Nigel Alan Marven (born in November 27, 1960) is a British wildlife TV presenter, naturalist, conservationist, author, and television producer.
Career[]
Early life[]
Despite being born in Barnet, Marven grew up in St. Albans. He had a childhood full of animal love. Hummy the hamster was his first pet. He kept an eel in a bath, stick insects, and boa constrictors. He also had a young spectacled caiman when he was fifteen. Nigel attended the University of Bristol to study botany and zoology till he left at the age of 22 to start working at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol.
Nigel began his career in wildlife documentaries in the mid-1980s, contributing to shows including My Family and Other Animals and The First Eden. Realms of the Russian Bear, one of the first wildlife documentaries he produced, was released in 1992. He has a great deal of respect for natural historian David Attenborough, with whom he collaborated professionally for 12 years. He moved to ITV in 1998 and was requested to produce and host documentaries on animals.
He swam beside a big white shark without a cage in his debut ITV television series, Giants. Other sequences showed Marven wrestling a fifteen-foot African rock python in its underground lair, and a goliath birdeater spider—possibly the largest spider in the world—walking over his face. His presenting approach has garnered him a lot of fans, and he has presented over fifty TV series and shows on wildlife to date.
Nigel hosted the popular yearly Shark Week event on the Discovery Channel for three years starting in 2000. Nigel was requested to host the Walking with Dinosaurs Special episodes "The Giant Claw" and "Land of Giants" in 2002 by the Impossible Pictures production business. These episodes debuted in late 2002 on BBC One to an audience of almost seven million people. An even greater hit was the follow-up miniseries Sea Monsters - A Walking with Dinosaurs Trilogy, which Nigel again hosted in 2003. He subsequently carried on working with Impossible Pictures when the company shifted to ITV, starting in 2006 with the fictional series Prehistoric Park, which was about going back in time to save surviving samples of ancient animals such tyrannosaurus, woolly mammoths, and arthropleura.
