Nigel Marven

Nigel Alan Marven (born 27 November 1960) is a British wildlife TV presenter, naturalist, conservationist, author, and television producer.

He is best known as presenter of the BBC miniseries Chased by Dinosaurs, its sequel, Sea Monsters, as well as the ITV miniseries Prehistoric Park.

He is also known for his unorthodox, spontaneous, and daring style of presenting wildlife documentaries as well as for including factual knowledge in the proceedings.

Marven was born in Barnet but grew up in St. Albans.

As a child he loved animals.

His first pet was a hamster called Hummy.

He kept stick insects, boa constrictors and even an eel in a bath.

When he was 15, he also owned young spectacled caiman.

Nigel studied botany and zoology at the University of Bristol until the age of 22 when he left to begin his career at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol.

From 1982 to the mid-1990s, Nigel first worked as a wildlife documentary researcher for such programmes as The First Eden and My Family and Other Animals.

He then went on to begin producing nature documentary series, one of the first being Realms of the Russian Bear in 1992.

He enjoyed a 12-year professional collaboration with the natural historian David Attenborough, whom he holds in high esteem.

In 1998, he moved to ITV where he was asked to present wildlife documentaries as well as produce them.

In his first television series for ITV, Giants, he swam with a great white shark without the protection of a cage.

Other scenes included a goliath birdeater spider, arguably the largest spider in the world, walking over his face, and Marven grappling a fifteen-foot African rock python deep in its underground lair.

This style of presenting has won him many viewers and to date he has presented more than 50 wildlife programs and series for TV.

In 2000, Nigel became the host of the hit annual Discovery Channel event Shark Week, and held this role for three years.

In 2002, the Impossible Pictures production company asked Nigel to present the Walking with Dinosaurs Special episodes "The Giant Claw" and "Land of Giants", which premiered on BBC One to nearly seven million viewers in late 2002.

In 2003, Nigel also hosted a sequel miniseries, Sea Monsters – A Walking with Dinosaurs Trilogy, which was an even bigger success.

In addition to being presenter for Impossible Pictures's time-travelling programmes, Marven also founded his own independent company Image Impact in 2003, and started producing his own wildlife films, including a few one-hour specials and then miniseries, such as Penguin Safari and Panda Adventure, both which aired on Channel 5 and Animal Planet.

He then continued his partnership with Impossible Pictures as the studio moved on to ITV, beginning with Prehistoric Park in 2006, a fictional series about travelling back in time to rescue examples of extinct creatures such as Tyrannosaurus, Woolly Mammoth, Arthropleura and others.

In 2007, he also worked with Tigress Productions which resulted in his shows Shark Island and Jaguar Adventure.

In his final appearance for Impossible Pictures, Marven went on to be featured as himself in season 3, episode 4 of the ITV action drama series Primeval, which aired in 2009.

He is seen playing with a baby Velociraptor, before encountering a Giganotosaurus, which, it is implied, eats him off-screen.

In the first half of the 2010s, Nigel produced nature documentaries such as Untamed China, Wild Colombia, Whale Adventure and Nigel Marven's Cruise Ship Adventures, the latter which was broadcast in May and June 2015 on Watch.

During the summer of 2014, Eden Channel in the UK started a new competition for aspiring wildlife filmmakers called Eden Shorts.

The task was to make one-minute videos with animals, with the best ones to be shown on TV.

Nigel Marven, along with Michaela Strachan, were judges.

Nigel has also made some short how-to-guides, available through Eden Channel's website.

One of his more recent successes, Ten Deadliest Snakes, was first broadcast on Animal Planet in the United States in spring 2014, and on Eden in the UK in June of the same year.

In May 2015, Eden premiered a film called Eden Shorts: From Lens to Screen presented by Marven.

In the show, he meets competition finalists and reveals techniques used to shoot their videos.

Season 2 of Ten Deadliest Snakes premiered in autumn 2015 on Eden, while season 3 began airing on 5 January 2017 on Nat Geo Wild in the UK.

Highlights of Ten Deadliest Snakes included, among others, visiting sea krait caves in South China Sea, handling black mamba in South Africa, snake-hunting with Steve Irwin's son Robert in the billabongs of Australia Zoo and visiting the Brazilian island of Queimada Grande, home of the golden lancehead with a scientific expedition.

In January 2018, Nigel's Untamed Philippines was screened on Nat Geo Wild in the USA.

The presenter-led version of this documentary called Wild Philippines with Nigel Marven aired on Viasat Nature in Europe in March and April 2018 and on Animal Planet India in June 2018, with the American TV channel PBS airing the series in late summer 2019.

As of November 2022, Nigel Marven's newest nature series is Wild Central America, a documentary miniseries consisting of four episodes, each looking at wildlife of a different Central American country, with focus on Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panama.

While Wild Honduras premiered on Viasat Nature in central and eastern Europe in summer 2019, the rest of the series was first broadcast on the same channel in late spring and summer 2020.

The presenter-less version of Wild Costa Rica and Wild Guatemala premiered on Nat Geo Wild in February 2020.

In September 2020, Blue Meridian and Crytivo released the official trailer for the video game Prehistoric Kingdom, featuring Nigel Marven as narrator.