Craig Ferreira - shark conservationist, educator, attacks researcher and cage-diving promoter rolled into one - is to freedive around the world with twelve shark species regarded as those which most commonly attack man.
They have been dubbed the Dirty Dozen and, naturally, the great white is among them. But Ferreira insists that the main point of the 12-part Discovery Channel series is not to play up the shark-as-threat stereotype, but to challenge the view of sharks as mindless man-mincers.
His contention is that, while certain species of shark can and sometimes do attack humans, the risk is cut to negligible given the right approach to interacting with them.
'Sharks are predictable, otherwise you wouldn't be able to do it [swim among them],' he says. 'We've learned that they're very stable animals... If you understand those parameters, you can take very good calculated risks. But at the same time it's like a gun. If you become complacent, it's going to go off.'
The programmes will not shy away, however, from an internal family disagreement over Ferreira's plan to get close to the creatures. His father Theo, a shark hunter who has turned conservationist, is concerned for his son.
'Only an idiot freedives with great white sharks,' he told the film-making journalists. 'There is a very real potential danger of you being taken out, and the only thing that saves you is the fact that you are alien in their environment and that makes the shark a bit nervous.'
Quite what Craig Ferreira's wife thinks of it all is not yet clear - but her views, too, will make it into the film. Ferreira acknowledges that, as 'three strong characters', he, his wife and his father will be providing Discovery with a controversy-rich 'family dynamic'.
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