All of Bear Grylls new fame is killing me.

Wabajack said:
"Edward Grylls, the guy everybody loves to hate"

lol :D
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It's not that people hate Bear Gryls,its that he starts every show saying he was SAS,like that gives him some super secrets of the out door's then proceeds to do some incredably dumb thing that can get people killed. Serving in a military unit does not automaticaly turn you into John "Lofty" Wiseman. This guy surley isnt him.That being said this is the first show i've ever watched that had me walking around in disbelief for a full 12 hours. (Poop drinking show) Gotta keep tuning in for next week's insanity
 
I enjoy his shows for a couple of reasons- entertainment and a good illustration of the fixes people can get themselves into while traveling in tsrange terrain. I watch it with my kids and we discuss what SOULD be done if they should ever find themselves in such a pickle. "I should'nt be alive" is another show good for this.
Anyone that seriously thinks they will learn the knowledge base and skills to survive from TV lacks the common sense to make use of what they see.

Long before Jackass, Steve Irwin or Bear Gryhlls I watched the Mid ATlantic Wrestling and Evel Knievel(SP?)- I did some pretty dumb things in the backyard. As maturity & common sense came, I learned what worked and what did not. My father said younguns are just tough enough to survive their learning curve.

2Door
 
btuner said:
he gets talked about on every forum because of people of you. no one on here would be talkin about him right now if it hadnt been for your post! if you think hes stupid then keep your mouth shut and watch something else on tv instead of coming on here and "ranting" about how stupid he is. You're just proving the point that it is a good show and worth talking about. it can be a little over the edge but then again its one of the most watched shows on cable television, so obviously hes sucessful, and obviously everyone watches the show cause its entertaining, otherwise it wouldnt be doing as well as it is(i work for Nielsen ratings)
Come on people i know you guys are all sick of beating this topic to death.
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the internets.... SERIOUS BUSINESS!
 
Strobengh said:
I think that Bear is a genius . . .

LOOK at all the hype his show has generated.

He even has those who profess to hate him with all their hearts tuning into his show on a weekly basis. THAT takes skill!
Hate him or not, he has created himself a very effective marketing machine, and his show has generated enough hype to attract supporters AND detractors.
That's pretty impressive.

I watch his show for the same reason I watch Dirty Jobs, or MXC: to see people get beat up for my personal entertainment. If someone decides to watch his show for their survival information, good on 'em.

That is all.
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you speak the truth. But along the same lines, Marylin manson is a genious. He has figured out how to make money with a few OK songs and pretending to be an asexual.
 
straitshot said:
Yes, this is a dead horse, but I had to offer that it is one of my very few evening refuges from sitcoms, idols, realities, fantacies, and cars that always explode like nukes. Spare me. I'll take Bear with gratitude. ss.
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more good points here

edit: don't take away my exploding cars though. See user name
 
lmalterna said:
Long before Jackass, Steve Irwin or Bear Gryhlls I watched the Mid ATlantic Wrestling and Evel Knievel(SP?)- I did some pretty dumb things in the backyard. As maturity & common sense came, I learned what worked and what did not. My father said younguns are just tough enough to survive their learning curve.

2Door
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I just think things are different now though. Maybe more elaborate. I dont' have kids yet but I wouldnt' want them watching Jackass. Any of the other stuff would be fine with proper guidence. Jackass should be ban from TV.
 
bear has a ten man camera crew and director filming him for a couple hours a day doing stunts... that rabbit he "hit with a stick" was likely brought in, and those "wild horses" had shoes on...
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Although I can't speak for this guy "Bear's" show--I've never actually seen any episodes--I can say that a lot of 'reality' shows do involve staged and choreographed elements. I know this because I used to work at a magazine for people in the TV and film industry, and I was told by these same people that they do do it.
 
Hey, it's a fun to watch show. Some parts of his shows actually dovetail with that of Survivorman, for example, the part where he (Bear) shows how to de-tail a scorpion leaving it ready to eat.

Other parts are just nuts--water from elephant poop, pee on the t-shirt to help keep the noggin cool.

Sad, but I'm afraid any venue that shows us how to "survive" w/o the entertainment aspect is not going to last long as a show.
 
They could do a show where they re-visit times when people got in trouble in the woods and then show what could be done to avoid the situation or how to take care of yourself in the same situation. They could have interviews with SAR staff, LEO's, rangers, and so forth. There are so many things they could show like navigation, first aid, water purification, signalling, fire building shelter building, using the essentials they are supposed to have, wild edibles, traps and snares, fishing, etc. You could do several seasons worth easy.
 
Ron Hood was involved with the show in the early stages, "Extreme survival" was the pilot I believe. Ron ended up on the outs with the producers due to all the stunts and dangerous behavior, he thought it was irresponsible to tout the things that they wanted to show to boost ratings as good survival info. Of course I'm para-phrasing, those weren't his exact words, but something like that.

He did speak fairly highly of Bear though, good guy, smart, knows his stuff, that sort of thing.
 
DaleW said:
They could do a show where they re-visit times when people got in trouble in the woods and then show what could be done to avoid the situation or how to take care of yourself in the same situation. They could have interviews with SAR staff, LEO's, rangers, and so forth. There are so many things they could show like navigation, first aid, water purification, signalling, fire building shelter building, using the essentials they are supposed to have, wild edibles, traps and snares, fishing, etc. You could do several seasons worth easy.
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Yea, that show is called "I shouldn't be alive!" and its lucky to pull half the ratings Man Vs. Wild does each week.

People want poop eating and cliff diving with their survival.
 
