From Great whites to Great whales, seals to sardine shoals, Orca to the oddities of the deep: this is a fantastic opportunity for fans of all ages to dive deep into the wonderful world beneath the waves. A must-see for all the family!

Q: Following a sold-out tour in 2022 you are bringing your highly successful ‘Ocean’ live show back to theatres across the UK in 2023 for 23 performances. Are you excited to get back on the road and what should audiences expect.

A: I am so excited to be back touring the country with my live show “Ocean”. I’m bringing the ocean’s aquatic environments and marine creatures to life on stage by using a giant screen featuring lots of amazing footage from my encounters with sharks, whales and dolphins over the years. There will be on-stage science experiments, by using props, stunts and tricks plus some outtakes and bloopers too. Also, some life-size scale ocean giants that we’ll be bringing out on stage, which I think really helps because it’s very, very difficult to get a sense of how big these animals really are. Being able to replicate that on stage is a big part of the show.

Q: Why did you choose the ocean as your subject?

A: First of all, the ocean and the animals that live there are my absolute passion. Secondly, it’s a part of the world that is a mystery to most people. There are so many of the secrets of the seas that people just don’t begin to know anything about. And thirdly, it’s probably the part of our planet that’s at the most at risk right now. The show is very much based around the most iconic animals in our oceans and how they function and what makes them special. But I will also be  talking a bit about the challenges that they face and that the broader environments in the oceans face as well. All of those things together made it seem that this was the perfect topic for a stage show.

Q: Without too many spoilers, what sort of stunts will you be doing?

A: I have a bunch of different ways that I’m going to try and illustrate the most out-there elements of wildlife, what it does, and how it works. That is going to involve an awful lot of stunts and tricks and experiments, many of which are going to go horribly wrong because they always do. I’m almost certainly going to end up covered from head to toe in goo at some point. I’ll be working quite hard to not physically hurt myself on stage, which is very, very possible, or even likely to happen.

Q: What are you hoping to achieve with the stunts?

A: We’ve done quite a lot of this sort of thing on my kids’ television programmes over the years, and I find that it’s a really effective way of illustrating an area of animal biology that perhaps otherwise might just be beyond our imagination. The classic would be that I can say 1000 times over that the biggest blue whale ever was 32 metres long and weighed 200 tonnes, but nobody knows what that means. It’s not until you actually take a jumbo jet and you saw its wings off, and you say, “right, it’s that big, and it weighs that much,” that people get it.

Q: So you want to make this exotic wildlife relatable?

A: Yes. It’s about finding things which are familiar to people and they understand and perhaps they may see in their everyday life that connect to how a jellyfish stings or how the tail of a thresher shark may take down its prey. There is 25 years of experience behind every single one of these tricks. It’s going to be a bit of magic show. It’s going to be a bit of TED Talk. It’s going to have a fair bit of panto thrown in. I’m very much hoping to make people laugh, and then cry and then think, and then think some more and then laugh again because I have just covered myself in elephant faeces. Actually, probably not elephant faeces because we’re underwater, so whale poop!

Q: Can you put into words why the ocean is your very favourite place on the planet?

A: So many of my very best wildlife experiences have been in the ocean. Whether it’s been freediving alongside a female sea lion who is dancing wingtip to fingertip with me underwater, coming in and practically nuzzling my mask as we swim alongside each other and pirouetting underwater like some kind of marine ballerina, through to seeing a tiny flamboyant cuttlefish no bigger than the end of my thumb hunting mysid shrimp on the bottom of the sea before putting on a hypnotic light display that would rival any nightclub in London. And then, having a humpback whale swim alongside you underwater, a big female being chased by 15 males all rocketing along, beating the living daylights out of each other to try and get their girl, or seeing flying fish skimming in front of your boat, or dolphins riding at the bow of your boat as you travel through every sea from Antarctica, to the tropics to the Arctic. The ocean is a place that is full of surprises, full of wonder, always invigorating. And I just want to bring that to life on stage.

Q: Do you have a favourite marine animal?

A: I think the Orca would be my favourite. There is so much about them that we don’t understand, and yet they have an awful lot in common with us. They’re obviously an air breathing mammal that breast feeds its young. But they’re also an animal that that has culture and language and community, that grieves for its dead and fears for, cares for and educates its young. They’re a creature that can be apparently cruel, but also altruistic. There’s so much about them that I find fascinating. And I know that I could study them for a lifetime and I still would not really understand them.

Q: How do we know that they grieve for their young?

A: Because it’s been seen and filmed and recorded. Female Orcas have carried their dead calves around with them for four weeks until eventually it’s not feasible any longer. And those that have had their calves taken from them, particularly by organisations looking to put them into theme parks, have fought to the death to protect their youngsters and prevent them being taken away from them. So it’s not just me anthropomorphizing them. It’s pretty evident that they go through those emotions. Obviously you can also test for hormones such as cortisol. Those demonstrate they are undergoing great stress which likewise shows that they grieve in exactly the same way as we do.

Q: You also love sharks. Can you describe the delight of swimming with them?

