In his new series Martin Clunes is shocked by sharks, giant crabs and sunbathing sea lions!
Martin Clunes: Islands of the Pacific Thursday 9.00pm ITV
Ed Grenby - 10 January 2022
Martin Clunes stands on the brink of the underworld and visibly shakes with fear.
It’s the first episode of his new three part travelogue, Islands of the Pacific, and he’s in French Polynesia – “all set up to do a drone shot of me standing on top of this rock, which had been seen as the gateway to the afterlife. When tribal chiefs died, their bodies were pushed over the edge.” The plan was that he would climb the rock, and look down hundreds of feet to the sea below. “But I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t even go within four metres of it – it was too scary, I was filled with horror. I’ve had a kind of vertigo since my daughter was born, 20-odd years ago, which was a kind of mortality check.
Normally on a programme like this, someone would have forced me up the rock, but luckily I partown the production company making this one [Buffalo Pictures], so that didn’t happen.” Despite French Polynesia’s deserved reputation as a primal paradise on Earth – Tahiti and Bora Bora didn’t become honeymoon bywords by accident – that rock wasn’t Clunes’s only brush with death. “I was swimming with these tiny, harmless, black-tipped reef sharks, and feeling quite brave,” he says, “but then suddenly the guide said we had to get back into the boat. Once there, she told me that there had been much bigger, more aggressive sharks coming towards us. I wasn’t so brave then. And later, back on land, there were the coconut crabs: they look like something from Alien, up to three feet wide with these massive claws that’ll cheerfully snip your finger off. They’re terrifying!” And that’s just episode one…
Elsewhere in the series, the presenter’s animal encounters are more benign: “On the Galápagos Islands, for instance, people just live alongside these extraordinary creatures. We got stuck in a little traffic jam behind a giant tortoise, with all the cars slowly going round this 100-year-old monster as it wandered up a hill. “Then at my hotel, on the waterfront, the sunloungers were occupied by sea lions more often than people. They’re basking on the beach, quite happily surrounded by humans doing the same.” In the end, of course, the greatest danger was a certain virus. “We were filming the series towards the end of 2019,” says Clunes, “and when we flew through Los Angeles airport, there was a lot of talk about this new ‘Chinese flu’ that had started because ‘somebody had eaten a bat’ or something [rumours later discounted]. And this giant baggage hall was rammed solid with people from China. Then by the time we were coming back from Fiji and Tonga in early 2020, we didn’t even have to break stride in that hall, it was empty.”
The pandemic, and the delays it caused the production, meant Clunes and his team “had to make huge changes” to the programme. “For one, we had to go back and do new voiceovers referencing Covid, because we had to justify why we weren’t all wearing masks, and why we did certain things – for instance, on Vanuatu we were invited to a kava ceremony, where this narcotic root is chewed by virgin boys then spat into a cloth and wrung out and shared in a communal bowl. I’m not sure we’d do that now. “
And another thing we had to change was a section with the Yakel people, who for many years have seen the Duke of Edinburgh as a god. Those scenes were filmed before Prince Philip died, so what seemed amusing when he was alive is much more poignant now. But I reached out to the Duke when I got back, and sent him a photo of me with the whole tribe under a huge tree, and I said his influence was obviously a force for good as they were absolutely charming. And he sent a message back saying he was glad I enjoyed my time there.” Clunes sent photos to an old pal, too.
From his hotel on Tahiti, he had views across the neon-blue waters to Mo’orea, the next island in the archipelago – and the shooting location for 1984 film The Bounty, starring Mel Gibson, Liam Neeson, Anthony Hopkins and, in his very first screen role, a 22-year-old hopeful called Neil Morrissey, one of Clunes’s co-stars in Men Behaving Badly. “I sent him pictures of it,” Clunes chuckles, “but I didn’t get to Mo’orea to find out whether he’s revered as a deity, too.” He may yet get the chance (series two is in the works), but there’s a lot of ground – or rather, water – for any series on the Pacific to cover. “That’s the interesting thing,” muses Clunes. “It’s huge, extending from Hawaii to New Zealand, a liquid continent. But, as someone out there told me, they don’t consider themselves separated by water; they’re joined by water. That’s rather lovely, isn’t it?”
