Best Of Deadly on a Mission: Pole to Pole

My name's Steve Backshall.

Whoa!

And I'm on a mission, searching for...

Deadly places.

Deadly adventures.

And deadly animals.

Oi, you...!

And you're coming with me, every step of the way!

Aghhh!

'12 months, 14 countries and three continents.

'Deadly Pole To Pole was to be our biggest mission ever.

'Travelling over 10,000 miles through the Arctic,

'through North America

'the Caribbean and South America...'

Hola!

'..before reaching our final destination,

'Antarctica.'

HE CHEERS

'A year where everything has gone smoothly.'

Agh, no! That's my script!

Where did my sunglasses go?

'Everyone's had fun...'

LAUGHTER

-THUD!

-Ow!

'..and no-one's got hurt.'

Ow, that hurts!

Whoa!

'So, join me, for the best moments of Deadly Pole To Pole.'

Ow!

Oh, strewth!

'After months of planning, we'd picked our route, north to south,

'through the American continents

'until we reached the end of our journey at the Antarctic Peninsula.'

'We began with one of the most chilling encounters

'we'd ever filmed, amongst the ice floes high up in the Arctic Circle.

'We'd come to Svalbard...

'..and boarded an ice-breaker to explore the pack ice

'and go in search of the great white bear that rules this world.

'These powerful predators feed on seals that haul out onto the ice,

'punching down to get at them.

'They're equally at home in land or in water and can swim for days

'in water so cold that it would kill a human in minutes.

'I was travelling amongst the bergs in a kayak

'when a polar bear spotted me.

'From miles away, he swam steadily and slowly in my direction

'before abruptly changing his behaviour.'

Looking right at me.

Ooh. He's diving under it.

'Bears sometimes dive underwater as they're about to begin hunting.

'We need to watch him very carefully.'

There he is.

Watching me very, very closely.

Looks like he might just swim... right in front of me.

Hey there, big fella.

He's OK. He's just keeping a very careful eye on me.

He's just watching me.

Wow. I certainly didn't expect to get that close.

HE PUFFS OUT

Just for a second there, he had me in his sights,

and a lot of the bears in this part of the world

will never have seen a human being before.

Polar bears are one of the only wild animals

that will deliberately target and hunt a human being.

It's desperately rare, but it's something

that you really need to have in the back of your mind at all times.

'While wild icons such as this would be the focus of our expedition,

'as we moved on we decided to try something new...

'..focusing on even bigger, lethal forces of nature.

'In Alaska, we set out to film something

'with the power to move mountains.

'Glaciers. Rivers of ice that have shaped the world we live in.

'To get a taste of their deadly side,

'we decided to explore the most dynamic part of the glacier.

'The inside.'

I'm going to get absolutely hammered here.

Whoa.

This would have to be one of the most hostile places

you can ever be in.

This is a place that human beings are simply not supposed to be.

If I didn't have my drysuit,

I wouldn't last seconds here.

The water is only just above freezing

and thundering down around my ears.

Steve, are you OK down there?

Uh.

Oh, my fingers!

I can't feel my fingers.

Is he coming back, Johnny?

Oh!

Whoa!

It's such an incredibly beautiful place...

..but it's almost too frightening and too overwhelming to appreciate.

I don't think I should go on any further.

I think it'd just be too dangerous.

I think, if I tried to head down there...

..I wouldn't make it.

Come on!

'That was probably the most hardcore thing I've ever done on Deadly.

'Having experienced the power of ice, it was now the turn of wind.

'So, when in Texas, we wondered what it would be like to face a tornado.

'But it's far too dangerous to experience these storms first-hand.'

Instead of doing that, we decided to create our own...using this.

The bit we're interested in is this - the exhaust.

When this jet fires up,

wind is going to come out of the back of here at well over 100mph,

possibly considerably more, and I'm going to try

and walk up the back and experience how it feels to be in a tornado.

