Why are TV wildlife stars all so endearingly DOTTY?
As Countryfile star admits scarring her arm for life as a love tribute to her partner...
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SOFTIE WITH BIRD SONG ON HIS iPOD
He’S been bitten by crocodiles, stung by bullet ants and broke his back tumbling 25ft down a cliff face, but TV naturalist Steve Backshall is a bit of a softie.
Not only did he break down in tears while proposing to Helen Glover, his Olympic rower wife, in 2015, but he listens to gentle birdsong, which he keeps on a loop on his iPod.
‘I’m hoping when I go somewhere and hear a bird, I’ll be able to identify it,’ he explains.
A RUSSIAN SPY SPIKED SPIKED MY DRINKMY DRINK
ADVENTURER Ben Fogle, who shot to fame on island reality show Castaway in 2000, has been stabbed in Costa rica, bitten by a flesh-eating parasite in the Peruvian jungle and had his car hijacked in London.
But perhaps his most curious tale centres on an evening in a Gloucestershire pub in 2013, during which Fogle’s drink was spiked with LSd.
He said it was a ‘strange coincidence’ that ryan Fogle, a CIA agent who shared his surname, was arrested in russia a few months later. ‘My drink was spiked just a week after I returned from russia . . . so they could have had us confused,’ he mused. Fogle, 43, who is married with two children, made headlines last year with an extraordinary attack on Lego, which he claimed had ‘stunted creativity’ and ‘ruined the world’.
TASTE FOR AN ODD THIRST QUENCHER
SURVIVALIST and nature presenter Bear Grylls takes the biscuit for doing odd and downright disgusting things on TV. Among the ‘foodstuffs’ he has consumed over the years are reindeer blood, elephant poo, raw snake, poisonous spider and goat’s testicles.
On his discovery Channel series Man Vs Wild, which was terminated in 2011 over contract disputes, he climbed inside a camel carcass for shelter, wrestled an alligator and held a dinner party in a hot air balloon at 7,200ft.
But he sparked outrage last year when celebrities on his ITV series, Mission Survive, were instructed to drink their own urine in order to stay hydrated.
Grylls, 42, real name Michael, frequently does so himself — but insists he would only do it in the wild, and never at home. ‘I’m weird, but I’m not that weird,’ he said recently.
UGLY ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!
SHe’S been dubbed the ‘ new david Attenborough’ and the ‘Steven Spielberg of sloth filmmaking’, but what wildlife presenter Lucy Cooke cares most about is overturning the ‘tyranny of cute’. Our obsession with cute, cuddly animals, insists Lucy, is endangering the lives of less attractive animals such as amphibians, reptiles and monkeys.
She became so besotted with sloths, the slow-moving, two-toed mammals, that she founded the Sloth Appreciation Society, wrote a book about them and uploaded videos of baby sloths in a bucket, which garnered more than a million views online.
‘You’ve seen one baby panda, in my opinion, you’ve seen them all,’ Cooke, 47, explains. ‘But while the world drools over cuddly, furry things, a whole class of extraordinary animals is being erased.’