Jeremy Wade confronts ‘monsters’ of the murky deep for your entertainment

In the end, there’s always some truth to the fish tales. “Often, there is something really impressive behind these stories,” Wade said.

And it’s true. For most of the episodes, Wade uncovers scary facts about these fish. He often uncovers first hand accounts of men and women who lost their lives because of them. Even more impressively, Wade is often revealing fish about which there is very little known.

“Fresh water is much more of a mystery. There’s a vacuum of knowledge,” Wade said. He attributes the mysteries of rivers to their murky water which prohibits photography, unlike the vast oceans which are clearer.

Wade is also much more than a fisherman. He’s a kind of roving anthropologist, biologist and master fisherman all in one. (Wade, however, is much more humble about his fishing skills than his record supports).

Fishing is, to Wade, a means of connecting with the people he encounters on his broad travels at a deeper level than would otherwise be possible. Fishing is universal, a path “into the human way of life,” he said.

Pulling off Wade’s investigations into the monsters in the murky deep is an incredible feat of its own. The episodes are shot in only two and a half weeks. In that time, Wade manages not only to track down people who have been involved in dangerous brushes with the monsters, but often catches one himself.

In one episode, tracking a giant catfish, Wade finds a South American man who had a tiny, parasitic catfish swim up his penis while he was relieving himself in the river. As if it weren’t enough to interview him, Wade takes him to a laboratory where the catfish had been preserved, confronting him with its lifeless body.

In that instance, Wade said it wasn’t as awkward as might be suspected, since the man had made a full recovery. In fact, on screen, Wade can barely contain his smile.

But other times the moments are quite painful. When Wade interviews the family of the toddler who was eaten by piranhas, he is visibly shaken. “I do find it very difficult, actually,” Wade said.

The scenes are for entertainment, of course. But it isn’t a fishing show, Jerry Springer style, Wade argued. “Ultimately we are doing it to inform,” he said, taking pride in the “children who watch and are being switched on to the outside world.”

So far, Wade has survived his encounters with fearsome fish, but not without close calls.

In the Congo in 1990, despite taking the requisite pills, he caught malaria. His vision became impaired and he thought he might die. But Wade survived.

In 2002, a scaly Arampaima he was trying to net swam full speed into the net, crushing into Wade’s chest. Six weeks later, Wade still couldn’t rise straight up into a sitting position when laying down. Later, he had a scare when medical tests showed damage to his heart muscle – he suspected the fish. Doctors later cleared his health.

Now at work on season three of River Monsters, Wade recently returned from New Zealand and fished in Papa New Guinea. He’s also slated to face monsters in Japan and hopes the third, and final, season will expand the habitats he locates the terrifying fish of his show.