OK, coming up.

Whoa-ho-ho! Argh! Oh, my goodness!

'And any tornado will bring with it rain,

'simulated here with buckets of water.'

Argh! My ear defenders have gone!

It's all right.

'And, of course, high-velocity dust...

'..and other flying objects, simulated here by 100mph tomatoes.'

Ow!

'Floored by a soft fruit and we still hadn't reached full force.'

Do you want more power? I've still got more.

Chuck them at me! I can take it!

THRUSTERS ROAR

'As he cranked it up to a Category 3 tornado, I'd had enough.

'That was it for our Texas twister.

'But as we carried on to Hawaii, we experienced the planet-forming

'and landscape-smashing power of fire.

'Here, the crew wanted me to measure the temperature of molten lava

'with just some oven gloves for protection.'

Erm, I am totally out of my comfort zone here!

I have to admit, I'm a bit scared!

I've come over all completely wussy.

Erm, but I guess I should give it a go.

OK.

-Oh...

-Oh!

-Yeah.

-Right, that's really, really hot.

Erm, right, come on, Backshall.

Agh!

Agh!

Have you got a reading?

Er, 29... Whoa! 106...

Arghhhh!

Did you see how hot that went?

Yeah, just, I mean... It was, like, 29 and it jumped up to over 1,000.

-Just went "boom".

-'Way too hot to hang around.'

'On Deadly, we've always tried to use the latest technology

'to show you wildlife at its best.

'We've used high-speed cameras to reveal the force of a tornado,

'designed our own underwater CCTV to capture shots

'of the rarely seen six-gill shark,

'used night-vision cameras to uncover the secret world of snakes

'and developed a time-slice rig

'to reveal animal behaviour in a way never seen before.

'The time-slice worked so well

'that we set ourselves an even bigger challenge,

'taking it to the Bahamas and underwater

'to try and film the anatomy of a shark bite.'

We've got our time-slice rig lined up here

with Johnny and Duncan holding on to it.

I'm going to try and bring a shark in

and get it to bite right dead in the centre

so the cameras can fire off all around it.

And then, hopefully, we should be able to break down the bite

into its constituent parts.

It might sound easy, but trust me, it's not going to be.

'Finally, we start to get the hang of it.

'Our plan is coming together.'

Yes!

Perfect!

'Once in the sweet spot. We filmed several bites

'and then went topside to review what the footage had revealed.'

OK, so...

you can see the lemon shark coming in here.

Oh, wow!

That is incredible!

'The jaws of the shark are very different

'from the jaws you'd see in those of a mammal.'

We have our upper jaw fused to our skull

and only our lower jaw can move free.

In a shark, it's completely different.

And you can see that at this moment of the strike.

There.

'Both the shark's upper and lower jaws thrust forward.

'Rows of fish-hook thin, pointed teeth can snag larger prey.

'Smaller prey is just hoovered up.

'And very lucky, I had a chain-mail suit on under my wetsuit.'

Argh!

'Sharks have always featured heavily on Deadly.

'This series alone, I had a close shave with a tiger shark

'and even had my camera stolen by one.'

No, no, no, no, no! He's got my pole!

'And to prove great whites aren't mindless man-eaters,

'I swam with one outside of the cage.'

He's coming back. Straight at us.

'But not everything we've encountered has been predatory.

'In Cuba, we stumbled on a beach where the wildlife

'was among some of the friendliest I've ever seen.'

-Look!

-There's lots of them.

Look at that!

This is absolutely remarkable.

There are wild animals scurrying towards me from all over the place.

This is a Cuban hutia.

It's a kind of rodent...oh! Oops!

Essentially, a massive hamster.

And they only occur in Cuba.

Look at that!

You are the most curious-looking creature.

It's like someone's taken the head of a beaver

and stuck it onto a wallaby.

'But lazing around on paradise sands is sadly not what we're all about.

