In the editors letter in the
March edition of Sport Diver (the official publication of the PADI diving
association in the UK), the editor, Mark Evans, reflects on the sad death of
the “First Lady of Diving” Lotte Haas in January of this year and asks: where
are all the new diving heroes?
Mark Evans writes: Lotte,
together with her husband Hans, pioneered scuba diving adventures on the silver
screen in the 1950’s and along with charismatic Frenchman Jacques-Yves
Cousteau, were responsible for getting entire generations actively involved in
our sport by bringing a whole new world to an excited audience. Mark goes on to
say: We desperately need modern day heroes’ of this calibre to bring the
underwater world to the masses.
Mark highlights that there
are the likes of Steve Backshall, Miranda Krestovnikoff and Monty halls (and
before you ask, we don’t know either), who are all doing their bit to raise the
profile of diving through more-mainstream channels, but the likes of Lotte,
Hans and Cousteau were mega-stars of their time whose appeal spanned the globe
and captured the attention of young and old alike.
Mark then makes a final
appeal: going forward, we also need Hollywood to splash diving all the cinemas
again, but in a positive, engaging and exciting fashion – no more Open Water
rubbish thank you!
Mark’s lament, first got us
raising our glasses in a last tribute to the late, great and gorgeous Lotte
Haas and then putting them down again as we ruminated on his words. Is he
right? Does diving lack modern heroes? And if so, why?
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| Lotte Haas |
Our first thought was, that
to a degree, Mark has answered his own question. Lotte, Hans, Jacques-Yves
Cousteau et al, were exactly what he said they were: pioneers. They broke new
ground, they invented and then developed their own equipment, they often risked
their lives and like others of their ilk (Ron and Valerie Taylor anyone?) they
brought the diving world to a whole new audience. They were definitely heroes,
but more to the point they were heroes of their time. In the fifties and
sixties the ability to travel to exotic locations and then plunge into the
azure ocean in search of adventure were limited to a wealthy few. Back in the
1950’s, World War Two was still a deep, dark scar on the world. In Britain for
example, a holiday adventure in 1950 was little more than a camping trip to a
damp field in Cornwall or a dreary weekend in a rainy seaside town –
grandparents included. Diving back then was something few people outside of the
Navy had ever even heard of and even if they had, we bet they had very little
money to squander on unproven diving equipment and, as often as not, unproven
airlines. The underwater adventures of Lotte Haas were therefore pure
escapism, something that captured your imagination in the local cinema rather
than something you got involved with on your local beach. Nowadays of course,
anyone with a passport and a few pounds in their pocket can pop on a plane and
in less than a working day be walking barefoot on an idyllic sandy beach. The
escapist world of Lotte and Hans is no longer something that you can only dream
about on a wet night in Scunthorpe, but something you can actually do yourself.
The world of diving is now, more than ever, open to far more than any of the
early pioneers could have imagined. Perhaps, though, that is part of the
problem. If every paradise isle is jammed packed with divers, all doing exactly
the same thing, with exactly the same GoPro camera, where is the originality?
To be a pioneer you have to do something that someone else hasn’t done before.
Then we thought about Mark’s
plea to Hollywood: We also need Hollywood to
splash diving all over the cinemas again, but in a positive, engaging and
exciting fashion.
So Mark wants Hollywood to
make a film all about diving, but not one that shows any of the inherent
dangers of going into an environment that evolution has singularly made you
unsuitable for. Instead he wants Hollywood to make a film that is inspiring,
engaging, exciting and well, just bloody jaw-dropping tremendous, that even the
most aqua-phobic among us will dive head first into the sea at the first
opportunity. No sharks though, we can’t stress that too much, there must
definitely be no sharks, and absolutely no moray eels hiding in crevices. So no
remakes of Jaws, The Deep, Open Water, Deep Blue Sea, or any of these films
that Diver Magazine (the North American Publication) calls the best diving
movies of all time.
Mark, it seems, has a very
different opinion about what makes a film engaging or exciting from the rest of
us and we suspect doesn’t understand that Hollywood makes films in order to
make money, not to support the diving industry but that aside, there is a
fundamental problem with such an appeal – it requires someone else to do
something! That’s not particularly pioneering Mark!
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| The old version of GoPro lacked portability |
Can you imagine Lotte and
Hans or Jacques or Valerie or Ron or even Monty Halls (and no we still don’t
know who he is) sitting around and wondering when someone else is going to film
all the stuff they were doing? No of course you can’t, pioneers don’t wait for
other people to do things they get on with it, that’s what being a pioneer is
all about and a quick perusal of the list in the Women Divers Hall of Fame,
shows that there seems to be a great deal of women doing exactly that.
So
what’s going on here? Diving has had it’s pioneers, it has had it’s movies so
why does Mark Evans think that the it still needs someone of high calibre to
bring the sport to a whole new audience? Then we thought about our own early
diving experiences and why we prefer snorkelling and we had
an answer. It’s all down to Brad.
You
see our sport has many advantages over diving. You don’t need a lot of
expensive equipment. You don’t need to join PADI or BSAC. You don’t need to
know how to correctly spell Cousteau and more importantly, and this is the crux
of the matter, you don’t have to spend time with Brad.
The
diving world is full of Brads; you meet them in every dive shop, every dive
operation and dive club around the world. Brad of course comes in different
shapes and sizes but the Brad species all have one thing in common – he has an
unbelievably over-inflated opinion of himself. You would think that you might
be able to avoid an encounter with Brad but you would be wrong. The diving
world it seems, insists that anyone’s first foray into the sport must begin
with a meeting with Brad. Yep, Brad is your diving instructor and he is adamant
that he is going to make you look a complete berk while he teaches you the
basics of diving in a hotel swimming pool. Of course Brad doesn’t normally
teach people to dive, as he will explain ad nauseam. Brad’s real job (the one
he’s taking a break from in order to train you hapless tourists ‘not to kill
yourself out there’ in the deep blue) is a fighter pilot or a Navy commando or
mine clearance expert or, and this is becoming more prevalent in Braddy world,
a Green peace defender of the earth. Yep Brad is taking a year off from all the
stress of being a Top Gun, storming beaches, disarming mines with toothpicks
and smuggling whales out of Japan in his board shorts, just to make sure you
know the difference between a fin and a flipper. Flipper is a dolphin according
to Brad. According to the rest of the world, Flipper is a fictional character
in a TV series portrayed by a variety of Cetaceans’ or those things that you
put on your feet that helps propel you through the water. Brad is the
antithesis of all that Mark Evans wants. Far from being engaging, charismatic,
exciting and likeable; Brad is annoying, obnoxious and soooooo boring that most
people who encounter him and his egocentric ilk are deterred from ever getting
involved in diving again. So Mark Evans is wrong when he laments the lack of
modern diving heroes. You see, the real legacy of Lotte Haas and the legends of
her time is that diving no longer needs a modern hero or a Hollywood
blockbuster to bring the sport to the masses – that’s already been done! What
the sport of diving needs is to stop Brad and his gormless, mind-numbingly dull
brethren ruining that legacy for millions.
An afterthought. Several
beers later, we suddenly realised that there are no real snorkelling heroes –
apart from The Dangerous Snorkelling Club of course. Then we found this picture
of Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.
He may be fat, have bad teeth and be offensive to Argentinians and Mexicans but we’d rather have a beer with him than Brad. Cheers Jezza and very a
big cheers to you Lotte – the underwater world, has indeed, lost a heroine.
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| Who are you looking at Brad? |
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