Have you ever heard the legend
of the Billingsgate seal?
Well, there's a fish market that has stood in London
for 800 years called Billingsgate.
And for the last 20 years,
it's been visited by a mysterious animal.
Sammy the seal.
Every morning, this seal turns up at the market
for a salmon breakfast.
And then buggers off again.
I recently heard that the market is being sold
to be redeveloped into luxury flats.
I wanted to go and meet Sammy
before he was priced out of the area.
So one night, I went down to the market.
I bumped into this guy. Big Greg.
Harry! Show me no teeth!
Guy with no teeth, look round here.
Another one, another long timer. 40 years.
Look at all the fish there.
Comes from a different country as well.
Ish!
Bit of squid for breakfast would be nice.
You can have what you want off me sunshine,
you know that.
Why do they call you Big Greg?
I was 38 stone, that's 240 kilos.
That's why I was Big Greg.
I think Sammy wanted to be me.
He's a legend, the seal.
Sammy the seal's been here for years.
Just turned up one day.
I was the main feeder.
Seal!
Here we go, ready?
I think he sees me and he thinks,
"I've gotta be like Big Greg".
He's put that in the fucking bank, he has.
There he is, look! There y'are, look!
That's five pound of salmon.
Ah, you greedy fucker!
You know why it's nice?
Because he gets it for nothing. It tastes better.
We was here before all this.
We was on our own here.
We watched all this get built.
All Canary Wharf get built.
We watched the Dome getting built
over the other side.
See the red lights over there,
we watched the Dome getting built.
All this round here was nothing.
Just us. Mark, alright mate?
Lifeboat man.
Does it for nothing.
Gets the people out the sea.
So do you want to see... Shall we feed him?
See if he comes back?
Seal!
One more time, Sam, come on!
Come on, seal!
Let's go!
Come on, seal.
Make us all happy.
Make the world happy.
Alright, mate?
Yep, you here?
Yeah, ring me back in five minutes,
just doing a bit of filming.
Turns out Sammy had been coming to the market
less and less.
As of a few months ago, he has completely vanished.
Every fishmonger had their own theory.
It's one of the biggest mysteries of the market.
I'm not sure what happened to him.
Hopefully he's still alright.
Maybe they've taken him away to the sea.
Naturally you'd have thought he'd have mated
and fucked off.
I reckon he's out living it up large.
Living the London life, innit?
There's no way he's still alive.
If you're getting a free meal all the time...
He'd come back if he was still alive.
God rest his soul.
Seal!
Come on, we want you back here!
Now, seal!
Alright, you two go and get him.
I've done my job. You've had me all morning.
You get down the River Thames
early hours of the morning, night time,
and you kick the metal fence
and say, "Seal, where are you?"
You find him, you bring him back to Big Greg
and I'll treat him like royalty.
See you later, boys.
How could I say no to Big Greg?
Maybe if I brought this beloved animal back,
it would save the market.
I had to find Sammy.
Seals come out at night,
so I had until dawn to find him.
I joined a police patrol in the area.
They look like a dog
Like a dog in the water when you first see them.
Their head just pops up and they look around
and then they go down again.
We had a call at the Woolwich Ferry
that was, "I can see a child in the water."
We did a lot of extensive searching.
First there was no distraught parents
or guardians.
Only one call on it,
which would be odd in itself.
And the we kept seeing a seal
exactly where they reported seeing the child,
So putting two and two together,
we think it wasn't a child, it was the seal.
Unsurprisingly, the cops had bigger fish to fry.
They dropped me off on the foreshore,
where I noticed strange lights.
Excuse me, have you seen a seal?
No, sorry.
No, no seal about.
Well, not around here anyway.
They have been seen.
But you've gotta be lucky.
Guess what? I've found Jesus!
Do you want to see Jesus?
He's part of a Georgian belt buckle.
So it would have been a massive great big buckle
shaped like that.
And that's Jesus on there.
Jesus in the river.
Often you find something of considerable age
and you just kind of wonder...
who the last person was that held that.
You know, it's mind-blowing really.
The Thames is littered with bones.
And do you ever get spooked down here?
In 1987,
when I was in a different area under a pier,
and I felt something touch the back of my neck
so as I looked up...
there was actually...
a dead body...
on top of a beam...
where it had…
The guy had come in the night before...
and then as the water went out,
he'd got stuck and...
And I never went back to that location again.
Not at that time in the morning anyway.
So that was a bit of a… bit of a wakeup call.
I received a tipoff
about a possible sighting downriver.
I rushed to the scene.
You're not Sammy the seal!
No.
I'm Dmitri.
Why are you swimming in the River Thames?
For good health.
And wellbeing.
I was getting desperate now.
If only there was some way
I could communicate with this animal.
-Hello? -Hi, is that Jackie?
It is.
I've got this seal I need to speak to.
Do you think you could speak to a seal?
I've never spoken to a seal before,
but I could try for you.
My name is Jackie Weaver
and I am an animal communicator.
The normal animals
that I actually communicate with on the day-to-day
would be dogs, cats, horses,
also rabbits, rats...
I got to chat to a deer for somebody.
So what do you need from us?
Well, all I need is actually a photograph of the animal.
It's sounds strange, but it's on telepathy
so distance makes no difference
to the communication.
So you just link in,
looking at the photograph of an animal,
and then you can communicate.
Let's have a look.
Oh, wow!
Oh, bless!
I've got a really good feeling about him.
That's sweet.
So what I'm gonna do,
just introduce myself to him through my mind,
and see what information I can pick up.
So just bear with me a second.
He's saying to me...
OK. He's giving...
He's saying to me that he felt
he was being repelled.
Now obviously, as everybody knows,
they're doing work, but it's kind of
he's talking about the vibrations,
so I don't know if they were doing
something to the ground that would cause vibration.
Because he keeps saying to me, "Repelled."
He says so sweetly to me, "I lost my home."
"I lost my home."
Do you think he'll come back?
My inner feeling is I don't believe he will.
And he says this really sadly,
but he's saying...
"Billingsgate was one of a kind
and it is the last of their kind.
You'll never get that back."
Dawn breaks.
I return to the closing market
to tell Big Greg the bad news.
I had failed.
What's happening? You found the seal?
Sorry Greg, we couldn't find him anywhere.
Did you look properly though?
-Yeah we looked. -Both sides of the river?
South? East?
Terrible.
What can I do? You're gone. Go on, go.
I'm out of here.
Even if Sammy does make it back to the market one day,
soon there will be no market to come back to.
Just luxury flats.
And they'll almost certainly
be out of Sammy's price range.
I looked in the river one last time.