“I am in the harsh wilderness of the African bush,” boasts ursine cookery enthusiast/television survivalist Bear Grylls, standing legs akimbo on a rocky outcrop in the baking sun. He looks like an investment banker who’s been washing his car. But he is not an investment banker. He is a wily wilderness dweller who will survive the apocalypse out of spite. And if he had a car, it would be a car jerry-rigged from sticks, twine and the carcass of a goat and it would run on his own urine.“Seven celebrities started. Now there are only six,” he says gleefully.
It would appear that light entertainment now has an acceptable casualty level. Bear Grylls: Mission Survive (UTV Ireland, Thursday) is a show in which Bear hunts the deadliest prey of all: Michelle Collins from EastEnders.
Actually, he trains hapless celebs who would struggle to survive in a less salubrious branch of M&S to survive in an arid wilderness. That said, the way Grylls keeps disappearing off into the scrubland to distribute refreshing ostrich corpses and wildebeest eggs (I may be getting these two animals mixed up) and to generally observe them from afar (I am reminded of the film The Hills have Eyes), makes it clear he would much prefer to be hunting them down, possibly for their lustrous pelts and sturdy footwear (we are not yet ready for such a show, but I give it about a year).
Grylls leaves a lot of the actual survival coaching to his “lieutenants” Megan and Scott but he regularly appears out of nowhere, like a creature from folklore, to reprimand his celebrity charges and to talk up his own prowess. He makes sure he’s around when vegetarians have to fondle meat and, in last week’s episode, when everyone drank their own urine. Urine is an acquired taste and Grylls has acquired it. He’s now at the point where he swirls it around his mouth and can discuss the vintage and bouquet.
“Why do we need to do this?” asks a weary celebrity.
“Oh we don’t,” says Grylls, drinking wee from a cocktail glass with a little umbrella.
That the survivalism of Mission Survive is somewhat ersatz never bothers Bear, who is, after all, not a real bear. When actor Samantha Barks is tasked with dislodging a springbok carcass from a tree, nobody asks how a springbok carcass would find its way up a tree (do they climb trees in order to die?). At another point, Grylls makes them cross a ravine on ropes. ITV's health and safety department have insisted they use safety harnesses, and you can see that this bothers Grylls. "You'd have died crossing that line," he says sadly, when actor Neil Morrissey, football manager Stuart Pearce MBE and Michelle Collins fall from the ropes but do not expire on the rocks as nature intended.
Darwinian ideas
Grylls adds a veneer of respectability to proceedings by discussing Darwin’s ideas (ideas which, I note, were written by someone who wasn’t drinking his own wee, but living comfortably in a Victorian pile) but for the most part, he seems to enjoy taunting his victims/subjects.
When Neil Morrissey’s heart races and he starts thinking about family members who have died of heart disease, Grylls emerges from behind a cactus to boast about his own heart health. “I regularly get up to [a heart rate of] 180,” he says before showing the females his glowing red baboon arse in a demonstration of virile superiority. “You might as well kill me and eat me,” wheezes Neil Morrissey, which I imagine Grylls seriously considering, before an ITV lawyer steps in to show him the bit in Morrissey’s contract that specifically forbids Grylls from killing and eating him.
Anyway, we’ve seen it all before: programmes in which unqualified celebrities are put in extreme situation. “What,” you say, “there are more of them?” Does Bear Grylls shit in the woods?
On the streets
BBC’s
Rich, Famous and Homeless
(BBC1, Wednesday) has four celebrity volunteers (Nick Hancock, Kim Woodburn, Julia Bradbury and Willie Thorne) sleeping rough in London. On the surface, this is an insensitive, sensationalising idea, no more representative of real homelessness than Bear Grylls is representative of a real bear (this is my final “Bear Grylls is not a real bear” joke).
But the celebs here act as good proxies for the viewer. The fact they’re so exhausted and frightened is a striking contrast to the stoicism of the real homeless people who are heroically patient and kind. As the snooker player Willie Thorne complains about the single day he’s spent on the streets and insists on going to a hotel, it’s the disbelieving look on the face of Steps, who has been homeless for 15 years, that resonates. It’s an interesting programme to watch from a warm sitting room. If you judge Thorne, you’re judging yourself. But I’d still prefer to see a documentary about Steps.
The hunger for celebrities in extremis arguably began with the OJ Simpson trial, a once-in-a-lifetime merger of reality television, legal procedural and 24-hour news. It's now a surprisingly brilliant drama series, American Crime Story: The People Versus OJ Simpson (BBC2, Monday) by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. How can anyone make good drama from a story so familiar? By merging the dark, meticulously factual content with an almost camply irreverent tone. It's all there: the racially charged atmosphere of the time; the self-pitying, childish defendant; the idealistic, naive prosecutor; the parasitic hangers-on; the bickering defence "dream team"; the eyebrows of John Travolta's Robert Shapiro; and the badger-themed quiff of David Schwimmer's Bob Kardashian (the eyebrows and quiff will run away together for the spin-off).
Sometimes it feels too good, too enjoyable, particularly when the distraught father of Ron Goldman (Joseph Siravo) laments his son becoming “a footnote to his own murder”, reminding us that these were real murders of real people for which nobody went to jail. And all the while, contemporary America continues to be just as racially divided and even more distracted by fame, demagogues and the reality televisual offspring of that badgery quiff.
