Television
Discovery’s annual Shark Week continues to feed our fascination with the ocean’s apex predators.
In July 1988, when Shark Week was first gifted to humanity, Ronald Reagan was still President of the United States, Malcolm Marshall took a career-best 7-22 at Old Trafford and Ngāti Whātua o Ōrakei finally got Bastion Point back.
It’s been a long trip since then for Discovery channel’s annual seven-day marathon of shark-related content, which starts on Thursday. But it got no stranger than in 2007, the year of Shark Week’s 20th anniversary, when future president Donald Trump arranged a tryst with a porn star in a private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel – and became so engrossed in Shark Week that he apparently forgot to have extramarital sex.
“I remember arriving, and he was watching Shark Week,” Stormy Daniels told CBS interviewer Anderson Cooper 11 years later. “He made me sit and watch an entire documentary about shark attacks.”
Daniels has never revealed exactly what documentary supplanted coitus that night – perhaps the whimsically titled Top 5 Eaten Alive? But she has told media Trump was “obsessed with sharks, terrified of sharks”, and told her he wanted all the sharks to die. And that after watching four hours of Shark Week, she bid her host good evening and left, without having sex.
Some readers may debate whether this is true. The Listener holds that it is unquestionably more true than 2013’s Shark Week special Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, which looked like a documentary but was in fact entirely fictional.
Thrillingly, Shark Week
2019 includes a follow-up, Expedition Unknown: Megalodon (Tuesday, December 10, 8.30pm), which is true. Probably.
Other titles include The Sharks of Headstone Hell (Sunday, December 8, 8.30pm), in which Kiwi scientist Riley
Elliot examines Norfolk islanders’ possibly unhelpful practice of throwing whole beef carcasses into the sea for tiger sharks to eat, and Sharks of the Badlands (Thursday, 9.25pm), featuring New Zealand diver Kina Scollay as he seeks to find out why great white sharks are converging in the waters of Cape Cod.
There’s also Shark Week’s first feature film, Capsized: Blood in the Water (Saturday, December 7, 8.30pm), lightly based on the story of the Trashman, a yacht that sank in 1982. Two of the five crew who took to a Zodiac dinghy swam off to be eaten by sharks. Discovery says the film is in keeping with its vow to refrain from “demonising sharks”.