Adventurer & Natural History Presenter
A note on Steve's Deadly 60 book...
We're pleased to announce that Steve's Deadly 60 book is now back in stores and available to buy!
About Steve Backshall
Steve has been passionate about the wild world ever since he could crawl, growing up on a smallholding, and counting as his best pals the animals that lived around him – from the asthmatic donkey, to the grass snakes in the manure heap! He lists his first jobs as ‘cleaning up endless dogpoo for the RSPCA’ and making Donner Kebabs in a local greasy spoon.
After Steve left Exeter University with a degree in English and Theatre studies, he went to live in Japan, where he studied martial arts for just over a year, attaining his black belt, (as well as working as an English teacher, a model and an actor in Japanese adverts). When he returned, Steve took on the job of writing for the Rough Guides, on their Indonesia guide. Over several years of travelling round the region, Steve became conversant in the local language, drank blood with uncontacted tribes, near got caught in fatal crossfire in riots in East Timor, came nose to nose with Komodo Dragons, and attempted to walk solo across Irian Jaya (a woeful failure!).
The next move was to come up with an idea for a television series, and head out to Colombia with a video camera to make a pilot for it. Living in the Colombia jungle he wrangled snakes and ended up in a Colombian jail (through no fault of his own!). The resultant video was bought by National Geographic channel International, and Steve was taken on as; ‘Adventurer in Residence’, essentially producing, filming and presenting adventure and natural history programmes. During the next four and half years, Steve circumnavigated the globe time and again, with expeditions into the Sinai desert (near ending in tragedy after he split his head open diving into a shallow rock pool) completing the Israeli paratroopers selection course (60miles overnight run with huge pack), catching anacondas, vipers and cobras, and perhaps the best job ever; “The Ten Great Dives of the World”, for the long-running series ‘Earthpulse’.
In 2003, Steve moved to the BBC’s Natural History Unit, where he took his place on the long running children’s wildlife programme ‘The Really Wild Show’. The following three years was awash with wildlife highlights; sharing a beach with 75,000 nesting olive ridley turtles, having a baby mountain gorilla take him by the hand, and having a red-eyed tree frog leap into his face on camera. When The Wild Show was decommissioned, Steve took his place on the Natural History Unit’s fledgling expedition team. In ‘Expedition Borneo’, he made the first ascent of a jungle peak and dropped into a vast sinkhole in the Mulu mountains. In ‘Lost Land of the Jaguar’, he made the first ascent of Mount Upuigma in Venezuela, sleeping on the vertical clifface, and finding unknown species of animals on the summit. He also abseiled to the bottom of the Kaiteur Falls in Guyana to the soaked wonderland below. In ‘Lost Land of the Volcano’ Steve was the first outsider to enter the Volcano Mount Bosavi – where the team discovered as many as 40 new species, including the largest rat in the world! Steve also took part in a brutal caving expedition opening up new passage in Mageni Cave in New Britain. Other series included ‘Expedition Alaska’, where he was near swallowed by humpback whales, and was swept into the guts of a glacier, ‘Wilderness St Kilda’, ‘Extreme Britain – Caves’, ‘Springwatch Trackers’, Nature Reports for the One Show, and ‘The Venom Hunter’, where he endured the stings of hundreds of bullet ants (the world’s most painful stinging invertebrate) in an initiation ceremony.
Steve is now fronting the BBC kid’s series ‘Deadly 60’, travelling the world to learn about the most inspiring predators, from boxing mantis shrimp to charging tigers. He’s been squirted with ink by Humboldt squid, flirted with by tarantula, assaulted by giant arapaima fish, stared out by thresher and great hammerhead sharks, mugged by pink river dolphins, and charged by elephants, but still maintains that wild animals pose no threat to people – in fact quite the opposite. Season III begins filming early in 2011. Also in the autumn of 2010, Steve toured the UK with the Live and Deadly Roadshow, a campaign to get kids outdoors and involved with wildlife and conservation.
Outside of television, Steve started studying for his biology degree in 2000 with the Open University, attained his diploma in Natural Sciences, and has completed one of his finals courses (though is struggling to find time to complete the degree!). He has published several books, ‘Venom’, ‘Deadly 60’, and ‘The Wildlife Adventurer’s Guide’, and has more coming, including 'Looking For Adventure' due out in Orion publishers spring 2011. He has completed many endurance events; finished in the top third of the field in the Marathon Des Sables, the top ten of UK’s Tough Guy, 5th in the Welsh 1000m peaks marathon, and completed the Devizes to Westminster kayak race. Steve’s outdoor sports CV includes having climbed the sixth highest mountain in the world (Cho Oyu 8201m), and many other ascents around the globe, as well as being passionate about rock and ice climbing, all disciplines of kayaking and cycling. He lives in Marlow in Buckinghamshire.