I like "Survivorman" much more than "Bear". I like survivor stuff, so I watch both..., I get kind of tired, sometimes, since Bear likes to do something "stupid" nearly every episode.

Not that I haven't done something stupid, and sometimes get hurt...., but I didn't do it intended :rolleyes:
 
This is what Ron Hood had to say about Man vs Wild. (posted on Ron's forum)

"I can't watch the show. It is so full of dangerous and stupid information that it makes me ill. It is as if Bear (or the writers) are trying to re-invent survival skills. I can do the long version of why drinking urine is bad but I won't. There are many accounts of situations where guys took different paths in life rafts and on ground. Those who drank urine and saltwater died. Those who just suffered the dehydration, lived. FWIW you can drink urine and live if you are well hydrated as the wastes are diluted.

I'm well and truly embarrassed that I had anything to do with this show (the first episode) but count myself lucky that I stepped away when I did. The producers, the actors, the network should all be held accountable when deaths occur. There is at least one that I know of now. I can tell you from personal experience, I spent enough time with him, that Bear knows shit about survival skills.

In some way I might be responsible for the shift from truth to stupidity. When we filmed the first episode I suggested eating the raw fish (taken from my own video), then I suggested we take a flank steak, make a paste of flour, sugar and butter, then cover the meat with the paste and add meal worms so he could act like he was eating a nasty raw bear kill found alongside the river. Closeups of the maggots crawling in the slime and him eating it made it look real. Of course they passed it off as the real thing. We did similar things with bugs and worms.... It's all fake, made for shock.... just like the show.

Absolutely worthless crap.


Ron"

I think that says it all really.
 
If, as happens everytime my six and three year old see Bear on a Discovery promo for MvW, they scream in unison, "Bear?!? That guy is nuts!"--just how dangerous can he be?

Even kids spot him as over the top entertainer that he is. I am personally waiting for him to bake his own shyte on a rock because that is the corner he is painting himself into after squeezing elephant dung and drinking his own piss.
 
Well, he was (at one time) the youngest guy to climb Everest, and anybody that was in the 23 SAS reserves for three years, who work closely with 22 SAS, and only came out due to a bad parachute accident whilst in the 23 SAS with a broken back, gets my respect, and is no dumb arse.
What he does is for entertainment, and I like the mix of survival, and escape and evasion military style, that he does on for TV.
He is also a survival expert for the military, so he does actualy know what he is doing, and SAS survival training is pretty intense.
As for being a legend in his own mind, well if you have achieved more with your life than him, then I guess your free to comment.
 
It occurred to me that, outside of the 'puff pieces' on his or Discovery's Web sites, I haven't heard much directly from the man himself. So, I went looking on the Web and found excerpts from a recent interview:

Bear on SAS service:
"The SAS was building specialist soldiers. It's very intense to get into but once you're there you're trusted with the world. And you're very much given self-responsibility. You need to, for some of the jobs you're doing, handling millions of dollars to bribe Arabs to carry ridiculous amounts of explosives around all day. You're trusted with the world..."

"My specialty with the SAS was combat survival. And I spent months and months and months doing that. We'd get dropped in the middle of the Alps with nothing. We'd have boots with no laces in them, completely naked in the middle of winter with a trench coat and that's it, with 150 soldiers with helicopters looking for us. We had to evade capture, stay alive and cross the mountains undetected. It was a big part of my life in the army learning how to stay alive, how to live off the land. It's everything I love -- all of that."
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Bear on going through French Foreign Legion training for a TV show:
..."I think the Legion is the opposite [of the SAS]," he shakes his head.

"It's a very hard lifestyle, but you're trusted with nothing. You're not told what time of day it is. You're told when to eat, when to sleep, when to do everything. Your whole life is controlled, and they're teaching you to obey orders. They keep 150 nationalities -- a lot of these guys are running from the law -- the only way they keep them together is through a regime of brutality where you do as you're told or you're kicked in the mouth and thrown out."
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Bear on filming MvW:
The Foreign Legion show led to "Man vs. Wild," in which Grylls can indulge his derring-do with little more than a ball of string and a mirror. He admits he's often frightened.

"I'm scared almost every day on the series. Just yesterday I had to swim across an alligator-infested river to show how you'd do it if you had to do this. I could see the alligators, they were 10 meters away. I'm scared the whole time. But I think what I've also learned is that that's OK. What matters is you stay and keep giving your all for what you're doing and say your prayers and keep smiling and go for it. It becomes the mental side of it," he says.
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The softer side of Bear:
But that's not the hard part, says Grylls, 32. The difficult part is being away from his wife, Shara, and his two boys Jesse, 4, and Marmeduke, 1.

"I come alive on a mountain or getting bitten alive by mosquitoes. But I'm used to those things. What I find hard is being away from my two little boys. And I've been away so much this year," he sighs.
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Yoshi said:
Well, he was (at one time) the youngest guy to climb Everest, and anybody that was in the 23 SAS reserves for three years, who work closely with 22 SAS, and only came out due to a bad parachute accident whilst in the 23 SAS with a broken back, gets my respect, and is no dumb arse.
What he does is for entertainment, and I like the mix of survival, and escape and evasion military style, that he does on for TV.
He is also a survival expert for the military, so he does actualy know what he is doing, and SAS survival training is pretty intense.
As for being a legend in his own mind, well if you have achieved more with your life than him, then I guess your free to comment.
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Exactly. Most of the "internet survival experts" here wouldn't make it a day if they actually had to get off their fat butts and fend for themselves in the wilderness.
 
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