Les Stroud Versus Bear Grylls

(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!)

 Loading ...

I’m posting about this because I’ve become a fan of Les Stroud and his Survivorman series on Discovery Channel.  Les truly goes it alone in the wilderness.  He sets up his own cameras and kills his own food and manages to survive lonely, brutal conditions.

Bear Grylls, the British paratrooper who has a competing show on Discovery called Man Versus Wild, keeps a camera crew with him and doesn’t really tell the audience how to survive anything.  Grylls performs stunts in the wilderness, such as drinking his own urine and drinking water squeezed out of elephant dung.  Its like a contest of wills between Grylls and nature.

But now it seems that Bear Grylls has been faking it.  UK’s channel 4 is investigating him for having slept at a hotel a few times when he was depicted on TV to be roughing it under the stars.

From Reuters here:

Bear Grylls is the star of “Man vs. Wild,” an increasingly popular series on Discovery Channel that recently concluded its second season. Each episode he parachutes into a different uninhabited territory without a map or much else in the way of camping equipment and spends several days trying to find his way back to civilization.

But this British adventurer is now the subject of an investigation by U.K.’s Channel 4, which already has confirmed that Grylls checked into motels on a few occasions when he was depicted on TV having slept under the stars. Other allegations have been made suggesting that the crew that records Grylls in action isn’t as hands-off as it might appear to viewers.

Truth be told, though, “Wild” isn’t so much 21st century “Gilligan’s Island” as it is a hybrid of “McGyver” and “Jackass.” Grylls has a knack for improvising solutions to dangerous predicaments and isn’t above grossing out everyone in the process.

Who can forget the time Grylls, burning up in the heat of the Moab desert, urinated on his own T-shirt, which he then wrapped around his head to cool his soaring body temperature. Or the time he hungrily bit the heads off maggots he found in a frozen animal carcass crushed by an avalanche, cheerfully explaining they were a good source of nutrition?

Grylls often commented on the painful loneliness of being alone in the wild, but unless his camera crew was staffed by bears, he did have some company out there.

So to combat the apparent fakery that has been going on with the Man vs Wild show, the show is supposed to become “more transparent” whatever that means.  I guess it will show the cameramen sharing PB&J’s with Grylls around the campfire.

Les Stroud’s official site is here.  Check it out, especially the FAQ and his Blog.