Shallow? Celebs and sharks make for moving reality TV

New ITV series ‘Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters’ is a silly but unexpectedly uplifting quest

- Katie Rosseinsky

There's just no getting around it. When you first read the concept for ITV's Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters, it sounds like an idea dredged from the depths of Alan Partridge's dictaphone, something to be filed away alongside Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank rather than commissioned by a legitimate real-life broadcaster. It’s the final boss of the “celebrities plus unpleasant task plus farflung location” reality TV formula that we’ve seen play out on our screens so many times. The apex predator, if you will.

In it, a group of seven British stars - including Lenny Henry, Amandaland’s Lucy Punch and Call the Midwife stalwart Helen George - are dispatched to the Bahamas, embarking on a trip to one of the most beautiful places in the world that’s tempered with perhaps the ultimate caveat. While they’re staying on the island of Bimini, they must swim with sharks and eventually learn to love (or, at least, express some mild affection towards) “one of the most feared and persecuted animals on the planet”, as the opening voiceover puts it.

Helping them out with this alarming task are three “world-renowned shark experts”. There’s shark biologist Dr Tristan Guttridge, marine scientist Danni Washington and army veteran Paul de Gelder, a man who survived a bull shark attack that left him, in his words, “half cyborg” (he uses a prosthetic arm and leg).