'Instead, we took a journey into the underworld.'

It really, really gives you the fear.

'As we descended further into the bowels of the earth,

'the temperature began to climb, and I could hear a faint noise.

'It was hundreds of thousands of bats.'

Unbelievable!

Now that is what I call a Batcave.

'But it was not the bats or the bugs that I was looking for.

'Instead, we were there to find an animal

'that's crawled deep into this cave to feed on the roosting bats.'

I've got one, I've got one!

I've got several, in fact. Oh, my God, there's loads of them!

No way!

So...

..this is why we've come to this cave.

Cuban boas.

And they are pretty much everywhere.

Just trying to keep my eyes on this snake, but I can't really see it.

This is a really substantial snake!

I wasn't really expecting to find anything this big,

but I guess when there's this much food around...

you can grow to be a really good size.

And this snake is really fat. I can feel inside him

several bats that he's feasted on, probably this evening.

The Cuban boa.

It may make its home in a nightmare of a place,

but for me, this is a dream of a snake,

and undoubtedly deadly.

So, halfway through, the crew are happy

and everything's still going to plan.

MUSIC: Best Day Of My Life by American Authors

'A few slips and trips, and some minor bumps.'

Oof!

Oh, no!

I didn't want to do that!

'But most importantly, everyone is still having fun.'

This is like...hell on earth.

I want to go home.

We continued south, crossing the equator and on into Brazil.

This vast continent is home to the one animal that's always managed

to elude me every time I've gone in search of it.

This is one last attempt to find a spotted cat that's rarely spotted.

It's not just that I am incredibly unlucky.

Jaguars genuinely are very, very difficult to see,

and there are many reasons for that.

One of those is that this is a creature of the shadows.

They're fabulously camouflaged and expert at not being seen.

But also they are rare, and one of the reasons for that

is persecution by human beings.

Thankfully, now they're starting to make a comeback,

and here in the Pantanal, you have a really good chance of seeing them.

Or so I've been told.

'We've given ourselves just four days,

'but early signs were good.'

Oh! Oh, guys, come and have a look at this!

Come and have a look at this!

HE LAUGHS

I don't quite know...

how to get across the excitement that I feel right now.

Because I've been waiting for this for a very, very long time.

That is a jaguar print.

Er...

I'm so excited, I can't even really control myself!

'But things were about to get even better.'

Our driver has gone into absolute overdrive,

because we've had a call that a jaguar's been spotted upstream.

This could be our big chance!

My heart is just going bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam

and I know that those capybara are too.

'They're probably in the river because the jaguar was hunting them.

'It might still be close by.'

There's a jaguar over there.

Over there, under that tree!

This is amazing!

The biggest carnivore of this part of the world

is wandering along the bank ahead of us.

There!

I can't believe it! My first-ever jaguar!

This is the king of cats.

The jaguar has stopped hunting and has sat right on the river bank

under a tree, and she's grooming.

She's using that rasping tongue to clean her fur.

It's a staggeringly beautiful animal.

'At last, I'd managed to film my jungle nemesis.

'With luck seemingly on our side,

'we decided to push things to the limit

'with what was probably going to be our biggest challenge to date.

'We headed south to Patagonia, our last stop in South America,

'to film one of the ocean's top predators.'

It is the orca, or killer whale.

So this place is absolutely perfect for us as well as for the orca.

Because they're going to be channelled into this one area,

there's no way they can hunt to either side of us.

We can sit here, we can watch and we can wait.

Everyone's on tenterhooks, just the idea that any second,

that black shape could break the surface.

There are several young sea lion pups right up at the water's edge.

Everything is in place.

Yes! I've got one! I can see one!

I can see an orca coming this direction!

Wow.

The stage is set.

This could not be more perfect for them.

Oh, so close! So close!

The orca beached itself right up on the sands,

but it was going for an adult sea lion and it just managed to escape.

