Thursday, July 26, 2007

I guess it all depends on the motel

So there’s this show, right, called "Man vs. Wild," in which the host—a man—attempts to survive unaided in certain inhospitable environments—the wild. The "vs." element is an allusion to the difficulty in doing so; supposedly it’s hard to not die when you’re stranded in an Arctic blizzard armed only with a corkscrew and half a pack of baseball cards.

Hard, that is, unless you’re Bear Grylls, the former British SAS commando who is the star of the show. At least, that’s the idea.

The unfortunate reality, it seems, is that Grylls was getting a little outside help. Like instead of spending the night in the snow, he would spend the night in a motel.

The series' production company, Diverse Television, is cooperating with British television's Channel 4, which carries the program under a the name "Born Survivor: Bear Grylls."

Channel 4 confirmed that Grylls had spent the night indoors on at least two occasions when the series had led viewers to believe he was spending the night in the wild.

... snip ...

Among the Grylls grievances is an episode supposedly set on a deserted island (actually Hawaii) that shows him building a raft, which was actually constructed and then disassembled by show consultants so that the host could easily put it together.

And though Grylls claims to be a horse wrangler, another charge maintains that the wild horses Grylls happened upon in the Sierra Nevada were not so wild, and were in fact from a trekking station.

What does all this mean? I COULD TOTALLY HAVE MY OWN SURVIVAL TV SHOW. Just make sure that the thread count on my sheets is over 200, OK?

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