Suffering For The Arts

Image © Gregor Younger

Wildlife programmes show us some fantastic scenes that only a few of us would ever be lucky enough to see in real life. The desert scenes of stampeding wildebeest, the hunt of the big cats, the undersea world – displays of nature can be genuinely breathtaking.

I've been lucky enough to go on Safari once and got close to elephants, giraffes and a lion amongst others. It's a pretty amazing and humbling experience to see such creatures in their natural environment, and is something I seriously recommend if you're fortunate enough to be in such a place.

One of the dafter things I did on my travels was a shark dive. The format was simple – get on a boat, sail to the most shark-infested part of South Africa, slip into a wetsuit, and jump into the water. In a cage of course.

You'd expect cages in these scenarios to be huge, overbearing pieces of machined steel, build to cope under the most extreme physical conditions. Bombproof. However, the cage I was due to jump into looked like it was made out of a combination of chicken wire and elastic bands left on the street by a postman.

Seeing as a Great White Shark can bite through bone like scissors through paper, my confidence was slightly on edge as I jumped off the boat into my tinfoil-thin shield. Coming face to face with 8 sharks in this situation left me feeling as protected as a wrapped Quality Street dangling in a Weightwatchers convention.

Luckily I survived the experience unscathed, and it was amazing. However, this was something I did for fun – some people put themselves in these situations for a living.

Steve Irwin is the most obvious example, who sadly met an untimely demise at the end of a stingray barb. When you consider his day job consisted of winding up snakes and pissing off crocodiles for fun, he's got to rank as pretty unlucky to be only the third recorded stingray death in Australian waters.

My favourite nature nutter isn't the loveable Aussie with a deathwish fetish though, it's our very own Sir David Attenborough. The voice of British natural history programming for more than 50 years, he's a national treasure.

Watching Parkinson's last ever show this evening (don't ask – the snooker finished early) I was surprised to see a feature on one of Sir Dave's more adventurous exploits. It involved a spitting cobra, protection in the form of a plastic visor, and generally annoying the f*ck out the snake.

After gleefully teasing a reptile with the spitting range of Roy Hattersley and poison that can permanently blind a man in seconds, the cobra took the bait and unleashed its venom over him. Unfazed, with the snake still there, Dave takes his visor off to show the camera the poison-covered plastic. Did I mention the snake was still there?

What a nutter – but I love him for it. Such eagerness to show the viewer the end product of his actions in the face of danger deserves nothing but respect, and demonstrates a clear willingness to suffer for his art – to inform, and as a result entertain.

Get a few more presenters prepared to maim themselves horrifically for the sake of entertainment and I might even start watching TV again.