing his love for wildlife and also journeyed around the world, thanks to the perk of free travel. “My parents both worked in the airlines, so we were lucky enough to travel from a very early age – Africa, Asia, South America and the Mediterranean. A lot of those trips were about getting in the sea and being transported into that different world where everything is new and fresh and exciting, and a colour you can barely describe. I would stay in until Mum and Dad, or sunburn, brought me out.”
His parents travelled bravely and on a small budget, “rocking up in villages at 1am without any sense of where we were going to sleep that night”, he remembers. This bequeathed him the resilience to undertake his own adventures, as well as diving qualifications, and ultimately led to him landing the dream job of “adventurer in residence” for the National Geographic channel in 1998. A few dozen death-defying adventures later and Backshall was making programmes for the BBC, where he launched Deadly 60 on CBBC in 2009.
If you’ve never heard of Deadly 60, ask anyone who has been 10 during the past 14 years to describe it. It’s a fast-paced show in which Backshall seeks to understand, via close encounters, the deadliest creatures on the planet. The series began three years after the death of legendary Australian animal wrangler Steve Irwin, who was sometimes criticised for hyping the dangers to humans of wild animals, and invading their space.
Was Backshall conscious he didn’t want to follow Irwin? “I realise that there are certain animals that people have a universal fascination for, and they are generally the ones we perceive as being able to do us harm,” he says. “So let’s use that knowledge, but make sure we never describe them in that way. If we ever describe them in relation to people it will be to confound expectations and talk about the fact that they are nothing like as dangerous as you might think.”
Backshall likes an illuminating statistic, such as you are more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine than a shark, or by taking a selfie, or by being struck by a champagne cork. Nevertheless, he still gets people asking why he shows these animals as a danger to humans. To them he replies: “Please, just watch one episode!”
Deadly 60 has become a phenomenon – its roadshows draw massive crowds – and Backshall has gone way beyond the original 60 animals. Next year he’s off to film marlin in the Pacific, martial eagles hunting bats on migration in Zambia, and two expeditions to the South American rainforest where he will just see what they find. “Making television can be very time-consuming with a lot of wasted time, but with Deadly 60 we turn up with two or three cameras rolling, let them roll, and what happens happens. We never do anything twice,” he says.
He wouldn’t try filming “on the fly” like this in the Arctic: “If you don’t find the polar bear or the narwhal you’re stuffed. But if you go to a rainforest and don’t find the harpy eagle, you know you’ll find the poison dart frog.”
Backshall may appear to be the archetypal TV presenter, dipping into the shallows of this and that, but he has depths, too: an English degree, a gift for languages – acquiring Indonesian, Japanese and Welsh over the years – and a thirst for lifelong learning. He returned to university in his 40s to obtain a science degree and recently undertook breath-training to become a better freediver.
“All the hyperbole is true. You can take almost anyone and double their breath-hold in a day of training. You can get them 20m underwater in a couple of days,” he says. “It’s impossible to talk about it without sounding really woo, but it’s a transcendental experience, one that puts you very in touch with your own body, very aware of where you’re at.”
Best of all, for Backshall, it transforms his encounters with underwater animals. “All the cumbersome kit that comes with scuba-diving and the bubbles you blow as you dive, makes you intimidating to animals. Freediving, you can very much interact with them on their terms.”
He’s poured some of his recent learning into Deep Blue, a beguiling mix of anecdotes from his animal encounters and an accessible scientific explanation of the importance of our seas. They are the source of 97% of the world’s water and yet we know vanishingly little about their depths: 90% of the world’s fish live in the twilight zone from 200m to 1,000m and yet, astonishingly, three-quarters of the world’s water is below this depth. There are still blooms of life beyond the midnight zone. When a dead whale sinks to the bottom, specialised feeders, such as flame-haired zombie worms, devour the skeleton. Some “whale falls” support 45,000 worms per square metre, the highest concentration of life in our oceans.
Backshall is full of wonder for marine life mysteries, but keeps returning to his first love: sharks. He was nine and snorkelling in Malaysia when he saw his first. “In my fever dream, my shark was megalodon-sized and could have eaten me whole without needing to chomp,” he writes. “In reality it was a black-tip reef shark and about the size of your average haddock, less danger to me than a house rabbit.” His “sick fascination” with the danger of sharks hooked him as a child, he says; today he is fascinated by how little we know about them.
