Bear Grylls

Sadly, Harry Hill’s TV Burp finished its run last weekend, so he’s not going to get to comment on the new series of Born Survivor with Bear Grylls!
Now regular readers may recall that in the past I’ve been a little cynical about the absolute reality of everything Bear did in the last series. Then came the revelations that Bear was heading back to various lodges and the like between shooting sections, so the survival aspects weren’t quite as represented.
Bear has taken all of this to heart. He’s got a blog where he’s been much more forthcoming about how the shows work. Indeed, he’s gone out of his way to highlight the crew!
A few weeks ago we got a one-off on his madcap scheme to paraglide over Mount Everest – in the event they didn’t fly over the mountain, but instead took off near the mountain and tried to get to a higher altitude. Unfortunately the measurement gear failed, and although it looked a bit like he’d done it, we couldn’t be sure.
But back to Born Survivor (also known as Man vs. Wild on Discovery in the US). The show begins with a disclaimer explaining that situations are sometimes set-up and that this is risky stuff, so don’t come complaining to Channel 4 if your loved-one dies trying some of the techniques in the wild. This disclaimer even gets repeated after one of the ad breaks.
Next, Bear tells us that he’s with a crew – not just a cameramen. We don’t see them aside from a very deliberate hand in shot when Bear’s given a video camera to carry up a tree when he’s hunting for grapes. This seems to answer a particular concern of mine in the previous series when Bear “needed” to jump from tree to tree, and yet sometimes was videoing himself, camera in hand, and at other times didn’t have the camera with him (when shot from below).
At another point in this episode set in the Sahara, Bear jumps into some quicksand to demonstrate how to escape. He again points out that this has been set-up for the purposes of demostration. He also meets a cobra, and then quickly points out that it has been brought in from nearby. Is there a snake wrangler just off screen?
As Bear crosses the desert, we get lots of helicopter shots, and we’re told that two crew members have been evacuated due to sunstroke. In other words – he’s not pretending to really be all alone out there.
Fair play to him for answering the critics – myself included – and addressing some of the issues from the first series. In some respects he’s gone too far the other way. He tells us about how they brought the snake with them, while Planet Earth doesn’t let on when it’s shooting close-ups of animals in zoos to run alongside the wild footage.
It’s also nice to see some of the survival techniques failing. At one point he tries to start a friction fire, rubbing a stick into some wood very hard to light kindling for a campfire. It doesn’t work and just expends lots of his energy – he uses a knife and flint instead. Then at another point he tries to get water from a dried river bed. Again, it’s not altogether successful, basically wetting his lips. Indeed, my only real criticism of this show is that he never really gets enough water to survive. His single litre water can is not going to keep him going for several days.
All the usual revolting elements of Born Survivor are present and correct: he needlessly parachutes into the desert when you just know the crew landed in the helicopter; he pees onto his ripped t-shirt and then ties it around his head to keep him cool; he eats various insects and small animals he finds in the desert – chopping off their heads before swallowing. And next week’s part two seems to include a truly revolting gutting of a large animal (a horse or cow?).
Roll on next week!


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