Eureka!: Flesh-Eating River Monster (Icon Films for Five)

Five's Flesh-Eating River Monster

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Executive producer Harry Marshall embarked on an adventure to hook a man-eating catfish.

Where did the idea come from?
Jeremy Wade is one of the top freshwater fishermen in the world and has heard lots of fishermen's tales.  When I asked him what was the most extraordinary story he had ever heard, he told me about a man-eating catfish in the Himalayan foothills. 

What made it stand out?
When someone uses the phrase "now there's a man-eating catfish in the Himalayan foothills", they generally hold your attention. What made this stand out is that we have all heard of sharks eating people - but a killer freshwater fish thousands of miles from the sea? That's new and not what you expect.

How did you pitch it?
I called Bethan Corney at Five and said, "There's this man-eating catfish..."

How did it evolve from there?
Bethan snapped up the UK rights for her strand Nature Shock. She has a very specific formula and we reversioned the Animal Planet version to her template.

What challenges did you face?
The goonch catfish had never been filmed before in the wild. The area where the reports were coming from was very remote, on the border between India and Nepal - an information black hole. It was very difficult to get there at all, with the river very fast flowing and dangerous once you finally made it.

And then there was the small matter of catching the fish. Not much is known about the goonch, so Jeremy had to work it out as he went along: what bait to use and where and how to go about fishing for them.

Jeremy took out some very specialist kit - a mini ROV submarine with an onboard camera and sonar - but in the end it came down to good old fashioned rod and line.

On the first trip, Jeremy only caught a small goonch and we had to go back twice before he really knew what he was doing. By then the monsoon was about to break and it was a race against the clock before the river turned into a torrent - but, finally, after a mammoth struggle, he landed a new world record goonch. A real flesh-eating river monster - just like it says on the tin.
Flesh-Eating River Monster airs on Five on 21 October