Wild Life: An Audience With Steve Backshall, Grand Opera House, York, June 16

BAFTA award-winning adventurer Steve Backshall has travelled the world encountering the world’s deadliest creatures but can still be surprised.

Soon to experience the wild side of life in York at the Grand Opera House, he has met more wildlife than most of us, but only the day before his YorkTwenty4Seven interview Steve had an unexpected encounter that really excited him.

“Yesterday I was sitting where I am right now, at my desk, and saw a pair of red kites outside the window. A male and a female,” he says. “They brought their talons together and tumbled down out of the sky, and at the last minute, when it looked like they would crash land in next door’s garden, they separated.”

He had heard of such tumbling behaviour, but not in red kites and certainly not outside his home in Buckinghamshire.

“I was ecstatic at seeing them right in front of me while I was writing. Every single day I see something that surprises me. It goes on forever,” he says.

That encounter with birds of prey happened close to home, whereas usually the man billed as “the next David Attenborough” is travelling the world in his role as the author, expedition leader, naturalist and wildlife expert known to young CBBC viewers as “Deadly”.

The fearless presenter of Deadly 60, Live And Deadly, Deadly 360 and Deadly Art goes globetrotting to learn about deadly predators and what they can teach us, but now he is embarking on a venture that carries just as many potential risks.

Steve is touring theatres with A Wild Life, one of those An Audience With shows that will involve him talking about his adventures, showing clips of animals that have inspired him and taking questions from the audience.

The tour also marks the publication of Tiger Wars, his debut novel for Orion Children’s Books. The book introduces Saker and Sinter on a quest to right some of the horrific wrongs perpetrated against wildlife as they come face to face with “the world’s most fascinating, majestic and lethal creatures”.

In the show, Steve will be discussing “some of the things that haven’t been seen on TV before and having a look behind the scenes”.

“Quite a hefty portion of the evening is for people to grill me, to ask questions they’ve always wanted to know about wildlife,” he says. “The first few times I was terrified because the natural world is a huge subject and, despite being pretty confident, you never know what people are going to ask.

“But I’ve been doing this for a long time – 13 years – and I can answer 95 to 98 per cent of the things people ask. I quite look forward to it; it’s an element that every evening is going to be different.”

It goes without saying that being on stage is very different to being in the field, and Steve admits he finds talking in public “quite frightening”, but he believes it is vital to do so.

“There’s a tendency to be quite distant from the audience. Most of the time I’m in the desert or a rainforest or up a mountain, where you can lose touch with what people think and feel, but it’s really important to get people interested and inspired,” he says.

Getting up close and personal with the world’s deadliest creatures looks dangerous work and while Steve does not play down that aspect, he points out it is never the things that people expect that cause most problems.

“I’ve spent years with venomous snakes and not been bitten, nor have any of the team, but there have been a few difficult moments,” he says. “Wild mammals like buffalo and elephants are worst of all. They are faster, the biggest and can be unpredictable. You can find yourself in a situation.”

Over the years he has kept a variety of animals, from geckos to scorpions, but lives on his own at present and does not feel his neighbours would want to pop in to feed the praying mantis while he was away on an expedition.

Filming the Deadly 60 series has led Steve to realise that what matters most in his shows is putting across the conservation message, which you can do by making something cool and full of action and adventure. “That way you can get hold of people who don’t necessarily like wildlife. The message is in the background; they can take it or leave it,” he says.

After spending six weeks on tour talking to people, Steve will be off on another expedition, and he is a man with a mission. There are around 260 countries in the world and, so far, he has visited only 101.

So far the financial constraints facing many film-makers of fact and fiction have not affected him, although finance has kept him away from Antarctica.

“I’d love to go there but we’re ‘cheap as chips’ TV and Antarctica is expensive,” he says. “I think finally next year, after 14 years in TV, I might get there.”

• A Wild Life: An Audience With Steve Backshall, Grand Opera House, York, June 16, 2.30pm. Please note, Steve’s evening performance has been cancelled. Box office: 0844 871 3024 and at agtickets.com/York