Half seven in the morning is a good time for television, if you’re sufficiently awake. We’ve recently heard about my encounter with the new and technologically savvy Postman Pat. Today I watched a programme called Deadly 60, in which a fellow called Steve Backshall tries to track down the 60 deadliest animals in the world. There’s a picture of Steve below. He’s the one on the left.
Steve has some unusual ideas of how to go about making a programme such as this. According to a BBC article on the programme – which is linked to here, just so you can see I’m not making it up – Steve will attempt to find out how the animals are so deadly by imitating them. The article says “He tries to hang like a bat, hurtles down a zip wire to emulate a fish eagle and attempts to match the yellowfin tuna's aquatic skills with hilarious results.” I just bet it’s hilarious. Not to mention deranged.
Fittingly for such an obvious headcase, Steve seems to have an interesting idea of what’s deadly. I caught an edition of this show last week, in which he went to Africa to see three different types of snake, all of them really very deadly. Steve had set himself the interesting limit, however, of saying that only one of these three snakes would be allowed a place on his Deadly 60 list. He had a long argument with an extremely unenthusiastic zookeeper over which snake was most deadly, and as I recall, he eventually settled on the cobra. Bye bye, black mamba. You’re not deadly enough.
This morning’s episode, I suspect, was shot towards the end of the series when the budget was running a little thin, because Steve was in Scotland to see some weasels. He did make a valiant effort to convince us that weasels and otters are right nasty little bastards – he spoke to a man who’d had both his middle fingers chewed off by an otter. This happened at the same time, apparently, so the obvious conclusion is that this idiot man had the misfortune to have one middle finger bitten off, and then immediately presented his other hand to the otter so it could have a go at that one too. I mean, honestly, I reckon if an otter ate my middle finger on my left hand, I’d keep my right hand as far away as possible from the otter. It’s common sense.
Notwithstanding this vicious assault, I hardly think otters deserve to be included in the list of the 60 deadliest creatures on this planet. This poor man who’s lost his middle fingers is the absolute worst case of otter savaging I’ve ever heard of – I don’t imagine otters get worse than this. But owing to Steve’s curious insistence that only one African snake gets on the list, the conclusion that leaps to mind is that Steve thinks otters are deadlier than black mambas. This I do not believe to be the case.
I’ve spent a couple of minutes trawling the net attempting to find a comprehensive list of the animals Steve considers worthy to be included in the Deadly 60. Unfortunately, I can’t find one. Deadly 60 doesn’t even seem to have a Wikipedia page. There is, apparently, a book of it, but naturally I’m not going to buy that. I’ve found various press releases for the programme, though, which mention cheetahs, grizzly bears, piranhas, pufferfish, tigers and alligators, though to my distinct lack of surprise, they play down the inclusion of otters, suggesting that even his paymasters at the Beeb think Steve’s mad.
I would be willing to forgive Deadly 60 its peculiar choices, though, if they would just indulge me, and include, for the sheer comedy value, the manul. You don’t know what a manul is? Well, in that case ...
Here’s one!
Come on, you’ve got to admit that it looks pretty damned deadly.