Background and career
Stephen James Backshall (born 21 April 1973) is an English naturalist, explorer, presenter and writer, best known for BBC TV's Deadly... franchise. His other BBC work includes being part of the expedition teams in Lost Land of the Tiger, Lost Land of the Volcano, Deadly Dinosaurs and Lost Land of the Jaguar, as well as Expedition with Steve Backshall for the TV channel Dave. He has worked for the National Geographic Channel and the Discovery Channel. He has published a series of four novels for children called The Falcon Chronicles, three adult non-fiction works and numerous other children's non-fiction books.
Backshall's parents worked for British Airways, and he was brought up in a smallholding in Bagshot surrounded by rescue animals. Backshall attended Collingwood College in Camberley and Brooklands College, Surrey, in the sixth form. He backpacked solo around Asia, India and Africa. After this, he studied English and theatre studies at the University of Exeter. In 2020, he received his MSc degree in bioscience from Canterbury Christ Church University.
In 1997, Backshall attempted to walk solo across the western half of New Guinea, then known as Irian Jaya; he was in the rainforest for three months, but was ultimately unsuccessful. He then had an idea for a series, bought a video camera, and went to the jungles of Colombia, where he made a pilot which he sold to the National Geographic Channel, which employed him in 1998 as its "Adventurer in Residence" and he spent five years as a producer and presenter. For National Geographic International, Backshall presented the expedition series Game for It and the environmental series EarthPulse. On A Walk in The Desert, he walked across Israel's Negev Desert. For Bootcamp, he completed the Israeli special forces selection course, running 60 miles overnight to gain their red beret. Cracking the Canyon was nominated for Best Adventure Film at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
In 2003, he moved to BBC's The Really Wild Show. In his first series, he travelled up Australia's east coast from Tasmania to Cape Tribulation. In the next series, he travelled around Central America, the Galapagos Islands, and then Southern Africa for the final series in 2006. He competed with fellow naturalist Nick Baker in a series of wildlife challenges. After four years, The Really Wild Show was axed so he joined the BBC Natural History Unit's expedition team. In Expedition Borneo, the team went in search of new species. With other cavers, he made the first exploration of the passages below the mighty "Solo" sinkhole in the Mulu mountains of Borneo, and also made the first ascent of the north side of Mount Kuli. He co-presented Springwatch Trackers with Kirsten O'Brien, which was broadcast live from the Springwatch farm in Devon between 28 May and 15 June 2007. Teams of boys and girls were set a series of tracker challenges. In 2008, his Deadly 60 was commissioned, followed by the Live n Deadly offshoot, the aim of which was to inspire children to get outside and interested in wildlife and adventure; his live wildlife question and answer appearances attracted up to 14,000 people per event. In the "Deadly" programmes he searched for predators that were "Not just deadly to me, but deadly in their own world". He dived outside of the cage with great white, bull, great hammerhead, mako and tiger sharks, caught king cobras, black mambas and lanceheads, had a redback spider crawl across his hand and was bitten on the leg by a caiman while searching for anaconda in an Argentine swamp. The programmes were transmitted on Nat Geo Wild, Animal Planet and BBC to 157 countries worldwide. The fourth season of the series, Deadly Pole to Pole was filmed in 2013–2014 from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica, journeying south through the Americas. The scenarios included being hunted by a polar bear while kayaking in Svalbard, filming feeding sharks and eagles (using time-slice photography), exploring flooded caves and the insides of a glacier, and catching dozens of species of snake and crocodile. He was bitten by a shark but was saved by a chain-mail shark suit. The finale was diving underneath Antarctic icebergs alongside predatory leopard seal.