“Look at any animal in the British countryside and we’re going to know just about everything about its life. But with the majority of ocean species, even really iconic ones, we almost certainly will not have seen courtship, breeding and giving birth.” So Backshall is excited by the technology helping us to unveil marine life in new detail, such as the brilliantly named “snotbots” – custom-built drones that hover in the air above a surfacing whale and collect the substance exhaled from its lungs. “The use of simple drones has in the last year accelerated to such a degree that we’re seeing behaviour at the surface from whales and dolphins we’ve never seen before,” he says. One recent example came after years of great white sharks mysteriously disappearing when orcas arrived in their waters. Last year, drone footage showed two orcas killing a great white: ramming it from below and then devouring its liver.
For all Backshall’s loyalty to sharks, the marine encounter that most sticks in his mind was with a female orca last year when he swam with a group attacking a humpback whale. “I got in the water and a female circled around me eyeing me up and almost led me away, flipped over on her back, showed me her tummy, came back down, and looked around me. It was utter magic.” Such moments, of which he’s had a dozen in his lifetime, imbue a sense of “kinship”, he thinks. It is humbling to see ourselves as just another animal making its way on this planet.
Backshall may not be afraid of sharks, but he is stalked by job insecurity. When he was adventuring his way around the world for children’s television in his 30s he figured, “No one’s going to want to see me doing the job I do when I’m 40. And then I turned 40 and it was still rumbling on.” And he thought no children (or more pertinently, TV execs) would want him on screen when he was 50 – “And now I’m 50 and still doing it. I’m very much thinking nobody’s going to want to see me doing this job when I’m 60. Sir David’s in his 90s and he’s still rocking on. But knowing how fickle this industry is, it would be very unwise of me to plan on that.”
What about the Sir David Attenborough role? Would he like to present blockbuster “blue chip” natural history series? “I have and I didn’t enjoy them,” he says. “I really enjoy being on expeditions with dirt under my fingernails, doing things on the fly. The whole idea of just shooting one little thing 100 times until it is beyond perfect is not my cup of tea.” Besides, he admits, “I would not be the BBC’s choice in a million years to do blue chip.” Why? “I don’t think Sir David is going to be replaced,” he says. The days of an English-speaking presenter being filmed in a rainforest for a blockbuster natural history series are gone, he thinks. Today, the big natural history series are made without presenters so they can be sold around the world and revoiced for each country.
Backshall hopes that writing more books could be a future career path, but he speaks with such passion about environmental issues that he would make a brilliant politician. Before the pandemic, he joined the Green Party and spent a week shadowing Caroline Lucas in parliament. The experience was disenchanting. “I sadly came to the opinion that so much of the job was red tape and doing things that would never ever lead to any resolution, and I was thinking about doing it because I wanted to make more of a difference, not less. The position I’m in at the moment is one where I have the opportunity to speak to millions of people. There is a certain power that comes with that.”
He is realistic about the destruction of ocean life. There are half the number of fish swimming in our seas today than when he was born. During his lifetime alone we have taken at least 5bn sharks from the oceans, most so that their fins end up in soup. But he finds hope in the young people he meets through his work. “It would be totally wrong for me just to say, ‘Oh leave it to the youngsters, they’ll sort it out,’ but I don’t think that is what’s happening,” he says.
He sees applications to study marine biology soaring. “There is a wave of youngsters who are qualifying now who are going to be the conservationists and activists of the future,” he says. “Fifteen years ago, ‘activist’ wasn’t in the vernacular in the way that it is now. There are young people who are thinking, ‘I’m going to be an activist.’ I’m lucky to work alongside a lot of those young would-be activists who frankly have already achieved more than I will do in my entire career. A lot of them have a remarkable voice and a canny knack for using social media. And I’ve spent my entire life trying to get on to BBC One so I can have my primetime slot” – he laughs self-mockingly – “talking two or three times a year to four million people. There are young people who can do that every week. They have an eloquence and a storytelling ability that I envy and I find very exciting.”
Deep Blue: My Ocean Journeys by Steve Backshall (Witness Books, £22) is out on 21 September. Buy a copy from guardianbookshop.com for £19.36. Backshall’s Ocean tour takes place across the UK this autumn
