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.”
