CBBC series to focus on deadly animals
Steve's Deadly 60: will include a close encounter with a hippopotamus.

Children's BBC controller Anne Gilchrist has commissioned a 20-part series titled Steve's Deadly 60 in which Steve Backshall investigates the world's most deadly creatures.

The series will be made by the corporation's Bristol-based Natural History Unit and will begin airing in 30-minute episodes on the CBBC digital channel from spring next year.

Backshall, who has worked as a presenter on The Really Wild Show, Expedition Borneo, and Springwatch Tracker, will travel across the world exploring the habitats of animals including scorpions, hunting dogs, stingrays, tiger snakes, red back spiders, kookaburras, sloth bears and giant centipedes.

The BBC claims Steve's Deadly 60 is CBBC's most ambitious presenter-led natural history series yet.

In the show, Backshall will follow in the footsteps of the late wildlife presenter Steve Irwin by filming in potentially life-threatening situations in which he has venom spat at him by a cobra and is chased by an angry hippopotamus.

Irwin, the Australian wildlife expert and television personality famous for his Animal Planet series The Crocodile Hunter, died in 2006 after his chest was pierced by a stingray barb.

The NHU executive producer, Wendy Darke, said: "Steve's Deadly 60 combines the best of the natural history and children's expertise to give the CBBC audience a real life, around the world, adventure and close encounters with 60 of the most deadly animals on the planet.

"Filmed in a way that makes the viewer feel a part of Steve's gang, this is true warts-and-all television, right down to an encounter with a Great White Shark with a very excited Steve and a cameraman who was seasick throughout the whole piece."

Backshall added: "I feel very passionate about wildlife and Steve's Deadly 60 gives me the chance to bring this wonderful world of animals to life for children. In the series we learn that we have nothing to fear from the majority of animals featured but in their world, even the smallest and most bizarre creature can be deadly."

The new series is being executive produced by Reem Nouss, head of news, factual and learning for CBBC.