Review of Bear Grylls: Born Survivor - Sahara

Introduction

There`s a penchant these days for show-off television, be it celebrity chefs, makeover TV or survival experts. Bear Grylls is the latest off the line of these, joining the likes of Ray Mears and Les Stroud.

Bear Grylls is an ex-military man who broke his back in a parachute accident and then two years later became the youngest Briton to scale Everest. Grylls is no stranger to controversy in his programmes as raised in The Guardian newspaper in June 2007 as to whether Grylls stayed in a hotel during nights when in the midst of filming a series of him attempting to survive in the wild. This is TV though and nothing should ever be taken as read as real. Does it detract from the overall experience? Only Grylls and his fans (1.4m last year apparently) can answer that one. I`m sure he`s not the only one though, although it brings to mind images of Damian Day in Drop The Dead Donkey to a certain extent.

Regardless, each episode of this set has the following warning at the start: "Bear Grylls and the crew receive support when they are in potentially life threatening situations, as required by health and safety regulations. On some occasions, situations are presented to Bear so he can demonstrate survival techniques. Professional advice should always be sought before entering any dangerous environment"

In this two part release, Bear is dropped into the Sahara and has to navigate his way across the vast desert whilst keeping his cool in an area of 9,000,000 square kilometres that has a total of about 3 inches of rain per year and eating lots of small disgusting things.

It should be noted that Amazon has this listed as a two disc affair that lasts around 163 minutes. My review disc was a single with two 45 minute episodes on it.

Video

Visually it looks very impressive and appears to filmed using handheld DV. Herein lie my problem with believability though as there are both aerial and long distance tracking shots alongside side close shots of the intrepid adventurer. Needless to say there`s no sign of the cameraman in any of the long shots. So it looks good, but actually saps my will to believe exactly what I`m seeing.

The editing is also quick slick and MTV-like, so you get a lot of repetition and either recap or mini-trailers for what`s coming up. Very annoying but I guess it wastes a few minutes of air time.

Audio

Plain stereo soundtrack that`s perfectly adequate, but no subtitles (which isn`t).

Features

None.

Conclusion

This is my first experience of Bear Grylls and actually the whole survival genre. I`m ex-military, but not really a survival expert of any kind and the whole thing just doesn`t really interest me and never did (although my brother, in the TA, loves it as I guess a lot of military types and would-be adventurers probably do). My opening impression was not a good one. Arriving in the Sahara in a helicopter, Grylls decides to freefall out of it to land in the desert, his landing met by a cameraman already on the ground. Good god, show off TV. I had a bad impression in the first thirty seconds.

It didn`t get better thoughout the first episode. Grylls made a habit of finding tiny creatures such as scorpions and lizards, and eating them. In fact, for some reason I was pretty annoyed by the whole thing at the end of the first episode that I wasn`t sure I wanted to watch the second one. I guess it`s because I was kind of sold on the premise that Grylls was supposed to be showing us how to survive by surviving himself but it`s clear that that wasn`t what he was doing. It reached a lowpoint for me when he decided to show us how to escape from quicksand, and eventually hauled himself out completely covered in thick and heavy mud. He gave the viewer a warning about getting cleaned up as soon and as best as possible to avoid rubbing in the groinal area (good tip by the way), and then appeared completely clean in the next shot. To be fair his shirt did look stained, but the only way he could have gotten completely clean was to have a shower and his clothes washed. I was hugely annoyed.

Then I started to watch the second part and my interest was piqued. There was still a lot of stuff he still did by himself that was a little annoying and self-indulgent in my eyes, like eating a snake and a frog and crawling inside a camel he skinned and gutted, but he did something that I found quite interesting. He came across a nomadic tribe indigenous to the Sahara and stayed with them a while. I found this segment quite interesting and would have preferred it if he just spent all his time with them. Alas it wasn`t to be and he soon wandered off again.

To be fair though, he covered a lot of terrain and passed on survival tips on how to attempt to survive on the different types of terrain to be found within the Sahara (it ain`t all sweeping dunes). I`m just not sure who this is really aimed at. Clearly he`s an adrenaline junkie who loves this sort of thing, so he`s probably up for it regardless. I just wonder who actually watches this kind of programme and why. Do we have an audience of wannabe adventurers out there who dream of crossing the Sahara but have trouble crossing the room to pick up the remote control to switch channels? Or is it just an extension of society`s need to watch other people doing either banal tasks or incredible feats? I guess that in the grand scheme of things, Bear Grylls is a brand and a celebrity/role model of kind in modern culture, but ultimately one of more use than the latest X Factor or Big Brother winner. And for that I can forgive him.