A: As much as anything else, it turns our own expectations on their head. “The J Word” – Jaws – has had such an all pervasive effect on the way that people see sharks that so often you get in the water with them and people shout, “oh my god, he’s going to get eaten instantly!” That was probably somewhere in the back of my head as well when I started off. But it’s amazing to turn that expectation around and find that not only are sharks not malicious man-eating monsters that are out to get you, but actually they are completely ambivalent to your presence, they could not care less if you’re there or not. In the right situation at the right time, with the right Shark, you can swim alongside them, as safely as you would swim alongside a dolphin or seal. Each individual shark will show off the way it’s feeling, whether it’s going into predatory mode or getting territorial, you can see that from the way they look in the water. It’s a question of assessing that. The shark is this streamlined, supercharged predator that’s been around for at least 400 million years, which is a masterpiece of evolution. That is quite transfixing and beautiful.

Q: Can you expand on that?

A: The majority of sharks have a genuine. Also, appeal. They have a sleek, almost burnished titanium sense to their skin. And far from having lifeless eyes, they have an incredible amount of evident character and individual personalities. And they’re the absolute top of the tree. To be in their presence is really something quite special. You could not walk over the savannahs of Africa alongside wild lions – you would get eaten in a second. And yet you can swim in the blue in the right conditions alongside a great white shark and they’re not bothered. Why is that? All of these things I find inherently fascinating, and I look forward to a lifetime more of exploration and learning about sharks.

Q: What else do you love about the underwater world?

A: Part of it is down to the fact that it is such an alien environment to us. It is somewhere that we occasionally feel like we’re just not meant to be. The sense that every time you go underwater, it is like you’re entering an alien realm, and that is really deeply fascinating. I’ve met marine biologists who have lived and worked on one reef for pretty much their whole lives and they still see new things every single day. That is inherently fascinating.

Q: There is so much still to be discovered underwater, isn’t there?

A: Yes. I’ve done well over 1000 dives just with sharks, and I’ve done that triple that number of normal dives. And yet, I’ve never been into the world’s biggest environment, which is the deep ocean. I’ve done one deep sea submersible dive down to about 600 metres, which is nothing, it’s not even scratching the surface. That whole vast abyssal plane and the grand ocean trenches beyond that, I almost certainly will never see. I have experienced such an infinitesimally miniscule portion of our world. And I like the fact that there are still vast areas of it that I will never know.

Q: What do you perceive as the major threat to the oceans?

A: Plastic pollution is the one that probably is most heavy in people’s minds, and it is unquestionably a massive problem, particularly for marine wildlife. Overfishing, mass-scale trawling, longlining, and dredging are extraordinarily destructive, too. They are probably the biggest threats of all. And then beyond that is climate change, and the things that come with it: ocean acidification, sea ice melting, and sea levels rising. I will be delving into all of those things in the show, but they are not going to dominate the narrative. I want this to be a show that is all about positivity, that is empowering, that places the tools of change in people’s hands, and gives everyone an idea of things that they themselves can do to make the oceans better.

Q: Do you hope that audiences come away from “Ocean” in a very positive frame of mind?

A: Absolutely. I think that’s critically important, particularly in something like this. I don’t want people leaving depressed – that would be a disaster. I want people to be engaged and filled with emotion. I want them to feel love and passion and excitement, and to be charged to go out and make a difference themselves. The last thing I want to do is sell this as being an environmentalists’ show. This is a show that is embracing the natural world, celebrating our marine environments, and finding ways of bringing them to life.

Q: You have inspired lots of people to follow in your footsteps. Do you find that very rewarding?

A: Absolutely.  Definitely the best part of my job now is that I’m at the stage where I’m an honorary lecturer at Bangor University. I’ll go along there, and there will be four or five undergraduates who come up to me and say, “I am here studying marine biology because I watched your shows when I was a kid and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” That is very gratifying.

Q: Finally, what sort of audience do you hope will come along to “Ocean”?

A: It’s pretty important to address who will come. At shows like this in the past, I have had three-year-olds who are interested in wildlife who’ve been spellbound. Potentially all they’re doing is in enjoying the spectacle and enjoying the beautiful images. And in the same audience, I’ve had PhD marine biologists who are getting as much out of it as the three year olds. I also have a friend who is a professor of biology, and he will be one of the first people to buy a ticket. So when people ask me, “who’s it for? What age is it suitable for?” I say, “if you’ve got kids who are into wildlife, who love sharks, who love whales, who love sea lions, it doesn’t matter how old they are, it’s not important – they’ll still love it So I’m doing everything I can to make sure this show includes as many people as possible. I absolutely say, “if you are an undergraduate in zoology, there’s going to be plenty of stuff in there for you. And if you’re a toddler who likes sharks, then you’re going to love it, too. And you’ll also have the joy of seeing me covered from head to toe in goo!”

Tickets for Steve Backshall’s new show, “Ocean”, are available from www.stevebackshall.com

Read Northern Life’s exclusive interview with Steve below.

Going Wild with Steve Backshall

NORTHERN DATES

OCTOBER