Bear Grylls

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mayfly

Life Member
May 25, 2005
690
1
Switzerland
Also I believe, from same source as Red says, a commonly used expression (correct me if I am wrong) by the military to describe people that say they played by Big Boys Rules (good book that) when they didn't. There was a thread about that recently. Hang on... here it is!

I figured the Bear programmes were amusing enough in a 'pinch of salt' sort of way. Better than X Factor I thought. Not so sure now, he really takes the biscuit :( Time to switch off the telly more I reckon!

Chris
 

TheGreenMan

Native
Feb 17, 2006
1,000
8
beyond the pale
It’s interesting to note some of the reactions to this TV series (having read other threads too). I think if one accepts that the programme is intended as entertainment rather than a ‘how to’ guide, then the whole thing acquires a more appropriate perspective.

TV is rarely reality, Reality TV even less so. There were definitely things that Mr Grylls did that I would definitely not do if I found myself in similar circumstances, but in my view the programmes were meant as fun and a momentary diversion, not art, not instruction, not education.

I certainly didn’t take the programmes as some sort of personal slur, which portrayed my hobby/recreation/interest/whatever, and thus by extension, me, as some sort of incompetent liability <ducks for cover>.

My only problem with the programmes (didn’t watch them all) was the cinéma vérité type wobbly camera work in one of the earlier episodes, which after watching it for 10-15 minutes left me feeling like my eyeballs were rattling around in their sockets, and slightly queasy. My objection was from an entirely stylistic viewpoint. I actually enjoyed some of the later episodes for what they were…fun.

My attitude to what looks to be an ensuing ‘bun fight’ between the various parties involved, will be of a somewhat bemused bystander. A position, not unfamiliar to me :)

Best regards,
Paul.

PS: I think the knife and the sheath look a bit ‘tastey’…<hums ‘YMCA’ to self> :p
 

xylaria

Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
:lmao: :lmao: :lmao:

Can a Mod change the thread title to "Cuddly Teddy Bear Grylls" please!

:lmao: :lmao: :lmao:

Teddy bear gryllis isn't cuddly, Ray mears is cuddly:p . Teddy bear grills needs the sent to the bottom of the toy box, for showing armchair tele heads that the outside world is dangerous, wild food should be full of maggots, and biting the head off wildlife is an acceptable way of dispatching it.
 

bazil

Member
Jul 14, 2006
25
0
46
under a fallen tree
bear annoys me, you can pick up parasites by biting into raw fish

and he shows that you can beat his very expensive knife with a rock and its ok....i wouldnt batton with a rock even on a cheap knife

anyway...here is a story about a WALT

"WE'RE going through!" The Bear's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the bear. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. Bear stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted Bear. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "Bear will get us through," they said to one another. "Bear ain't afraid of hell!" . . .

"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?"

"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty(bear). He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty(bear) drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. "You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over."

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair done," she said. "I don't need overshoes(i dont need gaiters...and im going down that gorge backwards even though there is a perfectly good footpath to the right hand side)," said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. "We've been all through that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're not a young man any longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but when the camera crew turned up, he took them off again. "Pick it up, brother!" snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.

. . . "It's the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan," said the pretty nurse. "Yes?" said Walter Mitty(bear), removing his gloves slowly. "Who has the case?" "Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over." A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. "Hello, Mitty," he said. `'We're having the devil's own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you'd take a look at him." "Glad to," said Mitty.

In the operating room there were whispered introductions: "Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty." "I've read your book on streptothricosis," said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A brilliant performance, sir." "Thank you," said Walter Mitty. "Didn't know you were in the States, Mitty," grumbled Remington. "Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary." "You are very kind," said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. "The new anesthetizer is giving away!" shouted an intern. "There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!" "Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep . He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. "That will hold for ten minutes," he said. "Get on with the operation. A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. "Coreopsis has set in," said Renshaw nervously. "If you would take over, Mitty?" Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. "If you wish," he said. They slipped a white gown on him, he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . .

"Back it up, Mac!! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. "Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. "Gee. Yeh," muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked "Exit Only." "Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her away." Mitty got out of the car. "Hey, better leave the key." "Oh," said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.

They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.

