I was so scared of dying in a shark attack I made a will: Countdown's Rachel Riley reveals her fears she'd be a 'goner' during filming for shocking new show

Daily Mail​

8 hours ago

Rachel Riley was frightened before she even flew out to film new reality show Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters.
But here she reveals the sheer euphoria of going eyeball to eyeball with ferocious maneaters...
We were thrown in the deep end, literally,' says Rachel Riley after being challenged to swim with the most frightening creatures in the sea. 'I was scared, but I was also really excited. You don't know how you're going to react until you're in there doing it!'
Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters is the breathless name of a new reality show in which seven men and women fly off to Bimini in the Bahamas to go nose-to-nose with the ocean's apex predators. Rachel says she expected a nice gentle start, but on the first day she and the others were told to put on a wetsuit and scuba gear and get ready to dive. She then had to climb down a ladder into deep water with nothing but a heavy-duty metal cage between her and the killers about to approach.
'Keep your hands and feet inside the cage or the sharks will have them,' said one of the experts from above. Then out of the haze of the Caribbean waters came not one or two but a host of ruthless-looking bull sharks with their sharp teeth and hunger for prey. 'I did feel fear at seeing a shark up close for the first time, my heart was racing but I didn't freak out,' says Rachel, who was still startled as the bull sharks came straight at her and banged into the bars of the cage. 'We later learned that every kind of shark has a different personality. The bull shark is a sneaky f*****. The experts don't trust them.
'You can see their eyes. You can sense their movements. And you're in their world.' She had a huge rush afterwards. 'It was glorious. There's a feeling of euphoria. You can really feel the chemical reaction in your body.'
After that shocking first day she was dared to go on and swim with other kinds of shark without a cage, but that only highlighted the danger of her first encounter. 'If a bull shark turned up when we were in the water without a cage they would want to get us out quick.'
The maths genius who co-hosts Countdown and its late-night spin-off Eight Out Of Ten Cats admits she was afraid before even getting on the plane. 'I wrote my will before we went. This trip made me want to make sure everything was signed, just in case. They're wild animals. You're scuba diving. Anything could happen.' The 39-year-old had seen how brutal sharks can be while on holiday with Pasha Kovalev, her husband and former Strictly Come Dancing partner. 'We were in the Galapagos islands and we saw a bright pink thing in the water. We thought it was a discarded life jacket. It was a sea lion that had just been bitten in half by a bull shark, and it was trying to crawl out of the water,' she says. 'We had been snorkelling off the boat in those same waters.'
She and Pasha met on Strictly in 2013 and married six years later. Their daughters Noa and Maven are three and five. 'I didn't tell them what I was going away to do because I didn't want to scare them. It was only when I was in Bimini on a video call by the water that I said, "Do you want to see some sharks?" They said, "Yeah!" If you fall in the water with a bull shark you're a goner, but the girls said, "You've got to go swimming with them, Mummy!" That reassured Rachel. 'They were too young to have any fear about what I was doing.'
The rest of the celebrity shark-bait includes the great Sir Lenny Henry, comedian Ross Noble, Amandaland and Call The Midwife actors Lucy Punch and Helen George, Paralympian and presenter Ade Adepitan and Dougie Poynter from McFly.
Weekend has seen the first episode and can testify to the shock and alarm on all their faces when Paul de Gelder walked in the room. The ex-Navy diver lost an arm and a leg during a frenzied shark attack in Sydney harbour, but has since become a conservationist and unlikely champion for the species.
Still, he reminded the startled celebrities the aim was to swim in open waters, unprotected, with the same kinds of creatures that nearly killed him. 'Next time there will be no cage.' The plan was to get used to being in the sea with rays and lemon sharks, then rise up through the scale of danger from hammerheads to the mighty tiger. 'Tiger sharks are big, they can grow to more than four metres long,' says Rachel. 'They're the scavengers of the sea. They'll just eat anything. There had been fatalities from tiger sharks in that region not too long before we were there.'
Helen George from Call The Midwife struggled the most at the start because of a phobia. 'Your subconscious does weird things to you,' says Rachel. 'If you're scared of the water then the rest of it – sharks and all – is so much more of a challenge, isn't it? But she's one of the strongest women I know. She was incredible.'
Shark! is inspired by the movie Jaws, which turns 50 this summer and gave the Great White a bad name as a monstrous man-eater. 'I was seven when I first saw part of Jaws,' says Rachel, who grew up near Southend in Essex and has a poignant reason to recall that night. 'I remember watching half the film and then being told my grandad had died. I didn't ever return to it until now.'
But actually Shark! is not as crass or cheesy as the reality shows it seems, at first glance, to outdo. There are no winners. The seven celebrities work together to overcome fears and learn more about what they're facing. The result is stunning underwater footage and an unexpectedly moving exploration of our relationship with sharks. 'We need them for the health of the oceans,' says Rachel. 'The sharks eat the pest fish that can destroy the coral reefs. If the sharks are not there the reefs are soon gone, they're not protecting the shoreline, you get erosion and extreme weather and everything is thrown out of balance.'