In Lost Land of the Jaguar, he led the first expedition successfully to climb Mount Upuigma. On the summit, they discovered an endemic species of frog and mouse, and also footprints of an unidentified mammal. Lead climber John Arran named the route "Spiders in the Mist" and gave it a British grade of E7. He filmed Ultimate Caving with Kate Humble, and Secret Wilderness Japan, and also presented nature reports for The One Show. In Lost Land of the Volcano, he led the first western expedition into the crater of the extinct volcano Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea, where they discovered, among other things, one of the largest species of rats known anywhere in the world, provisionally called the Bosavi woolly rat while its scientific name is determined. They also uncovered miles of undiscovered passages in the Mageni cave system in New Britain. In Lost Land of the Tiger, the expedition team travelled to Bhutan and filmed, via remote cameras, the Bengal tigers above the tree-line in the Himalayas, categorically higher than had ever been filmed before. Their presence at these altitudes has been previously reported from reports from India, Nepal and Bhutan. In Supergiants, he sought to explain why species grow very large. It included diving with Nile crocodiles in Botswana, sperm whales in the Caribbean, and avoiding 2-ton elephant seals in California. In 2013, he voiced Nature's Microworlds on BBC Four. He was a contestant on the twelfth series of Strictly Come Dancing from September 2014 on BBC One. He was partnered with former champion Ola Jordan. The couple left the series in week nine after dancing a jive to "Little Bitty Pretty One" by Frankie Lymon. In August 2015, alongside Matt Baker and Liz Bonnin, Backshall co-presented Big Blue Live, a series of three programmes for BBC One, featuring marine life in Monterey Bay, California. The series won a BAFTA for best live series. In 2016, the BBC aired a series called Steve Backshall's Extreme Mountain Challenge, in which the explorer attempted another first ascent by climbing one of Venezuela's remote and forbidding tepuis – sheer-sided flat-top mountains. In episode one, Backshall and his team tackle Amaurai Tepui in south Venezuela's Canaima National Park. The expedition nearly ended in tragedy when a storm hit the mountain, and rockfall nearly hit his climbing partner, Aldo Kane. In 2017, the BBC premiered another two-part documentary following Backshall's expedition to New Guinea called Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall. The team of whitewater kayakers attempted to make the first ever descent of the 500 mile long Baliem River in Papua, an expedition Backshall had been planning since 1997. Over the course of six weeks, they battled against some of the hardest whitewater on earth, capsizes, illness and local politics. Eventually, they made it from source to sea, although were open that they had not kayaked the entire length of the journey. A two-part series Japan's Northern Wilderness was presented by Backshall and his wife Helen Glover. A three-part series, Wild Alaska Live, co-presented by Liz Bonnin and Matt Baker, aired in July 2017. In January 2018, Backshall participated in And They're Off! in aid of Sport Relief. Later in the year, he appeared in the first five episodes of Springwatch for 2018 and also presented an hour-long documentary, Steve Backshall vs The Monster Mountain on CBBC. In summer 2018, he presented a ten-part series titled Deadly Dinosaurs, also for CBBC. In March 2019, Backshall, alongside Liz Bonnin and Chris Packham, presented a four-part series, Blue Planet Live, on BBC One. Backshall was seen diving live with great hammerhead sharks, tiger sharks, bull sharks and reef sharks from the shark sanctuary of Bimini. In 2018–2019, Backshall launched the project Expedition, which was televised by BBC Two, UKTV, SBS, PBS and Discovery Asia. This involved ten expeditions to parts of the globe that had never been explored before. The team uncovered many miles of sunken cave passages in the cenotes of the Yucatan. They made the first descents of rivers in Suriname and discovered a waterfall that had no record of ever having been seen before. At more than 100 m high, it was the second highest in the nation. In Bhutan, on the first descent of the Chamkhar Chhu river, Backshall was caught in a rapid for five minutes and nearly drowned. His life was saved by rescue kayaker Sal Montgomery. They also made an ascent of Jebel Samnhan in Oman, and the first exploration of a desert canyon with a local explorer.
In Venom Hunter, he travelled South America aiming to find out as much as possible about venom, including taking part in the bullet ant ritual where he was stung hundreds of times by the world's most painful stinging insect. In Swimming with Monsters, he swam with large animals, including anaconda, hippopotamus, Humboldt squid, and great white sharks without the safety of a cage.
