EXCLUSIVE I made a whole documentary tracking down a great white shark to swim with - here's why when I finally found one I had to give up my dream
Sharks Up Close With Bertie Gregory sees the wildlife filmmaker and his team head to South Africa.
They hope to dive and record great white sharks hunting seals, without the protection of a cage.
Throughout the show, Bertie gets up close with a range of underwater animals including southern right whales and spotted ragged tooth sharks.
However, the National Geographic explorer comes across unexpected hurdles in his search for a great white shark.
Bertie revealed to MailOnline he thought it would be 'straightforward' to locate one of the most feared sea creatures.
They hope to dive and record great white sharks hunting seals, without the protection of a cage
'I thought this was going to be our most straightforward Animals Up Close sort of episode in this season,' he said.
'We're in the third season, and we've done a lot of very challenging things and I thought this was going to be a slam dunk, super easy.'
During the show, Bertie and his team eventually manage to locate a great white after much difficulty, swimming in the shallows of a beach.
Though they finally get up close to the shark, the 'churned up surf' means the conditions are 'too dangerous' for them to dive with it.
'We had this amazing team there that dived with a lot of great white sharks there before,' he explained.
'The previous few years, the sharks would turn up like clockwork at that time of year, down the seals, and we turned up and Pat, our boat captain, was like, 'Yeah, so we haven't seen a shark yet this year, and the season has been running for two months'.'
Bertie admitted: 'I was literally expecting to see several sharks per day for the month or so that we had filming there and that wasn't the case.'
Reflecting on his search, Bertie says on the programme: 'Great whites are famous for being killing machines, but I've learnt that they're actually very fragile. And I'm pretty sure my mum will be relieved I didn't manage to dive with one.'
Bertie revealed to MailOnline he thought it would be 'straightforward' to locate one of the most feared sea creatures
He adds: 'We've spent far too long worrying about great whites when we should be worried for them.'
Bertie does manage to get up close with other shark species and in one dramatic scene, dives into the 'Shark cathedral'.
He described it as 'one of the most incredible sights I've ever had' and recalled how the sharks were 'hanging like spaceships' in the cave.
'Those ragged tooth sharks have terrifying mouths, just teeth, the teeth are just like pouring out of their mouths,' the filmmaker told MailOnline.
'There's something in the back of your head, your caveman instinct, that's saying this isn't a good idea. There's 50 sharks here that are more than two meters long each, and teeth pouring out of their mouths.
'But then I remember my biology and I'm lucky enough to have spent a lot of time around sharks, and know that we are not on their menu, and because of that, it means I could be in awe and enjoy it.'
Despite their formidable mouths, Bertie revealed that ragged tooth sharks are actually 'shy' and can be spooked by simply the bubbles from breathing.
He also has a keen eye for behaviours to look out for in sharks, to ensure he is safe when diving so closely with them.
'So sharks are very expressive. They have body language just like humans do, and you can read that body language to see how they are,' Bertie explained.
The 'key thing' to note, according to the wildlife expert, is the shape of the shark's body, 'particularly their back and their pectoral fins'.
He added: 'If their pectoral fins are flat, that means they're very happy, and if they're pointed down, that means they are either aggressive or spooked or they're not happy.
'They also arch their back when they do that. So if the shark's nice and flat, pectoral fins are nice and flat, they're very happy.
'As soon as those pectoral fins point down and their back arches, that means they're fired up and either they're on the hunt or they've been disturbed by something.'
