OCEANS: The New Generation

Written by staff reporter Friday, 09 January 2009 00:00

The team The Umbria wreck Filming a playful seal Lucy Blue on the Umbria Paul Rose Philippe Cousteau Dr Lucy Blue Tooni Mahto Australian fur seal Philippe Couseau and Paul Rose The team dives an underwater volcano Free diving with sperm whales

If you haven’t heard of Oceans, you’re about to. There is a real buzz about BBC1’s new eight-part documentary series, which is due to begin airing this autumn.

The last time this much talent was invested in a marine television series, we got The Blue Planet, but this time the divers are in front of the cameras. It’s a team documentary in the style of Coast, but for Oceans, all presenters are divers, and they are led by one of Britian’s eminent diver-adventurers, former Antarctic base commander Paul Rose.

Eager to find out more, I meet Rose at BBC Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush, where he is receiving the five-star treatment in the run-up to transmission. As well as being one of Britain’s leading divers, he is a mountain guide, polar explorer and proven expedition leader, but you couldn’t imagine a more down-to-earth character. He may have spent years in the USA and led expeditions all over the world, but the easy-going man shaking my hand is your classic Essex lad made good.

Raised in Elm Park, Essex, in the 1950s (he is now 57, but looks a decade younger), he left school at 16 and followed his father’s career by working at the Ford factory at Dagenham as an apprentice toolmaker. Drawn to outdoor pursuits, he joined Ilford Sub-Aqua Club at the age of 18 and soon found himself emulating his television hero, Mike Nelson of Sea Hunt fame, as portrayed by the late Lloyd Bridges.

His ambition took him to America, where he started his own diving school and ended up winning a contract to teach the US Navy how to dive, all the time extending his terrestrial qualifications as a mountaineer and explorer. In the early 1990s, he found himself working as a diving officer for the British Antarctic Survey, and proved so adept that he eventually became not just lead diving officer but overall base commander of Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Rose was made a vice president of the Royal Geographical Society, and his ambitious survey/conservation project in the Indian Ocean, Shoals of Capricorn, attracted the attention of Buckingham Palace and was visited by Prince William on his first big scuba trip. Rose was getting noticed, and inevitably the BBC – with its phalanx of science contacts – got to know him and roped him into some of its productions.

Rose is a natural leader, but as far as his television presenting is concerned, a genuine interest in the subject matter is the key factor. Talking about the Oceans expedition to the Sea of Cortez, his eyes blaze as he recalls the unorthodox working conditions of indigenous clam divers.

‘The Seri Indians gather scallops using a primitive, surface-supplied ‘hookah’ system,’ he says. ‘The compressor is a paint sprayer connected to a beer keg, with 50m of garden hose leading down to a nasty-looking old second stage. Health and Safety would have a fit if they ever saw one…

‘Anyway, we get to the site where the guy is going to dive, and this compressor is belching oil and fumes. The diver is running across the sea bed with no fins and this antique oval mask, and suddenly the compressor engine just stops and the connection with the beer keg blows. I’m still on the boat with this diver’s father, and the only thing I can do is fix the blown fitting with a plastic bag and a length of string.

It was incredible, but that’s the way these people eke a living from the sea. Tough guys.’ He isn’t adverse to a spot of drama either. In another episode, he finds himself swimming in the current-blasted Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. ‘Even at slack, it’s a high-speed drift dive and you have to go to 40m to get a chance of seeing the sharks,’ he says. ‘It’s a very problematic dive, so I went in with twin 15s blown to 310 bar, plus a pony. The site was only a couple of hundred metres offshore, and I remember thinking how strange it was to see the lights of the town and hear laughter outside the bars and clubs. But as soon as you start to descend, you’re in a completely different world.’

Perhaps for convenience, or maybe because he was tired of life, Rose had tied a tuna head to his weight belt. After a few unproductive dives, he was finally rewarded with two green eyes flashing in his torchlight, heralding the appearance of a 5m shark. That, in case you are wondering, is the size of a fully mature great white. As if to dispel any confusion over the species identification, the shark swam closely and slowly enough for Rose to count the six gills along the side of its great head (most sharks have just the five).

Team-led documentaries have come back into vogue with Coast (interestingly, the trend was presaged by a satire on the genre, Wes Anderson’s offbeat comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), and for one of the presenters it was an opportunity to come to terms with his own family background. Philippe Cousteau Jr has grown up as the son of the man touted by many as the natural successor to Jacques Yves (Philippe Sr, who died in an airboat crash near Lisbon in 1979). ‘For Philippe, this whole process has been a way for him to connect with his father’s memory,’ Rose says.