Martin Clunes stands on the brink of the underworld and visibly shakes with fear.
It’s the first episode of his new three part travelogue, Islands of the Pacific, and he’s in French Polynesia – “all set up to do a drone shot of me standing on top of this rock, which had been seen as the gateway to the afterlife. When tribal chiefs died, their bodies were pushed over the edge.” The plan was that he would climb the rock, and look down hundreds of feet to the sea below. “But I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t even go within four metres of it – it was too scary, I was filled with horror. I’ve had a kind of vertigo since my daughter was born, 20-odd years ago, which was a kind of mortality check.
Normally on a programme like this, someone would have forced me up the rock, but luckily I partown the production company making this one [Buffalo Pictures], so that didn’t happen.” Despite French Polynesia’s deserved reputation as a primal paradise on Earth – Tahiti and Bora Bora didn’t become honeymoon bywords by accident – that rock wasn’t Clunes’s only brush with death. “I was swimming with these tiny, harmless, black-tipped reef sharks, and feeling quite brave,” he says, “but then suddenly the guide said we had to get back into the boat. Once there, she told me that there had been much bigger, more aggressive sharks coming towards us. I wasn’t so brave then. And later, back on land, there were the coconut crabs: they look like something from Alien, up to three feet wide with these massive claws that’ll cheerfully snip your finger off. They’re terrifying!” And that’s just episode one…
Elsewhere in the series, the presenter’s animal encounters are more benign: “On the Galápagos Islands, for instance, people just live alongside these extraordinary creatures. We got stuck in a little traffic jam behind a giant tortoise, with all the cars slowly going round this 100-year-old monster as it wandered up a hill. “Then at my hotel, on the waterfront, the sunloungers were occupied by sea lions more often than people. They’re basking on the beach, quite happily surrounded by humans doing the same.” In the end, of course, the greatest danger was a certain virus. “We were filming the series towards the end of 2019,” says Clunes, “and when we flew through Los Angeles airport, there was a lot of talk about this new ‘Chinese flu’ that had started because ‘somebody had eaten a bat’ or something [rumours later discounted]. And this giant baggage hall was rammed solid with people from China. Then by the time we were coming back from Fiji and Tonga in early 2020, we didn’t even have to break stride in that hall, it was empty.”
The pandemic, and the delays it caused the production, meant Clunes and his team “had to make huge changes” to the programme. “For one, we had to go back and do new voiceovers referencing Covid, because we had to justify why we weren’t all wearing masks, and why we did certain things – for instance, on Vanuatu we were invited to a kava ceremony, where this narcotic root is chewed by virgin boys then spat into a cloth and wrung out and shared in a communal bowl. I’m not sure we’d do that now. “
And another thing we had to change was a section with the Yakel people, who for many years have seen the Duke of Edinburgh as a god. Those scenes were filmed before Prince Philip died, so what seemed amusing when he was alive is much more poignant now. But I reached out to the Duke when I got back, and sent him a photo of me with the whole tribe under a huge tree, and I said his influence was obviously a force for good as they were absolutely charming. And he sent a message back saying he was glad I enjoyed my time there.” Clunes sent photos to an old pal, too.
From his hotel on Tahiti, he had views across the neon-blue waters to Mo’orea, the next island in the archipelago – and the shooting location for 1984 film The Bounty, starring Mel Gibson, Liam Neeson, Anthony Hopkins and, in his very first screen role, a 22-year-old hopeful called Neil Morrissey, one of Clunes’s co-stars in Men Behaving Badly. “I sent him pictures of it,” Clunes chuckles, “but I didn’t get to Mo’orea to find out whether he’s revered as a deity, too.” He may yet get the chance (series two is in the works), but there’s a lot of ground – or rather, water – for any series on the Pacific to cover. “That’s the interesting thing,” muses Clunes. “It’s huge, extending from Hawaii to New Zealand, a liquid continent. But, as someone out there told me, they don’t consider themselves separated by water; they’re joined by water. That’s rather lovely, isn’t it?”
ED GRENBY