The Bear necessities
BY CATHERINE WOULFE
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YOU’VE drooled over him doing press-ups, naked, in the snow. He looks cute all curled up inside a camel carcass and somehow, he can even make giving himself an enema seem sort of masculine.
But can you picture Bear Grylls, who puts the man in Man vs Wild, doing yoga?
Apparently he can.
“I now practise yoga most days as a way of keeping my back strong for my life and I feel this is the key to what I do, day in and day out,” he writes on his website.
But don’t panic, Gryll’s not about to come over all girly on us. He fractured three vertebrae in a parachuting accident when he was in the British SAS. He does yoga to keep his back healthy.
He told reporters: “In many ways, I think it sometimes takes a knock in life to make you realise what you really value. I kind of wonder, if I hadn’t broken my back, whether actually I would’ve done any of this stuff anyway.”
By “this stuff” he means presenting the most popular show on the Discovery Channel. And by “presenting”, we mean wriggling through caves, traipsing across deserts, leaping into icy rivers and squelching through alligator-infested swamps, all with his tight little production crew in tow.
The idea is that Grylls gets dropped off somewhere insanely dangerous and remote, and has to not only survive, but get himself back to civilisation.
It’s great TV. But the show lost a little of its mystery in 2007, when it emerged that occasionally, Grylls had stayed in hotels, when the show depicted him roughing it in the wild. There were also allegations that a raft he “made” for the cameras had actually been put together earlier by crew, and “wild” horses he came across were anything but.
Discovery vowed that Man vs Wild would in future be “100% transparent”, and has re-edited episodes that were too staged, and added disclaimers.
The change in this series will be obvious to fans. In the first episode, screened last week, Grylls came across a tarpaulin in a remote river, stumbled into a controlled forest fire in the middle of nowhere, and when his own noose failed to trap a wild pig, an unlucky swine was left tied to a tree so he could demonstrate how to kill it.
But it’s all in good humour, and Grylls is just such a natural on camera that we really don’t mind suspending our cynicism for an hour.
And nature’s still throwing the show the odd curve ball. Late last year the team were caught in a typhoon while filming in the jungles of Hainan, China.
“The last place in the world you want to be during a typhoon is in a jungle,” Grylls told reporters.
“It was like being in a battlefield. There were trees just going, boom, boom, every few seconds, and we ended up kind of hiding in these old ammunition [pits] ... I just stumbled across this place, and it was absolutely full of bats ... I raced out, made myself like a tennis racket out of some bamboo, got a big flaming bundle of fire, threw it down this cave, and all the bats came screaming out, and I was just playing bat tennis, trying to catch these things.”
It was bat for dinner that night, and rats’ brains for breakfast.
“It’s a delicacy. I’m not sure why because it’s not very delicate and it’s not very nice.”
Man vs Wild is on Discovery, 8.30pm, Wednesdays.
- © Fairfax NZ News
