Naturalist Steve Backshall chats ahead of Northampton show

It has been a busy past couple of years for Steve Backshall and it is about to get busier.
Steve BackshallSteve Backshall
Steve Backshall

He’s stepped on to the Strictly dance floor, explored mountains, written a book and he goes on tour later this year, visiting Northampton’s Royal & Derngate on Friday, October 21.

It’s a wild journey, illustrated with photos and films from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the tundra to the top of the world’s highest peaks, and from the depths of the rainforest to the bottom of the ocean.

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Steve said: “There will be some video clips and some deleted scenes and there will be a chance for the audience to ask questions and for me to have an interactive relationship with the audience. To begin with, we were experimenting in the early days but they have got better.”

While he might be one of the most authoritative naturalists on television, he suspected his life would go down a different route.

Steve said: “I always wanted to do something with wildlife but I thought I would be writing. Doing it for television came about by accident really.

“I had this idea for a programme and went off for a few weeks to the jungles in Colombia and just shooting it on my own camera. And that was how it started.

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“It is nice to do that even now with some of the shows rather than doing it with several lighting, sound recordists and cameramen all sweating away. I only describe them like that because they’d describe me in the same way.

“But there is a need to make the programmes in a different way.”

He has also had another children’s novel published, Shark Seas, the fourth in the Falcon Chronicle series.

Steve added: “The fourth one is all about sharks which is an animal I am very passionate about.

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“One of the first things I got told when I was writing fiction is to base it on my own experiences and that has served me well.

“You do have to write differently for kids but perhaps not in the way that you would expect.

“I write with a lot more facts in the stuff for children than I ever would in the things for adults.

“But that’s because children absolutely adore facts.

“They are fascinated by some of the finer details.”

And you might expect that with all the terrifying things Steve has done, a spot of dancing wouldn’t scare him.

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He said: “The dancing really didn’t come naturally to me, it took a lot of work.

“I do look back at Strictly with a lot of happy memories and have made so many friends, many of whom I would never have met in the course of my normal career and some of them are coming to my wedding in the summer.”

Tickets for the show can be bought by visiting www.royalandderngate.co.uk or by calling the box office on 01604 624811.