North Wales, about three weeks ago: a child is stranded on some rocks off the coast, as the tide rolls in and threatens to cover them. But who is this hoving into view? Why, it is the RNLI, along with television’s Bear Grylls, who has masterminded the entire dumb-show. Not for a television programme, you understand. Just for fun. The big reveal for the lifeboat crew is that they have no idea there is going to be a real-life kid out there – much less that the child in question is Bear’s own son. Let’s up the stakes, lifeguards! Let’s do this! Let’s show these seas who’s boss! Also, let’s tweet it.
The moment is exquisitely heroic. Or, as the tetchily underbriefed lifeboat station manager put it when he returned from holiday to learn of the stunt: “The crew tell me they didn’t know Bear’s son was going to be on the rocks … As I understand, it was supposed to be a low-key exercise. I believe no photos were supposed to be taken. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but in his efforts to give the RNLI some publicity, this is the wrong kind.”
Oh, do be quiet, you boring little man. I much prefer the earlier verdict of an RNLI spokesman, who had categorised the farrago as a “joint training exercise” – that “joint” amusingly suggesting some kind of parity between the RNLI and the Grylls family. In truth, Lost in Showbiz thinks it would be more helpful if the RNLI saw itself as the Commissioner Gordon to Bear’s Batman. They both want the same thing, but the former is hopelessly outclassed by the latter, and must move to a position of grateful dependence, despite nursing various doubts about the vigilante’s methods.
As for the rest of us, wherever we were as a culture before Bear Grylls rescued us, it wasn’t a very happy place. In a sense we are all Bear’s children, marooned obediently on that rocky outcrop, waiting for him to come and save us with or without the buy-in of various junior emergency services.
Certainly, Bear has become the go-to guy for a number of celebrities who wish to alert the public to the fact that they would so much rather knock back their own urine than a lemongrass martini. His US show Running Wild with Bear Grylls has landed the likes of Kate Hudson and Channing Tatum, who were taught survival techniques such as eating ants and not having personal assistants for 36 hours. He even did two days with Kate Winslet, which I imagine was desperately gruelling. No idea where they went. But, you know: Kate Winslet. Apparently he cut the head off a fish and threw the body down her top. “I’ve got fish guts on my nipple,” Winslet declared. “Oh well, I’ve had people do a lot worse to me.” Not that she likes to talk about it.
As for Bear, he laps it up – though even he recently claimed to have been “broken” by the experience of downing a mouse cooked in the urine of Fast and Furious star Michelle Rodriguez, which she had been ordered by him to produce on demand. Still, I understand it can be very disorientating in the wild – once you’re out there, the line between survival and ratings survival blurs, and the line between subsistence and “specialist” sexual subculture services appears to dissolve completely.
Anyway, this week, Bear landed the big one – an absolute bromance of a trip to Northern Alaska and the Arctic Circle with none other than Barack Obama. The first selfie of the pair was posted by the US president, who teased: “Glad this was the only Bear I met in the park.”
“Such special moments all through this journey”, right-back-atchad Bear. As for the American people, they had one question: does this mean that climate change is really happening? Just kidding! Obviously what everyone wanted to know was whether Obama drank his own wee.
Apparently not. Whether Bear tried to get him to is hard to pin down. Facetiously named White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Air Force One: “I will not deny your suspicion that there may have been some suggestions put forward by the Bear Grylls team that were not approved by the Secret Service.”
Maybe it was urine, maybe they wanted to leave him unguarded on a rock within the sights of Sarah Palin’s house. Either way, Obama’s failure to embrace risk is a poor show – but hardly a surprise on the form book.
Still, he is on the way down, while Bear is still very much on the way up. Yes, there have been a few obstacles on the way: back in 2008, he was a leading light of the telly fakery scandal, having been exposed as kipping in a Hawaii motel during filming of a programme in which he was supposed to have been abandoned in the wild. But with two separate shows currently running on US TV and another two shooting over here, it is fair to say Bear’s journey to the summit of early 21st-century culture is on track. If you see him out there: do not fight him. Do not attempt to get your nutrition elsewhere. Realise that no one is coming, take responsibility for where you are, and let him quench your televisual thirst like a restorative cup of celebrity urine. The time has come to accept that it’s Bear’s world; the rest of us just survive in it.
