The world’s first and only heavy metal marine biologist, Tom “The Blowfish” Hird has been (not so) quietly shaking up the world of science broadcasting, bringing his obvious passion for conservation to screens around the world and sneaking all sorts of heavy metal references in whenever the mood so takes him.
Currently riding high on the success of Netflix series All The Sharks and Earth X adventure Ocean Wonders (sadly not available outside the US), we took a moment to check in with Tom to discuss his route into broadcasting, his process for pitching new shows, and his love of both marine biology and heavy metal.
As you might imagine, Tom is as genial in person as he is on screen, his passion for his work and his music infectious, and he generously took his time, guiding us across the highs and lows of his career to date.
To get a bit of background, when you started studying Marine Biology, from what I’ve understood, you did an undergraduate degree, but then stepped away from academia because you wanted to step out into the field to communicate some of what you learned, is that right?
Spot on. Yeah, I was initially going to do the whole, you know, BSC / MSC / PhD – all that kind of stuff – so, yeah, I was going to do the classical approach. Then, I figured what I’d do then would be to write papers, influence policy makers – produce science to protect sharks. But it was in 2005 and, halfway through my time at Bangor university – where I did my degree – I went on an expedition to the Adriatic and, while we were there, we chummed in the same place pretty much for two weeks solidly. Day and night, we just kept chumming, and we got like one shark. And it was just bonkers. It shouldn’t have happened. The Adriatic, the Mediterranean, that’s where all these cool Greek dudes were hoisting things out of the water and describing them for science for the very first time. And here we were, and we couldn’t get more than, like, a brief glimpse of a shark at a distance.
And that really, really slammed me and I came away thinking “good lord, by the time I’ve gone through that extra academia and got the extra loans…”
And I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, not even close, I’d be lucky if I’m actually in the cutlery drawer – I’m probably still in the sink somewhere waiting to be washed and dried off! But I thought to myself that I’d end up writing papers that ten other people would be reading, who already agree with me, and they’d be stuck behind a paywall anyway. So, I thought I’d change it up, so yeah. I took my nickname of The Blowfish, and I tried to become a wildlife presenter, a broadcaster – a science communicator as it’s now called – and get out there into the world and tell people about it.
The honest truth is that we are told, and we even believe that we do not have any power. But we just do – we’re the ones buying stuff off the shelves and it’s not even… I tell people this all the time, like, if you go and buy something from a supermarket, there isn’t a man or a woman who, at the end of the week tallies it all up and says, “ah ha, we sold ten pots of soup this week, we’ll make sure we have fifteen next week”. None of that happens, it’s a computer. And the computer says, “stock more of this, this, and this” and they do. So, we don’t have to talk to a human or convince a human. If we adjust our spending habits, the computer automatically adjusts the stocking habit, that then has that knock-on effect down the line and it’s very important to remember that. It is us; it is the small hands that make light work.
So, it’s as much about taking an activist stance and being able to directly influence as it was about communicating science from a more neutral perspective?
Yeah. You know, because, at the end of the day, the reason I even did marine biology and did all the sort of study on sharks and the route that I’ve gone down, I do just love talking about sharks and fish and all that kind of stuff. And they are so cool. I mean, we all know what it’s like when we get together with metalheads and similar ilks and you start talking about that album that you both absolutely love – that is true across the spectrum so, for me, talking about sharks is the same as pointing out what an absolute classic The Blackening is.
It’s an interesting thing – some of my background was in academia and one of the things that can be challenging is that academia is almost deliberately arcane in the way that it describes things, so learning to disseminate complex information to be people in a way that fosters the enthusiasm that you’re describing is not an easy thing to do – did it take some time to develop?
I feel that it was always kind of there through my own learning experience. I, myself, learn things because my brain automatically gives me an analogy for them. So, all I’m doing is spouting out those analogies. I think that’s inherent within my brains stem – it looks at something big and complicated and I understand all the individual parts of it, look through it and go “oh – you mean it’s like…” and the minute that that happens, I can explain it to others the same way.
So, I’ve never necessarily had to learn it. I think that, throughout my career as a presenter, I have obviously learned different styles – there are different house styles depending on whether you’re talking to an American audience, a worldwide audience, a British audience, all that kind of stuff, but that’s all with how you would pace your voice, where you’d pitch your voice. Sometimes you have to pitch up a level, sometimes you bring it down in terms of how big the words are that you’re going to use.
