When Craig David decided to take a well-earned break from featuring on songs by former Love Island contestants, he probably didn’t expect to join the seminal canon of videos in which humans try to be good samaritans, only to discover that life is a fucking joke.
There was the Irish couple that unwittingly fed a bird to their neighbor’s cat. There were the Americans outside what looks like an Irish pub on the Zante strip, who tried to teach an injured pigeon how to fly only for it to be snatched by a ginger stray while “Wild World” by Cat Steves plays prophetically in the background. And now? Now there’s a UK garage legend doing what might have happened in Finding Nemo if they didn’t book Ellen DeGeneres and decided to take things in a more French impressionist direction.
The video in question is just thirty-eight seconds long, and yet contains all of life itself. Craig David is having dinner (“I’m literally having dinner”), when a little flying fish flops onto the deck of his Maldivian resort. An older iteration of Craig David perhaps wouldn’t have intervened, but this is the Craig David of February 2026. He’s just one day away from having a life-altering experience at the resort’s sea turtle rehabilitation centre. He’s in a tropical climate, he’s standing waist-deep in the sea singing passionately with his eyes closed, he’s at one with nature—and this fish is the hero’s call to action.
It is a full moon. Craig David tells us so himself. “That’s the full moon for you”—as if something cosmic is at play. As if the universe ordained that this fish, specifically, would find its way to Craig David’s table in order to teach him a brutal Darwinian lesson (or, as he put it in his Instagram caption, “a divine message”). It’s survival of the fittest, and this fish is not the fittest. Craig David scoops it up with his god-like hand, implores it to “stay with [him],” and duly yeets it back into the ocean. It hits the water with a satisfying splash and then just sort of floats on the surface. Motionless.
We presume it is dead, as does Craig David (“I hope it’s still alive”), which is enough of a tragi-comic arc in itself. “That’s funny,” we think to ourselves, ready to scroll upwards and onwards to the next morsel of short form video content. But then a much larger fish suddenly appears and engulfs the smaller, original fish, leaving a haze of blood in its wake. “Oh dear,” says Craig David. The video abruptly ends.
“That’s the full moon for you”
Alfred Hitchcock had a theory about suspense versus surprise. It is called the “bomb under the table” analogy. If the bomb explodes without warning, the audience gets a few seconds of shock. But if we know it’s under the table, ticking away while the characters remain oblivious, we experience gut-wrenching anguish. It’s compelling, but the Craig David video ultimately proves that Hitchcock was chatting shit. The best villains are off-screen, unknown to the audience or, indeed, Craig David.
What complicates things slightly is that the villain might not be the larger fish at all, who was presumably just enjoying a sublime moonlit meal of his own. It might be Craig David himself, who, depending on your school of thought, delivered the fish straight to its death. Craig David wasn’t divine intervention, but rather Lucifer with a clean trim that he must have got especially for his holiday.
It’s a Sliding Doors moment: what would have happened if Craig David had merely acknowledged the fish flopping near his feet, then got on with his dinner? Would the fish now be happily swimming along with its mates? Would it have had a few more weeks on this mortal coil before Ne-Yo turned up for his annual trip, and it was he who had to learn about the circle of life? One wonders whether we, as humans, should always follow our kind-hearted impulse to intervene. In matters of nature, would we be better off simply leaving things alone?
Faced with such pressing existential questions, there was only one place to turn, and so I called the Finsbury Park branch of Fish Planet London. “Have you seen the video of Craig David with the fish?” I asked. The man on the phone said he had not, so I described the situation to him as if it happened to my own pet fish. He says to “just plop it back in” the tank. What if there were a predator waiting, I ask. He suggests putting the fish in an “alternative tank,” or at least “out of the line of sight” of the predator. In the context of Craig David’s predicament, it’s not much help. I guess he could have walked down the shore to find calmer waters, but the fish probably would have suffocated on the way. A classic catch-22.
And what of the fish itself? There is something decidedly fabled about it all. The creature spent its final seven seconds with the singer behind “7 Days,” which is somewhat poetic—but how would it feel to be experiencing the strange marvel of dry land one second and, the next, accidentally murdered by a man largely responsible for the commercial explosion of garage at the turn of the century?
When asked to proffer insight from the fish’s point of view, famed animal psychic Jackie Weaver tells me this is “not something [she’d] want to be involved in.”
The great mystery of nature endures.
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