Question:
Why is Bear Grylls a wanker?
Answer:
First of all his name is actually Edward Michael Grylls. Surely anyone who changes their name to “Bear” is a wanker. Almost as big a wanker as the late Conservative politician, Sir Michael Grylls, Bear’s father who was knighted in 1992, having lied two years earlier to the committee on members’ interests on the number and amounts of Ian Greer’s payments to him during the Cash for Questions scandal. Interestingly Michael Grylls managed to avoid notoriety unlike former Tory trade minister Neil Hamilton, who married Grylls’ secretary, Christine…
But I digress…
Recently aired on Channel 4 were repeats of Born Survivor.
Born Survivor saw Bear wandering around what may as well be Epping Forest, looking for discarded sandwiches to stave off the hunger when one of the 4-man camera team he travels with thought, for realism’s sake, not to invite him to dinner at the hotel the crew are staying at. Whilst you and I, and hopefully everyone else must realise that the locations are no more exotic than Windsor Great Park, we’re led to believe that Bear instead braves the Alps one week, and the fjords the next.
One particular episode of this insult to Ray Mears’ hallowed name sees Bear stalking purposefully through the swamps of the Everglades in Florida. Completely isolated in this most dangerous of habitats (bar of course the camera crew and rescue team hovering overhead in the Lynx) he’s forced to confront the local fauna by engaging in hand-to-hand combat with, er, some minnows, a handful of grubs, a baby frog and a turtle that looks uncannily like Dan Akroyd’s face in Coneheads.
The camera never actually shows anything that might qualify as a dangerous creature but Bear, not worried by this lack of drama, decides to add some of his own – by shimmying up a tree when he sees in the distance... bubbles. That’s right. Bubbles. He and the crew then turn tail and run/splash/trip in a most undignified manner, to the sound of Bear screeching “we’re too close! We’re too close!” To what Bear? A flatulent beaver?
When it comes to survival techniques, however, Bear is highly accomplished. “Lost” in this most forbidding of terrain, he needs to find higher ground. But fear not! Bear has a solution! He ties his shoelaces together and shins up a tree with all the charm and grace of Gordon Brown smiling on Youtube. “I’ll be able to get a glimpse of some pine trees,” he tells us, which is good “because they grow on dry ground”. He gets to the top, and shins back dejected. “I couldn’t see any” Oh, right.
Bear is a man who appears to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders as his furrowed expression shows us. He is clearly in danger every time he hears the breeze rustling through the trees, something he learned during his years at Eton. “The swamps are so forbidding. Anything could be lurking in the water”, he tells us, wading past some crisp packets and a shopping trolley.
Seeing the crisp packets has obviously made Bear hungry. The Everglades episode shows Bear taking a knife to a turtle and appearing subsequently with his T-shirt drenched in the unfortunate reptile’s blood. Later in the series we are blessed with an image of Bear snaking through a field of long grass (I believe they’re in Shrivenham) with a stick. Suddenly he jumps up letting loose a blood curdling scream as he hurls said stick ’somewhere’ into the grass from no less than 3 different camera angles. He dives in like a bored dog after his stick, presumably trying to alleviate himself from the mind crushing dullness that programming like this propagates, subsequently emerging with what can only be described as the still body of a young Elk, which our intrepid explorer promptly begins to hack at with that bit on a Swiss army knife for getting stones out of horses’ hooves…
Thankyou for the magic Mr Grylls.
But wait. Bear, old boy, I do believe you’ve led us astray! Although the title of your laudably egotistical programme is in fact “Bear Grylls: Born Survivor” one must look at the credits for a further insight into the production of this sham of a mockery of a mockery of a sham. My thanks instead should be directed to Kris Thoemke who is honoured on the credits as “Survival Expert” with Bear down only as “Presenter”…
Clown. Fish Stock
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