Jeremy Wade

“You start off interested in variety and then it's always about bigger fish, bigger fish and I became fairly obsessive, I think, in my late teens and early 20s.”

“The thing is, if you always catch fish then you lose interest because any achievement is related to facing difficulty; having to work hard for it.”

“In an ideal world, you don't want creatures where they shouldn't be because there's always unintended consequences.”

“Bull sharks get quite a lot of bad press.”

“I did catch a bull shark, and also accidentally caught two very large groupers. The bigger one was not far short of 400 lbs. It just reinforced that fishing is about the unexpected. You sit there waiting for one thing, and then something totally different comes along.”

“I like eating fish and the thing is when I'm on a shoot, quite often the fish that I catch are bigger than me. Although I have a very healthy appetite I could normally eat about a pound of fish in a meal. I can't eat 100 pounds of fish or 200 pounds of fish.”

“I've never caught muskie. That would be quite special.”

“If I'd had a magic ejector seat when I went to Zaire, which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, I would have pressed it multiple times. I felt totally out of my depth. I had no money and there was precious little infrastructure so I had to barter to survive.”

“Fishing is quite a good metaphor for life. You do your prep, you do your thinking, you put your bait out, and you wait, confident that you've done your groundwork. But a lot of life is luck.”

“I have feared for my life on fishing trips - I was once in a plane crash in the Amazon, for example, and I've been trapped in a sinking boat - but not when actually handling fish, although I have been injured by fish.”

“I have caught eels from Loch Ness, as we did a River Monsters episode which started off there. They weren't very big - just 18 inches. I'm sure there may be bigger eels, but you're only talking about 10lbs.”

“With rivers, you don't have a lot of room to work, and with the bigger fish that I'm catching, you might have just a few feet to work with.”

“Sea water is clear and you can put the camera in sea water and you can see stuff, whereas freshwater is often zero visibility.”

“The other thing is, visibility is often not very good in fresh water. So if a fish bites something, a part of the body, it doesn't actually always realize that it's part of a body. It just sees something sort of waving around in front of it.”

“Even without the creatures living in it, water is dangerous. We have an ambivalent relationship with water. It's the source of life, it's the source of food, but it's also a source of death, if you're not careful.”

“I try to sneak a bit of education into the entertainment. We don't preach to people, but we do try to give them very strong messages.”

“A fish with a big mouth, like a catfish, they've been known to bite people's legs. Normally not because they're hungry, but because they're protecting a nest or something like that.”

“I made a series set in India that was more of a conventional fishing show. The fish were very uncooperative, so we were casting around for other bits of local color. We heard local stories of something pulling people into the water. They called it the Kali man-eater. We did a bit of a feature on this, and if formed part of that series.”

“I have caught some big eels in New Zealand, where the climate is very similar to Scotland. But they grow to around five feet long.”

“It's a bit like some martial arts: if you're behind somebody there's not much they can do, if you're in a certain position. So same thing with a fish, if you're in the right position you're okay. As soon as you get in the wrong position you can be in very real danger.”