At 72, Lynne McGranger could have chosen comfort. Instead, after leaving Home and Away following 33 years on screens, she found herself descending into shark-infested waters in the Bahamas for Nine’s new reality series SHARK!.
“I thought, you know what? This is something way out of my comfort zone,” Lynne tells The Weekly. “ Life is for living, and if you’ve got it, use it, or lose it.”
The premise of the show is that six celebrities face their fears in an immersive, underwater experience in the shark capital of the world, the Bahamas. Lynne is joined on the show by Olympian Ariarne Titmus, actor Matt Nable, sportsman Sam Thaiday, influencer Tammy Hembrow, and The Block’s Scott Cam.
Australians have long had a complicated relationship with sharks, simultaneously fearing, mythologising and demonising them. SHARK! attempts to challenge some of those perceptions, pairing adrenaline-fuelled encounters with education and conservation.
As Lynne McGranger says in the premiere episode of SHARK!, if a shark walked into her sitting room, into her space, she’d be unhappy.
“As humans, we go, ‘Oh, we own the moon, we own the oceans” And we might on paper, but the point is they’re not our living space,” Lynne tells The Weekly. “We’re not the top predator.”
The show’s producers and experts, Paul de Gelder and Annie Guttridge, were with the celebrities every step of the way.
Paul de Gelder lost his arm and leg to a three-metre bull shark in Sydney Harbour in 2009. He was undergoing a routine Navy training exercise when he was attacked. On the show, he gives the celebrities a very explicit rundown of what happened to him. However, since his attack, he has dedicated his life to advocating for sharks, shifting from combat to conservation.
Joining him on the show is shark researcher and conservationist Annie Guttridge, whose mission is to restore and recover threatened marine species through her non-profit Saving the Blue.
“They really wanted to send a message to the world to say yes, these creatures are fearsome, they are predators, but you know we’re in their space, they’re not in ours,” explains Lynne. “They’re there for a reason, and we need to respect that and respect them.”
Lynne was the eldest member of the celebrities who agreed to the challenge of swimming with the apex predators. But she wanted to prove that age shouldn’t deter someone from going on an adventure. She wanted to be an inspiration “for women out there who may be feeling a little bit invisible now that they’ve reached a certain age.”
However, she does admit that while she wasn’t necessarily afraid of the sharks, she was apprehensive of the gadgets required! Despite that, she describes her first experience diving with the sharks as magical.
“I was in awe,” she says. “ Firstly, I was glad that I didn’t have all the gadgetry on me, the BCDs, the buoyancy control devices, the tanks and the flipping cords hanging off you and buttons to press and things to breathe.”
“You’d need about 24 hands,” she laughs.
“I was just really awestruck by the majesty of these creatures,” Lynne adds. “They’re scary, and they’re fierce, but at no point was I afraid. I felt really safe with Annie and Paul. They absolutely know what they’re doing. And at no point did I go, ” What the hell am I doing?”
But the magnitude of the experience wasn’t lost on her.
“Just to be so close with just a steel cage bar between you and these enormous mouths with these hideous teeth, and of course, these were the same sharks that took Paul’s leg and his hand in Sydney Harbour way back! I was just awestruck.”
While Lynne had an amazing experience, her co-star Ariarne Titmus, who has a genuine phobia of sharks, took it hard. However, Lynne took the Olympian under her wing.
“I just felt really instinctively maternal because she’s younger than my daughter, she’s 25,” Lynne says of Ariarne. “She’s got an old head on young shoulders in that she’s done so much in her 25 years, and she’s a very smart cookie as well as being a gorgeous human. I could tell you know you could tell from the get-go that she had a real pathological fear of sharks, which she admits to herself, and Matt [Nable] wasn’t real keen on them either. And so a kind of maternal or grandparent instinct kind of kicks in.”
More than just sharks being physically intimidating with their powerful bodies and rows of deadly teeth, Lynne shares that she learned that they have “insane senses.”
“They pick up on electrical impulses.”
This is something that Annie Guttridge shares in the show. When someone is thrashing in a panic in the water, not only can they feel that, but they can also feel the water pressure change.
“That’s why we were always taught from the onset, stay calm, trust the experts around you, just stay calm,” Lynne says. “ Tammy [Hembrow] struggled when she was first down in the cage, because she was squealing every time the shark came near her and taking her hand off the bar. And of course, beautiful Ariarne, who was just absolutely terrified of them. But, to her credit, she tried to meet those fears, and she was mostly successful, so good on her!”
But does Lynne feel differently about sharks now?
“Oh, absolutely darling, absolutely,” she says confidently. “I feel like they are essential to the life cycle of the planet, of the seas. They need to be respected and admired, and just don’t put yourself in harm’s way. And we’re very, very aware of what has happened around, particularly the east coast, but also the west coast of Australia.” Lynne and I were speaking just days after a man lost his life to a shark attack in far north Queensland.
“You know this time of year, particularly when there’s rain and the seas are all churning and murky, and people are out at dusk and at dawn. We are a sea-loving, coastal-dwelling people. We gravitate to the sea when it’s hot. People love the sea, they want to live near the sea, and that’s fantastic, but you need to be educated, and you need to be respectful of the creatures that live there that are going to see you as a threat and are going to try and get rid of you from their environment if you disturb them.”
Although a medical emergency forced Lynne to leave the challenge earlier than expected, she has no regrets.
“Even though things didn’t turn out how I thought they might have, I’m still really, really pleased that I did it,” she says.
Lynne hopes other women watching SHARK! might feel inspired to embrace discomfort too.
“If you can walk and you can talk and you’ve got a modicum of fitness,” she laughs, “then give stuff a crack.”
SHARK! premieres Sunday, May 31, at 7.00 pm on Channel 9 and 9Now.
