Sport Diving Needs A Hero: It Ain't You Brad

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?

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!

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.

 

Who are you looking at Brad?