Steve Backshall admits family fears during latest adventures

Steve Backshall never used to think about his loved ones in moments of danger.

The naturalist, adventurer and hugely likeable TV personality has fronted many adrenaline-fuelled series over the years, such as BBC’s Steve Backshall’s Extreme Mountain Challenge, and Down The Mighty River With Steve Backshall.

When things got tough, he would be “grimly focused on the task at hand” and back home wouldn’t enter his mind at all – one of the reasons he believes he was capable of doing the jobs that he has.

But last year, his wife, Olympic gold medal-winning rower Helen Glover, gave birth to their son, Logan.

And that meant that filming his latest show, Expedition With Steve Backshall, for UKTV was totally different.

“For the first time in my whole life, when I got into those sticky situations, my first thought was, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got a baby back home and I cannot die here, because there’s so much that I want to see and want to do,’” confides Surrey-born Backshall, 46.

“And those humanising moments, they definitely make you weaker, and they definitely make it harder.

“This series is 10 expeditions to parts of the planet that people haven’t visited before, attempting real world firsts.

“It can be discovering ancient human artefacts that haven’t been revealed for tens of thousands of years.

“It could be making the first ever white-water descent of a Himalayan river, or journeying into a jungle ravine or desert canyon that hasn’t been explored before.

“And, more than anything, I think it’s trying to prove that real old-fashioned exploration is still possible, even in this day and age.

“The hardest thing was the cumulative effect on me. Usually I do one of these expedition projects a year, maybe one every 18 months; we’ve done 10 in the space of 12 months.

“And I was super well-prepared for the very first one, but by the time we got seven in, eight in, I was exhausted, I was mentally drained, I was horribly missing home, missing my wife and my new baby. And physically as well – physically completely destroyed.”

What was his scariest moment during filming of the series?

“I think descending into a canyon in the desert in Oman, in the middle of summer, when it was pushing 50 degrees, and we had been going all day long,” he reflects.

“We’d already dropped down ropes a fair bit, so climbing back up again was going to be next to impossible, and we all ran out of water.

“We had all gone in carrying as much water as we were physically capable of doing but in that heat you just suck it down, and if we hadn’t come to a pool…

“When you see it on television you’re not going to believe that we drunk the water in this pool. It was just brown sludge, full of insects, full of frogs.

“But we lapped it down like it was the finest Champagne, because by then we were all right on the edge.”

How does the intrepid adventurer overcome such difficult moments?

“The thing that has always done it for us has been that sense of the unexpected; paddling down a white-water river exhausted, feeling like I could not take another stroke, and then you come round the corner and you see a view that is the most beautiful thing you think you’ve ever seen in your life,” says Steve.

“That gives you a shot of adrenaline and enthusiasm that gives you the next hour of paddling for free.”

Steve is already looking ahead to future adventures with his son.

“I am so, so excited about a possible future that we have.”

Expedition With Steve Backshall is on Dave, Sundays at 8pm.

The tie-in book, Expedition by Steve Backshall, is published by BBC Books at £20.