But, as far as describing the radular of a gastropod mollusc as exactly like an escalator, that was always there. So, yeah, it’s just a way to tell people about it that they can relate to.
Interesting – because, again, it feels like it goes against the academic grain of, perhaps, attempting to make things more complicated than it needs to be – especially in research and journal papers.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. Any paper I’ve read, you’ll re-read a sentence five or six times and you realise that all they actually said was “there are a lot of them in that pond!” But it was written as “the conspecifics of this particular species were numerous within the survey area”. So yeah – you mean the pond was full of fish? JUST SAY THAT!
But yeah, I fully agree but, to be fair, if I don’t fully understand something, I can’t describe it until I do. So, things like physics – it’s witchery to me and I understand enough about chemistry to know I shouldn’t go down the Breaking Bad route but, other than that, if it’s biological, I’m all over it mate!
So, once you came to the realisation that you didn’t want to pursue academia, how did you go about breaking into the world of media, because it’s not an easy world to enter into.
No, when I first started the, you know, the change as it were – this crazy journey that I’ve been on, it was at a very strange time where TV… TV has changed a lot, but it was at a moment where things were changing. So, my first showreels that I put together were filmed by a good friend of mine who would then go away and edit them and do his best to put it all together. It was proper home movie stuff, but then, after he’d finished, I’d burn them on to DVDs and then post DVDs around the country to various different production companies. So, that was at a time when, you know, production companies were ten a penny, because TV was really big. So, everyone was doing something of everything, somewhere.
Then the crash happened – we’re going back a bit now because I started making my first videos in 2007. So, the big financial crash happened, things changed, everything shifted, things like YouTube became the go-to thing and the first generation of YouTube celebrities -people like Joe Sugg, they succeed. And I’ve met the guy, he’s a lovely, lovely bloke and he himself will tell you that part of his success was that he was just the first one to do it. So, he was in the door before anyone else. The fact is that he’s very good at what he does, so that’s an aside, but yeah, coming through all that stuff and trying to switch and change along with the industry was a challenge.
Certainly, one thing along the way for how I’ve approached different scenarios in terms production companies and ideas, I have pretty much stayed true to The Blowfish. I’m still not wearing chinos and a blue shirt and North Face. And I’ve been rejected quite heavily for it. I remember that I had one rejection, it was an idea that got really quite far, and then they rejected it because they showed it to a group of school kids and one of them said “well, he looks like a convict!” So, that was it. I didn’t look how they needed me to look.
You know, all the way along, I could have changed and switched things around and dressed how I needed to dress. It’s never been a problem with how I speak or how I present, but I could have looked how I needed to look and I just… no, no, not for me. If I’m not me, then there’s very little point in doing it.
It’s an interesting point that, in traditional forms of media, there was an idealised view of what a science presenter sounds like and looks like, and it links quite closely to some of the stigmas we see around heavy metal in general.
Yeah, oh yeah. I’ve always done it with… well, I’m the heavy metal marine biologist! But yeah, that kind of stigma, it is what it is. The thing about the show we’ve just done, All The Sharks, it’s a complete change and a unique show in terms of what it offers in an environment that has gone extremely stale. Natural history has become the same show again and again and again. There have been attempts to replicate the unreplicatable – which is big Dave (David Attenborough). You can’t… it doesn’t matter who you throw into that chair, that’s his. It’s like trying to say that someone else can be Ozzy Osbourne, it’s like “no you don’t, no, no, no” – it’s Big Dave and no one.
I think, in a way, audiences are kind of fed up of seeing… I mean, the footage is incredible. The behaviours and everything, it’s superb. There isn’t any argument with that but it’s all the same. We see things shot in ¾ speed or super-slow motion and, for however long it is, an hour or whatever, you completely detach from the moment. But you dome away and you haven’t learned anything. You haven’t made a connection with anything because it’s been, in the business we call it nature porn! Because that’s what it is – you know, stylised, really clean cut. It doesn’t show the nitty gritty, the small players, the also-rans or anything. It’s class A creatures or nothing at all. And, again, with All The Sharks on Netflix, we wanted to show all the sharks!
