Posted on 07/25/2007 4:29:29 PM PDT by GSWarrior
TO LIVE up to his public image of a rugged, ex-SAS adventurer, it must have seemed essential for Bear Grylls to appear at ease sleeping rough and catching his own food in his television survival series.
But it has emerged that Grylls, 33, was enjoying a far more conventional form of comfort, retreating some nights from filming in mountains and on desert islands to nearby lodges and hotels.
Now Channel 4 has launched an investigation into whether Grylls, who has conquered Everest and the Arctic, deceived the public in his series Born Survivor.
The series, screened in March and April and watched by 1.4m viewers, built up Grylls’s credentials as a tough outdoorsman. In a question and answer session on Channel 4’s website, he recalls how station bosses pitched the venture to him stating: “We just drop you into a lot of different hellholes equipped with nothing, and you do what you have to do to survive.”
But an adviser to Born Survivor has disclosed that at one location where the adventurer claimed to be a “real life Robin-son Crusoe” trapped on “a desert island”, he was actually on an outlying part of the Hawaiian archipelago and spent nights at a motel.
On another occasion in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains where he was filmed biting off the head of a snake for breakfast and struggling for survival “with just a water bottle, a cup and a flint for making fire”, he actually slept some nights with the crew in a lodge fitted with television and internet access. The Pines Resort at Bass Lake is advertised as “a cosy getaway for families” with blueberry pancakes for breakfast.
In one episode Grylls, son of the late Tory MP Sir Michael Grylls, was shown apparently building a Polynesian-style raft using only materials around him, including bamboo, hibiscus twine and palm leaves for a sail.
But according to Mark Weinert, an Oregon-based survival consultant brought in for the job, it was he who led the team that built the raft. It was then dismantled so that Grylls could be shown building it on camera.
In another episode viewers watched as Grylls tried to coax an apparently wild mustang into a lasso in the Sierra Nevada. “I’m in luck,” he told viewers, apparently coming across four wild horses grazing in a meadow. “A chance to use an old native American mode of transport comes my way. This is one of the few places in the whole of the US where horses still roam wild.”
In fact, Weinert said, the horses were not wild but were brought in by trailer from a nearby trekking station for the “choreographed” feature.
“If you really believe everything happens the way it is shown on TV, you are being a little bit naive,” he said.
Channel 4 confirmed that Grylls had used hotels during expeditions and has now asked Diverse, the Bristol-based production company that made the programme, to look into the other claims.
“We take any allegations of misleading our audiences seriously,” said a spokeswoman for the channel.
The latest suggestion that Channel 4 may have breached viewer trust comes as the broad-caster’s supervisory board prepares to issue new editorial guidelines to suppliers in order to stamp out alleged sharp practices that mislead viewers.
“Born Survivor is not an observational documentary series but a ‘how to’ guide to basic survival techniques in extreme environments,” the spokeswoman said.
“The programme explicitly does not claim that presenter Bear Grylls’s experience is one of unaided solo survival.”
Nevertheless, the disclosure is likely to disappoint fans of the Eton-educated adventurer, who at the age of 23 became the youngest Briton to scale Everest. Just two years before that he had broken his back in three places after his parachute ripped during a military exercise.
On screen he has emerged as a natural performer, with stunts such as squeezing water from animal dung and sucking the fluid from fish eyeballs.
Grylls could not be contacted for comment this weekend as he was trekking in the Brecon Beacons with his four-year-old son.
So what if some of the show is staged! Any intelligent person could deduce that. I look at it like a training film. Its the information conveyed that is important. Who knows? Anyone of us could be stuck in the Gobi Desert without a pot, right?
I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express® last night.
In all of these type shows including Survivor where they are starving and no water etc. and in real danger, who do you think is recording it on film?? I would say it’s pretty hard to die from thirst with a whole camera and sound crew a few feet away.
I roughed it out once at the Bellagio and had a Bloody Mary with vodka from the well.
I almost broke down, right there in the bar off the lobby.
It’s one of my favorites. Each show is a reminder how many wonderful, amazing places there are in the world—God’s handiwork on display, if you will.
Especially since there are no wild horses in the Sierra, they are found at the foot of the White Mountains, 20 miles east of the High Sierra.
His episode where he parachuted into north scottish highlands right when a storm was about to hit was amazing. He skinned a dead deer and used the fur as a blanket to sleep with. He wasn’t sleeping in a holiday inn that night.
He teaches all kinds of great information. That episode was all good tricks to stay warm and find food and water.
I don’t see the problem if for some of the episodes, he crashed at a nearby hotel.
Big frickin deal.
Next thing you know, they’ll be telling us the NBA is rigged.
I am not sure, but I don’t think a feral horse would let someone approach it the way he did.
i have had to stay at a few east texas motels before because of the remote areas i was in. so i understand.
I agree!
He’s a hunk, masculine, Christian, and good guy.
What’s not to tear down?!
He’s like a moving target.
I enjoy this show. Anyone with a brain larger than a walnut realizes there is a camera crew with him, and some of it is staged. Duh...
But a TV station with smaller-than-walnut-brain-people want to investigate this? What next, investigate TV starlets with fake hair and boobs? Where will it end?
Neither is my 9 year old grandson!
Didn’t know he was a Christian...that’s cool.
I like the show...my wife loves Bear....i will watch the new season of Survivorman also starting in august....with all the CRAPOLA on TV, i think these shows are outstanding.
I’m with you Less is out there by himself.
So what, its still the best show on TV. The guy is amazing.
Pray for W and Our Troops
Suvivorman does his own filming.
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