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She then stumbled upon a 1992 Nature journal paper, Reflections of a Whistle-blower by Jim Rossiter, who was head of the ethics committee at Deakin University and had been quoted in Deer's Sunday Times article. 'Rossiter was angry about the way he'd been treated by the institution. He accused my dad of being abusive and unpleasant – and, while he's at it, he states that he doesn't believe that my father had a doctorate from Cornell. He suggests that he had made it up, and probably the prestigious doctor of science award from New Zealand University as well.' Joanne was intrigued. The red and blue theses were on a shelf in her brother's study. 'I thought: 'This is easily provable.'' She contacted Cornell University, which did indeed have a publication by 'Michael H Briggs, 1959' in its library. 'But somehow, I felt I couldn't just leave it at that. I contacted the librarian and asked for some screenshots of its pages. I suppose as a barrister I am used to proving things.' The pictures were of a volume very similar to the one in the UK. Almost the same, but not quite. The library version, the real one, isn't a PhD thesis at all – it's labelled a master's dissertation, one you'd write up at the end of a one-year course. And it has an account by her father of how he'd come to Cornell for a year to study for said MSc. He'd made the PhD up. From this point on, everything started to unravel. Further investigations revealed that the doctor of science award was murky as well. Two eminent scientists had rejected Briggs's application – but whether through an administrative oversight or someone acting in a more calculated fashion, somehow it still succeeded. Given that all this happened in the early 60s, the truth will probably never be known. At this juncture, Joanne started telling her friends about everything she had uncovered. 'I told them: 'You know all those things I told you about my dad, the incredible scientist? Turns out he made the whole thing up.' Many of them said I should write a book. When I had 8,000 words or so, I decided to enter the Bridport Memoir prize.' In 2022 she was named as the winner. Now published, The Scientist Who Wasn't There documents her father's extraordinary career as a liar and fantasist, but also explores the impact his actions had on his family. 'Writing the book gave me a much better understanding of my dad as a person than if I had not found out all these things about him. He would have remained a fantasy figure. I'd previously seen him as someone who moved ever upwards from job to job, opportunity to opportunity. Now I see it as a career of repeated flight, of him abruptly moving away from situations where he might get found out and towards lesser-known institutions who were grateful to have him. They thought he was marvellous because he told them he was – it's a classic conman routine.' Briggs did indeed work for Nasa, based at the California Institute of Technology. But Joanne believes the brevity of his sojourn there in 1962 holds the biggest mystery of all. 'He was only there for a year, probably less. I think something must have gone very wrong because that was his fantasy job, he was working on Mars probes. They probably rumbled him.' In 1963, shortly before Joanne was born, Briggs left Nasa and moved back to the UK to take up a research post at Analytical Labs, an animal feed laboratory in Wiltshire. It wasn't an obvious move. 'While researching the book, I looked into this mysterious lab and discovered it was known by another name at Companies House, and that it had never had any connection with agriculture whatsoever.' The company was based at Corsham, a Ministry of Defence base; when her father went to work there, this was also the home of the Central Government War Headquarters, the secret bunker intended to house the government in the event of nuclear war. Is she suggesting that her father was in fact a spy? 'I think of all the theories, it's the one that hangs together most coherently,' she says. 'He had extremely high security clearance because of his Nasa work. Why would you need that to work with animal feed?' In the book, she suggests that the animal feed work could have a link to the government's plans for agricultural capacity after a nuclear attack. Then there's the fact that a few years later, in 1966, Briggs suddenly went to work for Schering's UK research department in the area of hormone research – totally unrelated to either Mars or animal feed. Schering was on the radar of intelligence agencies because unusually, it had bases in both East and West Germany. How has all of this affected her? Joanne is delightful company with a dry sense of humour and, like her father, is a natural raconteur. 'Growing up, there was a sense of almost romantic longing for my father. As an adult, well, I have never been able to watch films like Father of the Bride. I've never been able to tolerate dramas about fathers and daughters. I couldn't face that loss, though I could probably watch one now. I've been married and divorced twice and I'm not currently married. So, my own ability to stay married may have been influenced by my past.' Does she believe her father harmed people? 'That is so, so hard to answer. If you look at him through the prism of fabrication and the identity that he'd created, he was not the scientist who he claimed to be. Would he have been able to make good decisions, or might he have allowed decisions to ride for a little bit too long? Would he have had the confidence to make difficult decisions and carry them out? He probably wasn't the best choice to be a director at Schering, whatever they wanted him to do there. I think that's about as far as I can go.' Does she feel disappointed in him? She stops to think. 'There's a French expression, 'Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner', which means to know everything is to forgive everything. He was a man who grew up reading science fiction and got the idea that he could be a spaceman, that he could know all of science. And maybe he thought there were people at Oxford or Cambridge that might beat him to it. Maybe he thought he hadn't the time to stand still and prove to everyone how clever he was – that he needed to fake it until he made it. And then he kind of forgot he was faking it.' The Scientist Who Wasn't There by Joanne Briggs is published by Ithaka (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
