Presented by Andrew Kay and Phil Bathols in association with Adelaide Festival Centre, the production is directed by Peter Adams.
Steve Backshall walks on stage at Her Majesty's Theatre to a howl of applause. Slightly less 'crikey' than Steve Irwin and a lot less magisterial than David Attenborough, this affable and articulate man is one of the world's best known and loved explorers of the natural world. His special area of interest is the dangerous ones, the Deadly 60.
He later admits that the television show, which has done four seasons, has covered a lot more than just 60 poisonous, venomous, creepy, crawly, toothed and fanged creatures.
He starts by thanking us for coming; it's his first show in Australia, and then points out that this country has most of the world's most poisonous, venomous, etc., creatures in existence.
The format is very simple. He shows clips from his adventures in seven different global environments, including previously unseen videos, and gets the audience to rank the denizens, by acclamation, in order of scariness. The film clips are brief but enlivening and his rapport with the audience is engaging. He ends the show taking questions from the younger members of the audience, and his answers are respectful and clear. He likes kids, they like him. There's a lot of the childlike delight in exploration and learning in him, still.
He's very clear about the effort and research, the time and money, that goes into each segment because, wherever he goes, except in very rare cases, he's got a camera operator, sound, and light crew right behind him.
Why does he do it? Why, even with an intrepid backup crew and available medical help, even with bites from piranha and caiman, does he strap on the oxygen tanks, shove his hands into holes in the ground, and rub noses with killer whales and leopard seals? Because they're there.
He ends the show by quoting the words of the early twentieth-century explorer, George Mallory, who may have been the first mountaineer to the top of Everest. He died on the way down.
"People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself, upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for."
Steve Backshall has managed to live that life and share that joy. The four performances were all booked out, and he should come back soon.
For me the most heartening aspect of the audience wasn't just the number of children, but the number of fathers. They may have explained it to their mates as 'taking the kid to a thing about sharks', but they were there and they loved it too. See the trailer below.
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