Bear Grylls is a hero to 10-year-old boys of every age. Whether abseiling, free-falling or guzzling his wee as a desert-survival technique, he is a boy’s own adventure made flesh, an SAS recruitment video reborn as high-fiving celebrity.
For his troubles he is, naturally, loved and loathed in equal measure. But what’s he like under the outback muck and officer’s-mess dash? That is the question Louis Theroux sets out to answer in the most successful episode so far of Louis Theroux Interviews… (BBC Two, Tuesday, 9pm).
It no doubt helps that Theroux and Grylls have a certain amount in common, such as being the privately educated offspring of successful parents – in Louis’s case the author Paul Theroux, in Grylls’s the late Conservative MP Michael Grylls
Theroux’s singular style involves nerdishly hovering on the periphery of a celebrity and quietly taking it all in. The approach has served him well across a near 30-year TV career – though there have been problems, too. The presenter would say himself that he gave Jimmy Savile an easier time than he deserved, for example, even though Savile’s crimes had yet to become common knowledge.
Theroux seemed initially out of his comfort zone in his new series. A sit-down with Stormzy revealed only how badly Louis Theroux seemed to want Stormzy to like him. He didn’t ask any difficult questions. He also committed the ultimate interviewer’s sin of asking whether Stormzy was comfortable with how the conversation was proceeding. Never offer your subject an easy way out.
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Theroux is on steadier waters as he takes a choppy boat to Grylls’s private island, in Wales. It no doubt helps that he and Grylls have a certain amount in common, such as being the privately educated offspring of successful parents – in Louis’s case the author Paul Theroux, in Bear’s the late Conservative MP Michael Grylls.
Grylls is, moreover, in the mood to share. He admits that some of his early extreme-survival films were possibly amped up a little for the cameras. And he confesses it’s taken him a while to come to terms with his mother’s eccentricities. (Now that she’s a little older he’s better attuned to her ways.)
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He also claims to be wary of the spotlight. Celebs often say that. But Grylls at least puts up a convincing argument. “Money, fame, glory – it’s never enough,” he says. “I see it all the time chatting to these stars. It’s a hole that can never be filled.”
There is even a Rosebud childhood trauma to explain his obsession with dangerous excursions and with pushing himself as far away as possible from the comforts of home. “Being sent away to boarding school aged eight – for me it wasn’t a choice,” says Grylls, who was educated at Eton. “What part of nature thinks this is a good idea? I’m crying. They” – his parents – “are crying. It was definitely a tricky time. I don’t think I dealt with it particularly well.”
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Theroux meets Grylls’s wife, Shara, and accompanies the explorer to his Electric Picnic-style festival, Gone Wild, where the adventurer goes pale with nerves as he counts down to his big Sunday-evening speech to the troops. “I feel I’m not as good ... This, for me, takes courage,” he says.
But if he is outside his comfort zone, Theroux is completely in his. After a few false starts, his shift towards a more conventional style of celebrity interview has finally hit its stride.
