is he a fake?
i hope not. the investigation has begun...
my apologies to all those bear grylls lovers, hold onto the hope that he's for real.
the following taken from: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
TV 'survival king' stayed in hotels
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.
