Steve Backshall, 46, sounds enthusiastic even over the scratchy telephone line, from his home in rural England. It is an enthusiasm that has survived death-defying confrontations with Nature, but, more interestingly, a signboard from his childhood advertising that the family sold manure at its farm in Surrey.
Since then, Backshall has been a BAFTA-winning TV presenter, naturalist, adventurer and writer, getting hordes of children, especially in the UK, interested in exploring the world’s last unknown spaces and the creatures that inhabit them. It all began with an abandoned, asthmatic donkey named Barney and that manure heap.
Backshall’s parents worked for an airline and introduced him and his sister to global cultures through walking safaris, setting off in him a desire to connect with fast-fading civilisations. With degrees in English literature, theatre and biology, and black belts in the martial arts, Backshall forayed into writing with Rough Guides to Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He has written books for children, but mostly given legions of people the belief that there are still places in the world that have fallen off the map and hold their own treasures.
“If you think our planet has been explored long ago, think again. I have travelled 101 countries and barely scratched the surface. Everywhere I go, I feel I still haven’t done it all,” says Backshall.
His web page has, among other stunning pictures, one of him stripped bare to the waist, suspended from a sheer rockface. It is good enough to be a pin-up. This poster boy for the wild earned his place in the pantheon of adventurers by walking through the wild island of Irian Jaya, drinking blood with uncontacted tribes, filming remote parts of Colombia for his pilot TV project, summitting blizzard-hidden peaks, completing the Marathon des Sables in the burning Sahara, and surviving a 60-mile overnight run to gain an Israeli Special Forces maroon beret. He cemented his adventure canon by surviving a fall with two broken vertebrae and marrying two-time Olympic rower Helen Glover.
But mostly, he has given legions of people the belief that there are still places in the world that have fallen off the map and hold their own treasures.
A slice of his life now comes to India with Discovery Channel’s Expedition with Steve Backshall , a 10-part series made by True to Nature and commissioned by BBC and UKTV, in association with Freemantle. Filmed over a year, the episodes see Backshall travel to undiscovered pockets of Bhutan, Suriname, Mexico, Oman and Greenland. The programmes encompass both the incredible explorations as well as the extraordinary filming. Helicopters, kayaks, oxygen tanks, rugged outdoor gear and polar bears are as much a part as the expertise of the team that comprises underwater cave explorer Robbie Schmittner, former Royal Marine Aldo Kane, diving camera operator Katy Fraser and archaeologist Guillermo de Anda.
“I maintain a diary and then branch off with the help of people I have kept in touch with to find newer nooks and crannies. The Expedition took a long time to prepare for,” says Backshall on how he finalised his list.
With a multitude of programmes across channels, how does he meet the challenge of staying different? “Every person out there is doing something that has never been done before. There are still places where you will find a river that has not yet been named. The trick is to be keen on the lives of others and translate that for the audience.”
At Yucatan, he mapped submerged pathways as he dived into cenotes — underground caverns measureless to man. In Greenland, he kayaked through a disintegrating ice fjord. All the while, he tries to get his audience interested in the future of our planet. “The more time I am away, the more I value the time spent at home with my wife. In a way, Earth is home.”
Expedition with Steve Backshall is on Discovery and Discovery HD World every Monday at 8 pm.
