Channel Nine’s new Shark! debuted on Sunday night with Paul de Gelder fronting a show built around the fear that nearly killed him. The former Navy clearance diver, who lost his right hand and right leg in a 2009 Sydney Harbour bull shark attack, is now the guide as six celebrities are taken to the Bahamas and pushed toward the water he once survived.
De Gelder, who grew up in Canberra, said the attack changed his life forever. He was on a counter-terrorism training exercise when a three-metre bull shark hit him in Sydney Harbour, ripping away his right hand and right leg in an eight-second mauling. Years later, the story is not just survival television; it is the reason viewers are searching for Shark Channel 9 now, because the show puts that experience at the centre of a primetime format built around sharks, fear and control.
The first group of celebrities includes Matt Nable, Ariarne Titmus, Lynne McGranger, Scott Cam, Sam Thaiday and Tammy Hembrow, all of them led by De Gelder and underwater photographer and conservationist Annie Gutteridge. Over a number of weeks in the Bahamas, they are expected to work up to swimming with tiger sharks, hammerhead sharks and bull sharks. For a show built on confrontation, that is the point: each dive is meant to turn panic into familiarity, and De Gelder is the person selling that idea because he lived through the opposite.
But he does not pretend the experience erased everything. De Gelder now says he wants to change people’s perceptions of sharks and show how beautiful they are, and how humans can coexist with them, yet he also says bull sharks are his least favourite sharks. He put it more bluntly in describing the species that attacked him: bull sharks can get f---ed. That contradiction is what gives the series its edge. He is asking celebrities to meet the animal he knows best and still fears most.
Cam said he had a lot of anxiety throughout the day because they were diving most days, but once he got in the water and down to the bottom he was alright and pretty relaxed. That is where Shark! is headed next: a slow test of whether fear can be worn down enough for the celebrities to swim cage-free with sharks at all. The show has not yet shown which of the three species will get the final call, and that uncertainty is what will keep viewers watching.
