Walking With Dinosaurs to come to Arena Birmingham

Walking With Dinosaurs – The Arena Spectacular will feature at Arena Birmingham from July 26-28. It will be based on the award-winning BBC TV series, which also returns this year, and it will star Michaela Strachan as ‘Huxley’ the paleontologist.

The $20 million live show is enormously popular and commands viewing figures of more than nine million people in 250 cities around the world. The 2018 version will feature new, state of the art technology, underlining its position as the biggest and best dinosaur show in the world.

Michaela can’t wait to get started: “I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a live show with life-size animatronic dinosaurs. We build a real spectacle around that. I play the part of the palaeontologist, a narrator that talks you through the different eras. It’s a very, very impressive show.

“There’s a story and a script – it’s a performance that people can enjoy. The dinosaurs are all there and we have to do it in arenas because they are so enormous.”

Walking With Dinosaurs is produced by Global Creatures and its boss, CEO Carmen Pavlovic, says they’ve pulled out all the stops.

“I am thrilled that Walking With Dinosaurs is embarking on an international tour. A new generation is ready to experience these life-size beasts in this awe-inspiring spectacle, which has still not been matched in terms of scale and quality. Many of our creatures have ‘evolved’ since the last tour, now featuring distinctive display feathers, head crests and tail fans, reflecting recent discoveries about the physical nature of these massive creatures. This show remains a must-see for audiences of all ages.”

Fans can look forward to a one-hour, 40-minute show depicting the dinosaurs’ evolution with cinematic realism. There are scenes of interactions between dinosaurs, an exploration of how carnivorous dinosaurs evolved to walk on two legs and how the herbivores fended off their more agile predators.

Nine species are represented from the entire 200 million year reign of the dinosaurs. The show includes the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the terror of the ancient terrain, as well as the Plateosaurus and Liliensternus from the Triassic period, the Stegosaurus and Allosaurus from the Jurassic period and Torosaurus and Utahraptor from the awesome Cretaceous period. The largest of them, the Brachiosaurus, is 11 metres tall and 17 metres from nose to tail. It took a team of 50 – including engineers, fabricators, skin makers, artists and painters, and animatronic experts – a year to build the production.

Michaela says: “I must be honest, I’m looking forward to seeing the dinosaurs as much as the audience. They have three people working each of the big dinosaurs; two voodoo puppeteers and a driver for each.

“The show has already done two world tours and was last here five years ago. This will be the last time so it’s a great opportunity. I’m just doing the British leg and I really am looking forward to it.”

Michaela has led a fascinating career. The TV presenter was a former Avon Lady and kissogram who made her debut on TV in the 1980s, with such programmes as TV-am and Wide Awake Club with Timmy Mallett.

In 1993, she moved into wildlife programming by landing a role with The Really Wild Show and she became a regular reporter for BBC One’s Countryfile for many years. She presented a TV show about orang-utans in Borneo and then presented a six-part series called The Great Penguin Rescue.

But it has been with Springwatch and Autumnwatch that she has made her greatest impact. She replaced Kate Humble on the show and has become popular alongside fellow presenters Chris Packham and Martin Hughes-Games.

“I really enjoy performance. That’s my background. I came from musical theatre. I didn’t do any ‘ologies’ at university. So for me to be able to bring that performance side into things is great. I’m not a palaeontologist. I’m acting. But dinosaurs were part of the natural world and that’s what fascinates me.

“And I’m really excited about this and to play arenas is incredible. When are you ever going to get the chance to do that? I’m going to be such a rock star. I’ll tell them I only want blue M&Ms.”

Michaela will have a week’s rehearsal for her role before being introduced to the dinosaurs. And she’ll have to familiarise herself with the dramatic music that underscores each performance. It’ll make a change from her regular work on TV, which is more intense and can be highly challenging.

“TV is intense, yes, and every day is a challenge. But I work with people I really enjoy working with and the amazing thing about doing wildlife telly is that you inspire people to get into wildlife. As I’m getting older I’m getting more and more of that. A good handful of people might become vets or work in animal rehab or work in rescue centres. To have played a part in those career choices is a real privilege.”

Michaela didn’t plan to work in wildlife. It was a happy accident. Back in the day, she hoped to be a pop star and released two singles that got into the top 70. “We hit it at the right time. It was just when all the female pop stars were coming out. We were very whacky, very bouncy. In those days you had to rely on a plugger, somebody getting your record into the shops and radio. I didn’t have a plugger that believed in me and instead we ended up going around the nightclubs plugging the record ourselves.

“So TV was a happy accident. I’ve fallen into this and I love it. People still think of me as an expert but I’m not. I didn’t study zoology or biology. My knowledge has grown over the years and it’s something that I have a personal interest in.”