For that show, we showed sharks on camera that have never been broadcast before. They’re well known, they’re common, they’re not rare. We didn’t find any new species. But they’re sharks that have never ever been shown on camera before because they weren’t big enough or bitey enough. working, certainly, with the best production team for that. The guys involved with that, the ethos behind that, really does match mine as well – which is, look, we’re passionate people. We don’t necessarily look like you, that isn’t a problem, but we’re going to do what we’re going to do So, yeah, that’s the kettle of fish that I am.
Your approach in those early days was very similar to a band trying to get demos out in those pre-digital days – for me it was sending out cassettes (which has probably betrayed my age a bit) …
I really love the sound on cassette though. I don’t know where they are anymore, but I have a couple. I remember going to see a certain gig by a certain, rather disgraced goth rocker and, opening for him, was disturbed and they gave out Down With The Sickness on tape…
Oh man, I saw that tour. I think I still have that tape somewhere…
It’s probably worth money now. Well, maybe not, but yeah, I saw that at the NEC. There’s a nice sound on a tape. But yeah, I’m going slightly off topic…
But yes, it was. I kept a list on my computer of all the people I’d contacted, when I contacted them, what I said, what they said back to me and I would check, you know, at ten days, fifteen days, and it was tough work. So, I was working, obviously, doing… well, I’ve done a lot of random jobs. And that’s another thing with a lot of British wildlife presenters and broadcasters, and even influencers, they’ve been lucky enough that they don’t need to work, so they can go off and do what they need to do.
People ask me why I can’t just go off and film a load of sharks and stick it on YouTube… and it’s because I can’t afford to fly to XY and Z, hire XY and Z, to put out whatever it is that I need to out. But yeah, some people have been lucky enough to be able to do it all the time and fair play to them, you have to use the resources available – why wouldn’t you?
But I wasn’t in that position. I was always working. I’ve worked in aquariums, pubs, Liverpool University… I’d do a shift, then come home and spend an hour or more checking emails, checking through this, writing that, it was hard work. It was really hard work to get the ball going and get people paying attention. Or even bringing me in for a meeting.
So, obviously now, you are more in control of the creative direction? How long does it take to develop a show from initial concept to production.
It’s a bit of a piece of string question, to be honest. Some things just happen really easily; others get stuck in development hell. The show that I did, which is as close to being mine as mine can be, is a show that I did for Earth X TV, with a production company in Bristol called Off The Fence, and it was called Ocean Wonders. Now, annoyingly, it’s only available in the US, which is a shame because it means no one elsewhere can see it and it’s really good. That show was all mine, it was all my idea, and we filmed the pilot for that show – the taster – the year before COVID or just before COVID. And we ended up… it went to Animal Planet, and they made a lot of noises for a long time, but we ended up getting a bit messed around, and in the end, they didn’t go for it, and, by that point, we’d wasted like eight to ten months.
Then COVID hit, so it was a lot harder to sort things out through that, and we were rewriting it so we could do it COVID safe, which was a nightmare, and then we came out the other side and we got with these guys at Earth X, and they saw the showreel and said they wanted it exactly as it was. So, very quickly from that point, we could put it together. We got it filmed in six to eight weeks and then it went to edit. So, yeah, when you get round to it, you can put it together pretty quickly and certainly, if you already have a format, then you can turn it around even faster.
With All The Sharks, it wasn’t my idea. I was brought in a few weeks before it was due to go out because they weren’t initially going to have a host, it was just going to be a narrator throughout the whole thing. And again, this guy called Mike, it was his idea originally, and he’d had that idea for years and years and years, so if you push it, eventually someone will find it. And it was the same for me for Ocean Wonders. That was originally called Heavy Metal Marine Biology, and I had been pitching that show and that style for years and years and years, and someone suddenly thought they’d have it.
So, there is no truer exponent of right place at the right time than broadcasting. You come to the right person, make the right noise at the right time, they’ll have you.
I would imagine, in terms of trying to fill the need to reach a mass audience, while remaining true to the idea of the heavy metal marine biologist, you have to be careful not to overdo the niche references?
