WILDLIFE television presenter, children’s author and all-round daredevil Steve Backshall is swapping the outdoors for the theatre stage on his 27-date Wild World tour that steps inside the Grand Opera House in York this evening.

The 43-year-old adventurer and naturalist from Bagshot will be sharing stories from his nail-biting expeditions to the world’s wildest places and face-to-face encounters with the most bizarre and deadly beasts on Earth as he gives an insight into "the best job in the world".

The tour crowns a busy year where Steve married double Olympic gold medal rower Helen Glover in September, published his latest Falcon Chronicles novel, Shark Seas, and presented the ITV series Fierce and BBC Two series Steve Backshall’s Extreme Mountain Adventure.

Now comes Steve Backshall's Wild World, a wild journey of a theatre show illustrated with photos and films from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the tundra to the top of the world’s highest peaks, from the depths of the rainforest to the bottom of the ocean.

"Now that I'm getting audiences that are five years old to 80 years old, I have to find a way of addressing each of them and I have to find a way of doing that that's interesting in the live shows," says Steve. "Being on a stage is not my background but now I'm getting used to it and I'm quite enjoying it!

"When I first started the Deadly 60 series, I did a live version that I took around the country, and I even did four sell-out dates at the Sydney Opera House, where I got a bit emotional when I walked out on to the stage. I kind of choked up."

This autumn he is taking his latest tour show in his stride. "It's completely different to doing a TV show; it's almost the opposite of what I do for the screen," says Steve. "One of the best bits of advice I got for TV was that I should never try to 'present'; instead you should talk to the camera as if it's your friend, almost conspiratorially, whereas the stage is the opposite. You have to fill the room, while at the same time still make it feel like you're speaking to just one person."

Steve reveals the Wild World show will evolve the more he does it. "It's like a comedian putting together a new routine, as I want to come to things with a fresh eye, not repeating things but having new things to say rather than reading from a script..though I always have to show the clip where I'm bitten by a crocodile!" he says.

"It's not scripted at all, so what I do is put the videos together and then freestyle with it, and as the tour goes on I do find there's patter that I slip into. I enjoy even more the question-and-answer part of the show with the audience as the questions they ask always surprise me. They can be so outrageous! The big question is always 'What is evolution', where after 15 minutes you could still be answering the biggest question in science."

While on the subject of big questions, what drew Steve to the natural world? "I grew up in the Surrey countryside, on the edge of Surrey Heath, with parents who were massively into the great outdoors world, and so they were the great drivers in my life," he says.

Steve Backshall has walked and talked the wild side of life ever since.

Steve Backshall’s Wild World, Grand Opera House, York, today, 6.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024, at atgtickets.com/york or at stevebackshall.com/tour/. Backshall's fourth novel in The Falcon Chronicles series, Shark Seas, will be on sale at the show.