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Bear enough
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| Born Survivor: What a fuss over a speck of sand |
IF you're just about to have your dinner, you shouldn't be online. Oh, you've just finished?
Good, then I shall begin...
If I had to eat the pulsating, engorged abdomen of a still-kicking sand-spider or the tailless but furiously wriggling upper-half of a scorpion, I'd do it quickly, wouldn't you?
Not Bear Grylls, professional survivor, intrepid adventurer, ludicrous over-achiever and scoffer of things that go pop and scrunch, but not in a good way.
In his new series, Bear Grylls - Born Survivor (Sunday, C4, 8pm), the unstoppable man of iron made a real meal of chomping down on various scary beasties, just so that we could all collectively go "eeewwww" and talk about it the following day.
He ripped their heads/
stings/tails off, then held them aloft, squirming and squeaking (him and them) before slowly eating them a bit at a time, making sure we had foodie reviews such as "it's just like a big ball of pus exploding inside your mouth", while allowing said pus to dribble down his chin, just in case you didn't get his drift.
He doesn't need to perform these cheap tricks, for what he actually does is jaw-dropping enough.
This week it was a case of Grylls by name, grills by nature as he survived the desolate furnace that is the Sahara, a place so mind-searingly hot that barely anything lives, let alone grows, there.
He minimised the effects of the heat using a top he peed on as a cooling headdress; then he coped with plummeting night temperatures, so cold a man could die before even getting round to thinking "blimey, it's a bit parky, where's me jumper?", by lighting fires with flints, like some modern-day caveman.
Okay, Bear, we believe you. You are well-hard.
But no, that still wasn't enough.
He dived into lethal quicksand which came up to his neck in seconds, yet refused to allow his film crew to help him out - that way, he explained, we would all know what to do should the same thing happen to us - next time we're strolling down Winton high street, presumably.
On and on went the death-defying feats, and you simply couldn't stop watching.
It may all be completely pointless, but it's great fun and he obviously enjoys all the suffering.
One look at his CV - SAS, British Legion, avid skydiver, climbed Everest, black belt in karate, crossed the frozen Atlantic in a jam-jar lid or something - and it's little wonder that a day in the Sahara for Bear is as much fun as a day at Bournemouth Beach for we mere mortals.
Saying that, if you trip over a good-looking bloke buried up to his neck in the sand in the midday sun down by the Pier, it might well be him, bored with drinking tea and eating plain old cucumber sandwiches round his mum's - Lady Sarah Grylls lives in Wimborne.
And it may be worth mentally noting all those survivor tips as, according to this week's telly, we're all doomed and it could only be a matter of time before we are scavenging to make ends meet.
Everything is empty.
The government's coffers, our bank balances, the shops, a big pile of new flats in Leeds.
Only the news is full - of phrases like credit crunch, sub-prime mortgages, negative equity - as the media goes into overdrive to tell us how badly off we all are.
And shows like Flat Broke (Monday, ITV1, 8pm) and Panorama (Monday, BBC1, 8.30pm) gleefully informed us that our houses (if we are lucky enough to own one) are now going to be worth about seven pence and the cost of living could mean that we'll all be living on bread and water for the next decade.
That's all very well, but how will we know exactly when to start being miserable?
Nobody has offered to do my weekly ironing for a fiver yet.
None of my neighbours have created allotments.
It's hard to spot a car on the road that's less than five years old and I can't get a seat on Eurostar that doesn't cost the equivalent of Posh's annual shoe budget for love nor money.
And tell me this - if everybody is skint, how come whenever I try to buy Marks & Spencer oven-ready lamb shanks, they're sold out? Have you seen what they cost?...
11:02am Friday 18th April 2008
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