Man versus Not-So-Wild

Posted by Matt Cipriano | 5 Comments

I am a fan of the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, they usually work nicely when there isn’t much on television, always nice to tune in and see what Mike Rowe is up to or to see some one struggling to survive on an crab fishing boat, driving to and from a diamond mind in the Arctic, or lost in the wilderness.

In fact, the lost in the wilderness concept is so popular it has spawned two shows, both on Discovery Survivorman and Man vs. Wild. Survivorman has Les Stroud, an American a Canadian, with his own with a camera or two, stomping around in the wilderness, setting up his shots and then going back, breaking down the camera and moving on to his next shot. The idea is to survive the wilderness and make it back to civilization some how. Man vs. Wild features Bear Grylls a British ex-SAS “adventurer,” stomping through the wild, with a camera crew in tow, also stranded in the wild and trying to make his way back to civilization.

Now from the sounds of them they are two pretty similar shows, each one has a guy lost, out in the wild with few tools trying to make his way back to civilization. Bear tends to have the slight edge by being a bit more adventurous and daring then Les and is also willing to throw himself into dangerous situations to show you how to get out of them (like jumping into frozen ice ponds to show you how to get yourself back on to dry land and safety). Well, as it turns out Bear is a bit of a faker.

The London Times reports to us in an article titled “TV ’survival king’ stayed in hotels” that Bear may have misrepresented himself a bit. In the UK version of Man vs. Wild, Born Survivor, Bear had technical advisers for things like building a raft to escape deserted islands (the adviser claims to have built the raft with a team, then disassembled it so Bear could do it on camera). In particularly nasty locations Bear stayed at a lodge or hotel with the camera crew rather then roughing it. And in an episode where he wrangles a wild mustang, well, it turns out the horses were from a near by ranch and were set up and choreographed. Turns out the “Wild” that he was facing in some situations wasn’t exactly as wild or remote as he claimed. Though not to worry, Discovery has no intention of canceling their top rated series because of this, just some “unspecified” alterations will be made.

A disappointment to all of us arm chair adventurers who are pretty sure the closest we will ever come to being lost and stranded in the alps is when the chair lift breaks down at the local ski resort.

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