That was it! That was the moment we'd been waiting for.

The incredible surge of force and power

driving an animal that's many, many times right up onto the beach.

But also, I guess it's all the more thrilling

for the fact that that sea lion managed to hold its own.

It managed to escape with its life.

I have to say that that was worth

travelling halfway round the world for.

And despite the fact that this time

the orca came up empty-handed and didn't manage to find a meal,

there is surely nobody on the planet who can doubt

that the killer whale is deadly.

'The intelligence, size, speed and power of the killer whale

'makes it THE apex ocean predator.

'But it's not only big guns like orca and jaguars

'that deserve to be on Deadly.

'There's plenty of room for the weird and wonderful.'

It's a hairy armadillo!

'A scuttling, snuffling tank.'

It's a biggie!

'In North America, it was the hellbender, or snot otter,

'that won us over.

'And the smallest animal we filmed on our expedition,

'in the forests of Hawaii...'

I don't know if you're going to be able to see this with the camera,

but lying along the edge of this leaf here,

lying perfectly flush with it and exactly the same colour,

is a caterpillar.

And believe it or not, this is what I'm considering

as our next Deadly contender.

'To see this mini-beast in action,

'we need to use some specialist kit.

'A high-speed macro camera.

'A macro window on its miniature world.'

HE LAUGHS DISBELIEVINGLY

'These carnivorous caterpillars' strikes

'are triggered when their unsuspecting prey

'wander too close to their tail end.

'Their pincer-sharp legs raise into the air,

'forming a stabbing basket

'which envelops the bug in a deadly embrace.

'It's blisteringly quick - all over in a tenth of a second.

'Weird, wonderful,

'and the very definition of deadly.

'At last, after a year of adventure that had seen us travel

'from the frozen Arctic through the heat of the Tropics

'and down to the frozen south, we reached our final destination.

'The Antarctic peninsula.

'And we'd saved the best till last. I was going to try and dive

'with one of the top predators of these freezing waters.'

I think I heard breathing. Oh, oh, oh!

What was that? Did someone see that? I saw a breath at the surface.

Leopard seal, off the end of that iceberg. Do you see it?

It's huge!

No way!

See, see, see? He's right here.

That is a monster.

I'm not sure I want to get in the water with that!

'This is a predator that can literally

'thrash a penguin out of its own skin.

'But I'd come halfway round the world. I couldn't back out now.'

Looks like it might finally happen.

The adrenaline is absolutely singing round my body.

Right there, right there.

Right behind you.

'If you haven't got visual, he's coming towards you now.'

Oh, I see him!

I see him! He's massive!

That is the most extraordinary sight.

A leopard seal, just showing off her expertise.

Look at that, barrel-rolling around,

pirouetting in front of us.

Unbelievable!

Where's she gone? Has anyone got eyes on?

Come up a little bit, come up.

There she is, she is.

Wow!

She's kind of getting bolder each time she approaches.

Each time it's just a little bit closer.

Big show of teeth there, look at that.

When an animal shows off its teeth like that and blows bubbles,

it's not yawning!

It's showing off what it can do.

'She's just letting us know that this is her world, not ours.'

There's no doubt this animal could do me an awful lot of damage.

Wow!

I think it's time for us to head for the surface.

Oh, my goodness.

That's one of the most exhilarating and frightening experiences

of my entire life.

'We've spanned the planet with all things Deadly,

'and you've been with us every step of the way.

'But so has one ocean-wandering giant - the humpbacked whale.

'We saw them first at the start of our expedition, in the high Arctic.

'Then in Alaska, spouting like cannonfire.

'Utterly awe-inspiring.'

Oh, my goodness!

'In Hawaii, I swam alongside them, sharing the Big Blue.

'And in Antarctica, they joined us one last time.'

WHOOSH

Oh!

The sound they make as they come to the surface,

it hits you right in your heart.

An incredible finale to an incredible expedition.