A particularly resonant echo might have come during filming in the Bahamas, where the team set out to explore the Black Hole, a brackish lake in Andros, which they had to charter a helicopter to reach. Unlike the famous ‘blue hole’-type-sites, its depths are defined by layers of bacteria that form false ‘bottoms’, creating a psychedelic haze of bright greens and purples when viewed from below with a light.

‘We broke through the layers and emerged into water that was cool and clear but very dark,’ Rose says. ‘Looking up, I could see tendrils of matter hanging from the bacteria layer. I was in a layer of anoxic water, close to what the world’s oceans were like three and a half billion years ago. When we surfaced, cameraman Mike Pitts was feeling terrible and the safety diver, John Chambers, was throwing up in the weeds.’

All of this brings to mind the film Cousteau senior made about Clipperton Atoll in 1980, in which the divers descend through the opaque layers of an island lake to encounter similarly toxic water. History, it seems, has a way of repeating itself when it comes to underwater exploration.

The series is due to be aired in either October or November, and thanks to the pre-transmission buzz, all eyes will be on the team when they finally hit the small screen. There have been industry rumours of disorganisation during the initial stages of the project, but the word is that the finished series will be one of the television events of 2008, and that Oceans will make stars of its young presenters.

For Rose, meanwhile, the privilege of diving for a living is more than enough, and his own philosophy could serve as a valuable lesson to today’s generation of excitable presenters: ‘I think I’ve learned a little trick – I’m not just trying to be another body in front of the camera. I only make programmes and talk about things that I am passionate about, and on subjects that I understand. That’s all there is to it.’

OCEANS FOUR: THE TEAM

PAUL ROSE
Expedition leader
A former base commander for the British Antarctic Survey, he has trained US Navy divers and is a qualified mountain and polar safety consultant. He was vice president and chairman of expeditions and fieldwork for the Royal Geographical Society from 1999 to 2002

DR LUCY BLUE
Maritime archaeologist
Co-director of the Roman and Islamic Red Sea harbour site of Quseir al-Qadim, she has also excavated widely around the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. She is the current chair of the Nautical Archaeology Society, and is senior lecturer at the University of Southampton’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology

PHILIPPE COUSTEAU
Environmentalist
As well as lecturing and serving on numerous boards, the 28-year-old grandson of the most famous diver ever is chief ocean correspondent for the satellite TV channel Animal Planet. He was present during filming for the channel when a stingray fatally wounded his co-host, Steve Irwin. Holds a master’s degree in history from the University of St Andrews

TOONI MAHTO
Marine biologist
Previously worked on freshwater and marine expeditions to Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique and as leader and science co-ordinator. Her first on-camera appearances have been so successful that she is already being touted as the talent ‘find’ of the series. She recently completed a masters in oceanography

OCEANS: SHOW BY SHOW

Eight expeditions, each three weeks in length, make eight one-hour specials

The Mediterranean: the team evaluates this historically important sea in its role as a cradle of civilisation, with the emphasis strongly on archaeology and geology

Sea of Cortez: our guides look at the way the food chain has been reconfigured as a result of fishing and human influence. Also, the team dives with voracious Humboldt squid, possibly the most aggressive creatures in the sea

The Spice Islands: the team looks at the culture of the Spice Islands of Tanzania and studies the marine environments of near-shore Africa

The Indian Ocean: the fragility of coral ecosystems comes under the microscope, with a visit to the Indian Ocean’s only coral nursery

Atlantic: based in the Bahamas to study the Gulf Stream and, of course, dive with sharks, the team looks at the invasive phenomenon of displaced lionfish and the effects of a revolutionary shark-repellent metal for use on longlines

Red Sea: this programme covers the southern sections, encompassing Eritrea, Sudan and Djibouti. There’s a hunt for clues that this may have been one of the first seas that early humans encountered, and how they may have learned to survive off the sea

Southern Ocean: in parts of the Southern Ocean, the water temperature is rising at more than twice the rate of other oceans. The team investigates the effect this change is having on ecosystems such as kelp forests and the creatures that live in them

The Arctic: the team heads for the island of Svalbard, home to the Norwegian Polar Institute and a major centre for studying the first obvious effects of climate change, a recurrent theme in the series. The team undertake some chilly dives, discover new critters and explore the remains of an old whaling station