Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I’m away for a year exploring the world when all I want is to be with Helen and our new baby... but I’ve worked my whole life for this
need to know that they could do it. I think Helen could be that role model.
“There’s a whole new realm of expedition programmes, we’ll see what the future holds. The ideal for me would be to do things together with Helen.”
For now though, he’ll be going it alone and Helen’s family – including four siblings – will be there to help her through the last months of pregnancy, and the first of motherhood.
She and Steve have been together since meeting at a Sport Relief event in 2014.
Later that year Steve left his comfort zone by going on Strictly Come Dancing.
Partnered by Ola Jordan, he made it to week nine but found the whole experience more frightening than any of his daring exploits.
Steve’s love of wildlife and the great outdoors began when he was growing up in Bagshot, Surrey, when he was surrounded by rescue animals.
After A-levels he backpacked alone around Asia, India and Africa then read English and theatre studies at Exeter University. He also spent a year in Japan. returning as a black belt in judo, a brown in karate and fluent in the language.
In 1997 he tried unsuccessfully to trek across western New Guinea but his time in the rainforest sparked a TV idea.
He shot a pilot show and sold it to the National Geographic Channel, which hired him as its adventurer in residence.
In 2003 he moved to the BBC’S Really Wild Show and in 2008 Deadly 60 was commissioned.
Steve has already left for cave-diving in Mexico, the first of his 10 new expeditions, but will be back for days and possibly weeks at a time. He says: “We go up to the Arctic, there will be jungles and deserts and a bit of everything.”
But today viewers can see him on CBBC trying to fulfil a boyhood ambition to scale the Eiger in Switzerland.
He says that as a boy, climbing the mountain’s north face seemed terrifying but also fascinating. “But then, as with so many things in my life, I find the things that scare me most end up becoming obsessions. They become things that I ultimately find I have to do.”
Helen put him on a brutal caloriecontrolled, booze-free, five-month training regime to get him in shape.
Steve, who lost a stone, says: “Climbers don’t look like me – they are wiry and are looking for the maximum strength to body weight ratio.
“My kind of physique has been built up from a lifetime of judo and contact sports. I’m not built for it.”
Helen pushed Steve hard to turn him into a lean, mean climbing machine. But when it finally came to the ascent the weather was the winner. The
temperature