Steve Backshall shares London’s surprising ‘deadliest creature’ ahead of O2 Arena live show
LondonWorld talks to Steve Backshall ahead of his massive Deadly Live show at the O2 Arena this October.
This October TV star Steve Backshall is taking his hugely popular Deadly franchise on tour across the country including a show at London’s iconic O2 Arena.
Set to be his first ever arena tour, the wildlife expert will take over the North Greenwich venue during the autumn half term on October 27 for an unforgettable action packed experience.
Ahead of his capital show Steve Backshall told us what London fans can expect as well as the surprising deadly animal that calls the city home and what lethal creature Londoners are most similar to.
What can we expect from the Deadly Live Tour?
Deadly Live Tour is my first arena tour, so I have to make it bigger, bolder and more dramatic. It's going to be filled with life-size/scale animals, from woolly mammoths, modern big cats and birds of prey, all the way back to the dinosaurs, which will be strolling across the stage, roaring as they go.
The O2 Arena is one of the biggest arena venues in the UK. Are you going to feel like a rockstar?
I am really excited and a little bit intimidated. It is an awful lot of people and a very big venue. The most important thing is that I fill it, that this is not just a two-hour TED talk, but that it has a real sense of scale, of visual dynamism, that it's packed with slapstick, explosions, stage science, outtake bloopers, things that go wrong, craziness, alongside a whole bunch of other things that make people gasp and knowledge and information they'll be dying to take home and share with everyone they know.
Tell us about your new book.
The new book [Deadly: My Ultimate Lethal Beasts] is very much on the same lines as the arena tour, in that it is a history of Deadly through the ages. It starts off with the inception, the genesis of life on Earth, works through the time of the dinosaurs to modern days, compares and contrasts everything from the past and the present and faces off all of the most dramatic, deadly animals.
What’s your animal hero and why?
My animal hero is the orca, also my favourite animal. It is communicative, sophisticated, complex, intelligent, works together as a unit, can sometimes be cruel, other times mischievous. They are probably as close to us as human beings as any other animal, and I would include our close primate cousins in that.
What is the Deadliest creature you’ve encountered?
The deadliest creature to us as human beings is the mosquito because of the diseases it spreads. But if I was to spread the net wider and include the whole remit of deadly - that is, animals that are not dangerous to us but deadly in their world - I would probably choose something like the peregrine falcon that we have right here in London, stooping down onto its pigeon prey from the highest of our buildings. The fastest creature ever known to have lived, living in a whole different world of speed to us as human beings. The absolute epitome of vision, poise, reactions and pace.
If Londoners were a deadly animal, what would they be and why?
They would probably be chimpanzees: quick, clever, sometimes charming, sometimes horrible, unpredictable, surprising, full of life and energy and wanting to explore and investigate and embrace everything new in their world!
Steve Backshall’s Deadly Live! London show will take over the O2 arena on 27 October. Tickets are available via DeadlyLiveTour.com. Deadly: My Ultimate Lethal Beasts by Steve Backshall is also out now (£22.00).
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