5 hours ago
7
I am obsessed with sharks. Fifty years on from Jaws, and for me no film can touch it. I trawl YouTube for unspeakable footage. On a recent holiday to France, I made my nonplussed household watch every shark documentary on National Geographic. I’ll even make time for guff like Jaws 4 or Sharknado 5: Global Swarming. I’m metaphorically chumming the water at every opportunity. Every so often, something shows up.
Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters (ITV1, Wednesday 16 July, 9pm) sees seven public figures with a fear of sharks mercilessly pushed into the water to swim with some. Say no more – I’m hooked. The victims – sorry, participants – include Lenny Henry, Lucy Punch, Ross Noble and the bassist from McFly. I like some of these people very much, and hope they don’t mind that I would love them to be ripped in half and devoured in high definition, thrashing about in a vortex of reddening water. It’s nothing personal.
It’s also unlikely, since the show is being aired. (Unless they started with eight contestants.) We are, post-Jaws, more ecologically conscious. There would be massive complaints if the show presented the sharks as primeval nightmare fuel, even though that’s what they are, what ITV wants them to be and what we want them to be. It feels somehow subversive when the consistently hilarious Lucy Punch announces, “I don’t love sharks. I think they’re savage tubes of teeth.”
The show knows that’s why we love them. You can feel it straining against its moral imperative to educate us as to why these beasts are mostly harmless, necessary and misunderstood. “Sharks are the custodians of the sea,” an expert posits at one point. “They take care of the sick, dying and injured.” I imagine this is the same way I “take care of” all the burgers at a barbecue, or foam shrimps at a pick ’n’ mix; I don’t picture the sharks in a Florence Nightingale cap. But the programme doesn’t elaborate, so who’s to say.
In the first hour alone, the celebs experience a rattling encounter with bulls, an alarming flirtation with stingrays, and a frenzy of lemons. They’re mostly uncaged – which doesn’t mean they’re all in the same boat. Paralympian Ade Adepitan does everything the others do with twice the level of physical challenge, while actor Helen George has a phobia of water itself, and hasn’t got in past her knees in 20 years. McFly clearly isn’t afraid of anything, and probably only said he was so he could have a free diving holiday.
I do wonder what the sharks make of this. Can they feel the weight of all our psychic projections? Is that why they don’t sleep? In that sense, Celebrity Infested Waters is a brilliantly cheeky subtitle, flipping the POV. Fame is the opposite of being a shark, really. Irrationally beloved, a lot of celebrities are awful once you understand them.
“This is the realest thing I’ve ever done – and I’ve done panto in Lewisham” quips Henry as the sharks circle. The actors and comedians are pretty charming, and banter gamely on boats, as they overcome their aversion. But it’s George in whom we’re invested. She looks unwell. It’s a reminder that true fear is not visually dramatic. It’s a tense sickness that grips, a private experience of trying to keep an ego from completely fragmenting. I find her panic attack in a cage more affecting and real than any amount of screaming, and I hope she’s OK.
I’m sure she’s heading for epiphany, Punch will learn to love her tubes, and Rachel Riley will be sudoku-ing with a pyjama shark at the end of five episodes. Most people don’t want to stop being afraid of sharks, though. The more convenient our lives become, the more we yearn to imagine overwhelming forces. There’s a paradoxical vitality to it. This truth in no way undermines the importance of marine protections, curbing man’s barbarism, or our commercial predation of the natural world. I’m always on the animals’ side.
Happily – and without spoilers – I can reveal that one of the celebrities does get bitten by a shark in the first episode, and there is a lot of screaming, so everyone’s a winner.