When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town--he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's, razor blades? No. Tooth paste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, Carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. "Where's the what's-its- name?" she would ask. "Don't tell me you forgot the what's-its-name." A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. "Have you ever seen this before?'' Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. "This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80," ho said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. "You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?" said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. "Objection!" shouted Mitty's attorney. "We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. "With any known make of gun," he said evenly, "I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand." Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty's arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. "You miserable cur!" . . .

"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit,'" she said to her companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. & P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. "I want some biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any special brand, sir?" The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. "It says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the box," said Walter Mitty.

His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes' Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first, she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?" Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets.

. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir," said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. "Get him to bed," he said wearily, "with the others. I'll fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the sergeant anxiously. "It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier." "Somebody's got to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm going over. Spot of brandy?" He poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. 'The box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant," said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" He poured another brandy and tossed it off. "I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir," said the sergeant. "Begging your pardon, sir." Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. "It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming "Aupres de Ma Blonde." He turned and waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . . .

Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you," said Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?" "Things close in," said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs. Mitty said. "Did you get the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that box?" "Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the store?" 'I was thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home," she said.

They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won't be a minute." She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. "To hell with the handkerchief," said Waker Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.


i got bored rewriting that......feel free to have a go
 
Jul 17, 2007
7
0
I'm surprised people have used this to jump on Bear that much and put him down. I really enjoy his shows and while i perhaps wouldnt climb 20 foot of tree to get my bearings or other such skills he does touch on very useful and very valid skills useful in survival situations.

The lads been through a lot by the sounds of it, a broken back at age 22 leaving him out of action for 12 months is something i can only imagine as being a tough mental battle. Having recently injured myself badly enough to make walking an impossibility without crutches you learn how precious just the ability to move is. When tasks such as dressing yourself and toilet trips become team family efforts anyone that has gone through it has my respect.

People will always aim to shun successful people and its infectious, it spreads to people who dont take the moment to make there own conclusions.

So with Bear an avid adventurer, with a keen knowledge of the outdoors, a respect for the wilderness and a keen contributor to charities close to my heart i admire him and hold him in good regard as a human being.
 

Goose

Need to contact Admin...
Aug 5, 2004
1,797
21
56
Widnes
www.mpowerservices.co.uk
So with Bear an avid adventurer, with a keen knowledge of the outdoors, a respect for the wilderness and a keen contributor to charities close to my heart i admire him and hold him in good regard as a human being.

I don't think anybody is being personal about him, he possibly (probably) is a nice guy. Comments I, and others, have made about him are about his TV persona and the (public) image he is trying to portray. I read his book "Facing up" and he came across as a genuinely nice guy, an adventurous, spiritual family man. This, I would guess, is probably more "him" than the pillock he portrays on his TV show.
I think the reason he has caused so much fuss, on this forum and "real" conversations, is that he sends a dangerous, silly message that extreme is good in the wilderness. A lot of people on the forum have experience or at least knowledge of various extreme sports and of being (well) outside a twenty minute ambulance response time, and can see the stupidity of his alleged actions, remember before the press "revelations" most people on here saw through the facade, what about people who don't and look up to him and try to copy his actions, which he was basically lieing about anyway!
 

Ralph

Forager
Oct 31, 2005
164
0
33
lost
Anyway, going back to the original point of this thread, lets not forget that he did jump into freezing water, a sinkhole, eat several things that most people wouldnt dream of eating (except us, ofcourse;) ) and several other things. So think about these acts before you criticise him for stating in a hotel...
Even though those acts were bloody stupid.:banghead: :theyareon
 

dommyracer

Native
May 26, 2006
1,312
7
46
London
if one accepts that the programme is intended as entertainment rather than a &#8216;how to&#8217; guide, then the whole thing acquires a more appropriate perspective.

A Channel 4 Spokeman said:-

&#8220;Born Survivor is not an observational documentary series but a &#8216;how to&#8217; guide to basic survival techniques in extreme environments,&#8221;

And at the start of each episode Bear says "I will teach you how to survive in the wild".

Now tell me again how its not presented as a "How To" guide.

I've got no issue with the fact that he 'faked' stuff, it wasn't a documentary. My issue, and that of others is that the stuff he does is complete rubbish
 
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