My shows are full of Easter eggs. For people who want to look, my shows are full of Easter eggs. I will often, if it’s not a wrestling phrase, or a wrestling position, I remember on my first shows – one of my first showreels actually, it was a pilot I did for ITV Granada – and we were talking about gulls coming from the sky and I was saying, “in this case the killer came from the sky”. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll be able to watch the show and spot the references. I’ll throw in a metal phrase whenever I can or that kind of thing. I throw in lots of stuff. Stuff in the background as well. Some of my action figures have made it into the background of the show, or I’ll have one of my guitars – one was with me when we did Ocean Wonders – that features heavily through that and frankly, unless the director tells me not to say that, they’re staying, 100%!
In terms of developing music and soundtracks, have you ever been tempted to add your own music to the mix?
I’d love to. I’d absolutely love to. But I mean if I get the option, I totally will, but the simple answer is when it comes to the edit side, all these production companies pay for access to a studio full of clips they can use without worry about copyright. So, it’s already fully recorded, it’s already there, and it would be so much added extra for me to do something else. But, if I’m lucky, one day I’ll be able to play my own theme tune. I’m a bassist, so you probably won’t be able to hear it, but if I get a real kick ass guitarist over the top, it’d still sound good.
It seems like sharks and heavy metal are a match made in hell for this sort of thing.
Oh yeah, unless someone’s done it since, I’m the only person alive to ever play live music, or live metal, to sharks in both Soth Africa and also in the UK. They love it. It’s the basslines [impersonates bass] – they sound like a struggling fish and that just brings them in. They love it. Either that or they just love metal, that’s an option as well.
We had a house rabbit that used to move towards the speakers, the heavier the music. He really liked The Blackening, actually. He didn’t like Devin Townsend, he used to stamp when he was on – I don’t know if it was something in the guitar frequencies – and he also wasn’t too keen on Pink Floyd, it used to freak him out.
Well, Pink Floyd will do that!
And you’re a fan of Slayer, I think, did you see them on the last tour?
I like a bit of Slayer. I’m not the world’s biggest fan. I didn’t see them on tour, but I did think it was interesting that Kerry King, in the time they were split, he decided to just slander them all! I thought that was very interesting. It was like “have you been spending too much time chatting to Dave Mustaine?!”
But yeah, I like a bit of Slayer, they’ll be in there. But they’re not one of my top, top bands – I’ve been misquoted somewhere, no doubt.
So, that being the case, were you to be dropped on an island in shark infested waters, are there any albums you’d have to take?
I’d probably go for Lateralus, because I’m a massive, massive Tool fan. I’d have Cannibal by Static X, because I’m a huge Static X fan. Then, Master Of Puppets because that’s basically perfect from start to finish, you can always listen to it. And The Blackening, because that’s another album that’s perfect from start to finish. And then… [ponders for a while] You’d want something packed full of bangers – oh! Slipknot’s first album. 100% I can’t believe it took me that long. I was going down a Soulfly / Sepultura path, but Slipknot – just bangers.
It’s really tough! But some great calls there. So, looking to the future, have you ever thought about collaborating with a band or some bands for some sort of show?
I absolutely have. I know that there are bands or band members who are passionate about conservation and who, themselves, really love wildlife. I think, more than anything else, it’s a hell of a bridge for me to get to them, because we’re in two very different worlds, in terms of the circles my agent moves in vs the circles they move in. But I’d love to, because there’s so much you could do as well – anything from… I look at My Own Summer and the video they did then. Not only is that a really good tune (I mean, I’m not a big Deftones fan, but I like the headline stuff), and that’s a great video and we’ve seen over the years many bands put their political or personal beliefs forward through their videos, to highlight things, highlight causes. It’s a doable thing.
I’d love, love to take a group of musicians or a band out shark diving or get them playing underwater. It’s just trying to get across that barrier so, certainly, if you’re ever speaking to someone who likes sharks, you can point them to me! As longs as it’s not anyone from Bring Me The Horizon. I’d happily take them shark diving; I’d just turn off all their air!
And on that bombshell…
Oh, I can go further than that. I have a deep personal dislike for Bring Me The Horizon’s music. It wakes me up at night. Not because anyone’s playing it, but just because it exists! They’re good for some people, which is fine, let them do their thing.
Thanks so much dude!
