Jeremy Wade returns October 20 with the Fish On vodcast: the River Monsters stories that never made it to air
He ended River Monsters himself in 2017 because he'd run out of monsters. Nine years later the show is pulling nearly five million views a day, and Wade is coming back — just not to television.
Fish On! With Jeremy Wade launches October 20 for Patreon members and on rivermonsters.tv, with a public release on October 27 across YouTube, Spotify and podcast platforms. It's a 20-episode vodcast co-hosted by Wade's longtime friend and collaborator Scott Tankard, produced by Oxford Scientific Films — the company behind River Monsters — and distributed by ITV Studios' digital label Zoo 55.
The premise is the archive, unlocked. Wade and Tankard revisit the catches, near-misses and unexplained encounters from the show's nine seasons, with guests from the original crew — and, per the Patreon pitch, the stories and raw vault footage that never fit into a 44-minute Animal Planet episode. Wade, now 70, notes that fans always ask about the biggest fish, or about "the closest I've come to being killed"; a vodcast is the format where those answers can run long.
The numbers behind the comeback
River Monsters ran from 2009 to 2017 and ended on Wade's own terms: he'd ticked off every monster on his list and chose to stop rather than pad the show. What's happened since is the part worth staring at. Per ITV Studios, in the past year alone — nine years after the finale — River Monsters content has generated more than 1.74 billion views across social platforms, averaging 4.77 million views a day.
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ITV's Ruth Berry used the show to make a broader point at the company's showcase this week, via Variety:
"You'll hear that young people don't want to watch long-form content — not true."
— Ruth Berry, ITV Studios, citing River Monsters' 90-minute average YouTube watch times
Read that again: the average watch time for River Monsters episodes on YouTube is 90 minutes. A cable fishing show that ended when its youngest current fans were in primary school is outperforming most of what television makes on purpose.
River Monsters has been off the air for nine years. It did 1.74 billion views in the last twelve months.
Why this is a vodcast and not season 10
The release structure tells you the business model: a week of Patreon exclusivity before the free drop, with paid tiers offering extended cuts, unaired vault footage, and a say in where Wade goes next. That's a direct-to-superfan play, not a TV revival — ITV monetizing an archive that's already printing views rather than financing new expeditions.
The corporate backdrop makes it even more pointed. ITV announced Fish On! at a showcase held while the company is in the middle of a sale process for its media arm — and one of the liveliest assets it had to show the room was a 70-year-old angler's decade-old catalogue. Oxford Scientific's Helen Conlan called Wade one of the true rock stars of factual television, and for once the press-release superlative has the per-day analytics to back it up.
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