So, surely the producers were not really going to endanger anyone's life making this? 'I've got quite a rational brain so on the way there I was thinking, "How can they get insurance for this unless it's safe? How bad could it be?" Also, I'm quite trusting,' says Rachel. 'But then Paul, who's been through the worst thing that could possibly happen, was like, "No, don't be complacent, these are real sharks".'
The killer instinct was never far from the surface. 'Swimming with sharks was like being with the Mafia. Everything is fine while everything's fine and everyone's laughing, but they could turn in an instant and there would be nothing you could do about it.' Not every celebrity was brave enough to take the final dive. 'By then you really did feel like you had a responsibility to look after your life, because something bad could happen.'
After getting a master's degree in mathematics from Oriel College, Oxford, Rachel's big break came after a night on the town when she finally gave in to her mother Celia's pressure to apply for the Countdown job, as Carol Vorderman was leaving. The form said they were big shoes to fill so a hungover Rachel wrote: 'I'm a maths geek, I love the show, I'm an Essex girl so why not fill them with some white stilettos?'
She beat a thousand applicants and has been solving the maths problems on the show since 2009, as well as showing a dry and salty wit on Eight Out Of Ten Cats. Rachel was partnered with Pasha on 2013's Strictly and split up with her husband during the run, before marrying Pasha in a secret wedding in Vegas. Fame, success and a contented home life gave Rachel the courage to start speaking up on the things she cared about, inspired by her mother's work as a charity fundraiser. But it has led to a vicious backlash online. 'The more I speak, the more abuse I get, and the more abuse I get, the more I speak,' Rachel has said. She was given an MBE in 2023 for services to Holocaust education and anti-Semitism awareness.
Sometimes she gets it wrong, like being too quick to link the stabbings in Sydney last year with Islamist terrorism. She deleted her post but cancel culture means some people now avoid controversy at all costs when they become famous. 'They might be wiser,' she says wryly.
Does she have any regrets then, about being so vocal? 'It does come at a cost, but you don't necessarily know the cost until you've already paid,' she says, then checks herself. 'I don't like to do the whole hindsight thing, there's no point. When I do anything I think: 'Can I look at myself in the mirror if I do this or if I don't do this?' That's the only real decision. You've got to answer to yourself and to your family.'
Her mother is Jewish and Rachel has embraced that identity more and more in recent years despite describing herself as an atheist. Her account on X – with more than 600,000 followers – is pinned with a post that says: 'OK Jews. Things are sh** right now. But we will get through this.' Everything has become more intense since the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and Israel's response.
'I read recently someone talking about how it's no longer an irrelevance to be Jewish,' says Rachel. 'I was irrelevantly Jewish before all this. I've got a Hebrew name and a mezuzah [a small parchment scroll] on the door but it didn't affect me day to day. And now it does.' She has become one of the public faces of a community that feels severely under pressure. Rachel acknowledges that not everyone in it agrees with all her statements but says, 'I talk to a hell of a lot of Jewish people and they're really kind and supportive and grateful.'
Another conflict has also affected her life deeply. Pasha is Russian – and when his home country invaded Ukraine in 2022 they took in a family fleeing the war. 'It goes back to the Jewish thing,' she explains. 'My family fled persecution in the pogroms in what was Russia but is now Ukraine and ended up here at the turn of the 1900s, with no one to help them. This time we were in a position to help.'
Still, it's a big decision to open your home to strangers. 'I wanted my girls to see an example. Noa and Maven are of Russian heritage and I didn't want them to feel any sense of shame or guilt about who they are.' The refugees were a lawyer called Sasha, her ten-year-old son Mykyta, her mother and aunt. 'They're part of the family now. My little girls say Mykyta is their big brother. He says he's got little sisters.'
Her body language has changed. When we started Rachel was chatty and relaxed. Now the stress on her face is a reminder these conflicts are personally painful. There's a photoshoot to do, so I end by asking how she trained for the Bahamas. 'I've always been sporty but it's just chasing after toddlers at the moment, that's where I get my exercise now.'
Wearing a wetsuit on camera was no problem, she volunteers. 'Once you've had kids a lot of the hang-ups go. Your body changes in ways you've got no control over. I'm going to turn 40 next, I just don't really care. My one vain act for this project was to say, "I'm going to be in the water all the time, I'll get my eyebrows painted in".'
Rachel relaxes again. These are safer waters. 'That's why Shark! was so wonderful, because sharks only care if they can eat you. Sharks couldn't give a t*** who you are!'
Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters starts Monday 14 July at 9pm on ITV1, ITVX, STV and STV Player.