"Part of my reason for going into medicine was to work overseas. I was a bit of an adventurer. As a student, I did an elective on the Afghan-Pakistan border."
His sense of chance led him into working as a trauma and war surgeon for the Red Cross and medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontiers.
Nowadays, Mr Mannion spends two weeks of every month at his job in Blackpool; and the other deuce weeks operative for charities in countries like Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone.
He features in the last film in a three-part series called SuperDoctors which looks at the progress being made in medicine.
Medicine
The first two programmes focus on high-tech practice of medicine in the form of surgical robots and dearly-won stem cell therapy.
In contrast, presenter Robert Winston follows the operating surgeon to Malawi, one of the poorest countries on earth where the lifespan expectancy is around 40 years.
Mr Mannion's human ingenuity in treating people in places that have no technology or money has seen him cross over a medical frontier.
"It may not immediately be seeming that working in warfare zones or developing countries is somewhere you can push back medical frontiers or be very innovational, but I feel it's even more important in these situations," he said.
The surgeon believes you canful push the boundaries of medicine in poor countries
He maintains his mantra that "necessity is the mother of invention."
Around Malawi, the surgeon has several clinics for children and adults with clubfeet.
Like Britain, somewhere between one to two children per 1,000 are natural with this deformity.
Until lately the discourse in Britain has been extensive surgery, and when the treated child grows up they are much still in pain and scarred from the procedure.
In Malawi, however, Mr Mannion was one of only two surgeons for seven-spot million people in the northern area of the country.
Demand
To proceed up with demand, he had to come up with a new and non-surgical solution which he could train staff in the land to perform as well.
The surgeon constitute a slight known and scarcely secondhand physiotherapy treatment, called the Ponseti handling, which proven to be successful.
It involves gentle manipulation of the bones and stretching of the skin through casting, followed by the baby wearing a particular type of boots.
Quickly Mr Mannion spread the practice through clinics all over the country and soon evidence based on hundreds of cases showed that the treatment was excellent.
Not only that - it was better than the British treatment of surgery. He had stumbled across something big.
The computer program follows the Ponseti treatment - both in Africa and Britain - and tells the story of Steve's struggle to overcome deep-set traditions and practices to eventually cross a new medical frontier.
Yet, for the monetary value of one advanced surgical robot - around �12 million - a quarter of a million children can be treated and given the ability to walk again.
Unlike expensive high tech surgery, Mr Mannion establish a simple solution within the reach of more than than a small percentage of the world's population.
The first of three Superdoctors programmes in the series is scheduled to black market on Thursday 21 August on BBC One at 2100BST.
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