{"id":258395,"date":"2025-07-12T07:54:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T07:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/258395\/"},"modified":"2025-07-12T07:54:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T07:54:09","slug":"shark-celebrity-infested-waters-im-absolutely-hooked-by-this-cheeky-danger-packed-reality-show-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/258395\/","title":{"rendered":"Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters: I\u2019m absolutely hooked by this cheeky, danger-packed reality show | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am obsessed with sharks. Fifty years on<\/a> 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\u2019ll even make time for guff like Jaws 4 or Sharknado 5: Global Swarming. I\u2019m metaphorically chumming the water at every opportunity. Every so often, something shows up.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 I\u2019m hooked. The victims \u2013 sorry, participants \u2013 include Lenny Henry<\/a>, Lucy Punch, Ross Noble and the bassist from McFly. I like some of these people very much, and hope they don\u2019t 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\u2019s nothing personal.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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, \u201cI don\u2019t love sharks. I think they\u2019re savage tubes of teeth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The show knows that\u2019s 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. \u201cSharks are the custodians of the sea,\u201d an expert posits at one point. \u201cThey take care of the sick, dying and injured.\u201d I imagine this is the same way I \u201ctake care of\u201d all the burgers at a barbecue, or foam shrimps at a pick \u2019n\u2019 mix; I don\u2019t picture the sharks in a Florence Nightingale cap. But the programme doesn\u2019t elaborate, so who\u2019s to say.<\/p>\n

In the first hour alone, the celebs experience a rattling encounter with bulls, an alarming flirtation with stingrays, and a frenzy of lemons. They\u2019re mostly uncaged \u2013 which doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re all in the same boat. Paralympian Ade Adepitan<\/a> does everything the others do with twice the level of physical challenge, while actor Helen George has a phobia of water itself, and hasn\u2019t got in past her knees in 20 years. McFly clearly isn\u2019t afraid of anything, and probably only said he was so he could have a free diving holiday.<\/p>\n

I do wonder what the sharks make of this. Can they feel the weight of all our psychic projections? Is that why they don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Rachel Riley and Ade Adepitan with the other celebs in Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters. Photograph: ITV<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the realest thing I\u2019ve ever done \u2013 and I\u2019ve done panto in Lewisham\u201d 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\u2019s George in whom we\u2019re invested. She looks unwell. It\u2019s a reminder that true fear is not visually dramatic. It\u2019s 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\u2019s OK.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure she\u2019s 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\u2019t want to stop being afraid of sharks, though. The more convenient our lives become, the more we yearn to imagine overwhelming forces. There\u2019s a paradoxical vitality to it. This truth in no way undermines the importance of marine protections, curbing man\u2019s barbarism, or our commercial predation of the natural world. I\u2019m always on the animals\u2019 side.<\/p>\n

Happily \u2013 and without spoilers \u2013 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\u2019s a winner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I am obsessed with sharks. Fifty years on from Jaws, and for me no film can touch it.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3937],"tags":[77,382,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-258395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114839189107080717","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}