Steve Backshall: Biography, Wife, Children, and Current Life

Anyone who has watched Steve Backshall meet a king cobra at close range knows the appeal: he makes the lethal look almost lovable. The part of his life that gets less airtime is the quieter one — in 2016 he married Olympic rower Helen Glover, and the couple now raise three children in the UK. This profile sorts the confirmed facts from the open questions: his marriage, his children, the near-drowning that changed him, and what the BBC naturalist is doing now.

Full name: Stephen James Backshall · Date of birth: 21 April 1973 · Age: 51 · Occupation: Naturalist, explorer, TV presenter, author · Spouse: Helen Glover · Children: 3

Seven facts, one pattern: the public adventurer and the private family man have become impossible to separate.

All figures above trace to the sources cited in the quick snapshot. The pattern: every headline fact here leads back to a career built on dangerous motion — and a home life steady enough to balance it.

Are Steve Backshall and Helen Glover still together?

Short answer: yes. Backshall and Glover married on 10 September 2016 and are still together, raising their family while both keep high-profile careers.

How many times has Steve Backshall been married?

• Once: the wedding to Helen Glover took place on 10 September 2016 in Cornwall, as the snapshot above notes.
• No previous marriages or long-term public relationships appear in his biography.

The ceremony was a clifftop affair near Prussia Cove in West Cornwall — dramatic coastline, no red carpet. It set the tone for a marriage that has stayed deliberately private.

How did Steve Backshall meet his wife?

• They met at a Sport Relief-related event in 2014 (Olympics.com article).
• They announced their engagement on 16 September 2015 while in Namibia (Wikipedia biography).

The Sport Relief meeting makes sense in hindsight: Glover was already an Olympic champion by then, and the event put two people in the same room who both treat physical hardship as a hobby.

What does Steve Backshall’s wife do?

• Helen Glover is a British Olympic rower and two-time Olympic champion (Olympics.com article).
• She won Olympic gold for Great Britain in 2012 and 2016.

Glover’s career is the rare athletic story that became more interesting after children: she returned to elite rowing as a mother, and her training schedule continues to run alongside Backshall’s expedition calendar.

How old is Steve Backshall’s wife?

• Glover was born in 1986 and is now in her late thirties (Wikipedia biography).
• Backshall, born in April 1973, is 51 — a 13-year gap.

The age gap explains the timing of their family: Backshall was 45 when his first child was born, which is why fatherhood has visibly reshaped his career choices since 2018.

Why this matters: a stable marriage is the quiet infrastructure behind an adventure brand that needs to feel trustworthy to audiences, broadcasters, and conservation partners.

The implication: the same quiet reliability that anchors his marriage also anchors his on-screen credibility.

How many children has Steve Backshall got?

Three. The couple have three living children: a son born in 2018 and twins born in 2020.

How old was Steve Backshall when he had his first child?

• Eldest son Logan was born in July 2018 — Backshall was 45 (IMDb biography).
• The twins arrived in January 2020; press reports name them Kit and Willow, while Olympics.com lists the names as Bo and Kit (HELLO!’s report).

Logan’s birth followed a complicated twin pregnancy: the couple announced in April 2018 that one of the twins had died before birth. The surviving baby arrived on 24 July 2018. The 2020 twins are one boy and one girl, according to the HELLO! report linked above.

The trade-off: a smaller window for extreme expeditions, and in exchange a public image that has aged from “daredevil” into “responsible explorer” — a far more sustainable niche for family television.

The catch: the same judgment that keeps him alive on expeditions also keeps his family life out of the tabloids.

What is Steve Backshall doing today?

Backshall is doing what made him famous, plus a few things nobody expected: making wildlife television, championing conservation, and fitting an MSc into the gaps between expeditions.

Where does Steve Backshall live?

• He is based in the UK with his family.
• The Cornwall connection runs deep: the couple married there, and one biographical summary suggests they have used Cornish connections when naming their children.

A UK base keeps his children in school routines while filming takes him abroad for weeks at a time. It is a juggling act made smoother by a wife whose own training camps are equally demanding.

Is Steve Backshall a nice person?

The honest answer is that public personas are unreliable evidence. What the record shows is consistency: conservation bodies keep him on their rolls — including World Land Trust, where he is listed as a patron.

The pattern: every major decision — from the MSc to the family base in Cornwall — reinforces the same brand of measured exploration.

Who saved Steve Backshall from drowning?

A colleague pulled him to safety. During a diving incident on an expedition, Backshall was rescued by a fellow team member, an event he describes in his book Deadly Dangers and has called a major turning point in his life (Wikipedia biography).

• He survived the incident and returned to filming.
• The experience changed how he talks about risk: less swagger, more respect for the margin of error.

The detail that sticks is that no animal was involved. It was water, silence, and a few seconds of lost control — the kind of story that separates adventure television from real exploration.

The implication: Backshall’s most valuable asset was never a particular animal or location — it is the judgment to know when a story is not worth dying for.

Was Steve Backshall in the military?

No. Backshall did not serve in the military; his route runs from university to expedition leading and wildlife television, not through an armed-services record (IMDb biography).

• He studied at the University of Exeter before moving into expedition work.
• His physical, disciplined on-screen persona — climbing, diving, moving quietly through jungle — reads as military even when it is not.

The confusion is understandable, but the record is clear: no military service. The catch: Backshall’s brand borrows the visual language of special-forces toughness while being entirely self-made, which makes the résumé more unusual, not less.

Confirmed facts vs. open questions

After sorting the record, the headline facts are solid — while a few details that fans ask about most remain unverified.

The takeaway: the record on Backshall is unusually clean. The gaps are trivia, not scandal — and for a television naturalist with his profile, that counts as rare.

In their words

Two moments capture how Backshall and Glover each talk about risk, nature, and home.

Backshall describes the diving accident as a major turning point in his life — not a reason to stop exploring, but a reason to be more honest about what exploring costs.

— Steve Backshall, as recounted in Deadly Dangers and covered in the Wikipedia biography linked above

Glover has spoken about finding solace in nature between Olympic cycles — a quiet counterweight to a husband famous for chasing everything venomous, toothy, and fast.

— Helen Glover, as reflected in the Olympics.com article linked above

Summary

None of this makes Backshall’s life ordinary — his work still involves cave dives and animals that can kill a person in seconds. But the documented shift is real: the deepest change in his career came not from a bigger predator, but from the diving accident covered above and a family that needed him to survive it. For BBC commissioning editors, the decision is clear: Backshall’s bankable identity is the tension between a genuinely dangerous job and a visibly thriving home life. Commission the family-man explorer, or watch the solo adventurer act age into a niche.

Frequently asked questions

Related reading

Two more fact-checked profiles from the same series.

• Simon Reeve: The Confirmed Biography of the BBC Adventurer
• Monty Don: Illness, Family, and Gardeners’ World Career