You Vs the World: The Bear Grylls Guide to Never Giving Up

Product Information

For Bear, this includes a very public U-turn from evangelical vegan to committed carnivore. “Our bodies don’t deal with being plant-based, in my experience, but they do deal well with animal products. BEAR GRYLLS OBE, has become one of the world’s most recognised faces of survival and outdoor adventure. Bear’s tough. If you remember him from his Man vs. Wild days, you’ve seen him jump into things like that naked, with no editing. So yeah, he fell in the ice. He pulled himself up out of there. What he actually did was he stripped down, because his clothes were soaking wet, and started rolling in the snow to get the wet stuff off of him. I always like that quote that says, ‘you never want to arrive at the end of your life in a perfectly preserved body’. That’s a waste. You want to come skidding in sideways, covered in scars, beaten up and screaming, ‘Yahoo! What a ride!’” he laughs. Basically we’d be like, “All right, Bear, you’ve got to get across this river. What are two ways you could do that?” And he’d be like, “I could try to swing across on this vine, or I could try to balance on the log and get across.” He’d know in his mind which was the better bet, the safer bet, but we’d let the viewer play with him a little bit, almost like he was their action figure. He’d do both, and then once he would do one, we had a change of clothes if he needed for continuity. We were straddling the unscripted and scripted worlds in a way I’ve never done before.

Anyone who’s watching that discerningly can make their own assumptions. What I’ll say is, sometimes it happens naturally, and sometimes we have to push it along a bit. Totally. It was a real challenge, and there were times when I was pining for the days of the simple, linear, unscripted TV show producing. That being said, I really liked the challenge and I’d love to do more. There are so many places in the world were we could take Bear. That’s true. It’s probably like pro sports, right? The fans and the stats will tell you when you’re too old for this shit. I don’t see him ever not doing it until it’s just not an option for him. He loves it so much. You get him out in the wild, he just comes alive. Related A hoffech chi wybod sut y mae cŵn yn siarad yn Gymraeg, Saesneg ac Almaeneg, neu sut mae dweud 'mae eisiau bwyd arnaf i’ yn Sbaeneg ac Almaeneg? Bydd y gweithdy amlieithog hwn, o dan arweiniad y Prifardd Mererid Hopwood, yn canolbwyntio ar rythm geiriau a brawddegau, gan gyflwyno tair neu bedair iaith ar yr un pryd. Drwy’r sesiwn chwareus hwn, bydd disgyblion yn mwynhau dysgu ieithoedd newydd a dysgu sut y mae gwrando’n ofalus ar rythm ac odl. We’d be negligent if we didn’t mitigate risk, so we always find a way to keep us safe. But, for example, if Bear comes down a 200-foot cliff and we’re filming him from the bottom, that means the crew also has to rappel down that 200-foot cliff. The crew is very small. We have two camera guys, a sound guy, a drone operator, and myself. And a couple safety people as needed — sometimes the safety team to crew member ratio is one-to-one.What I meant by the improvisation was, whether Bear fell off the log or not, or whether he made it across on the vine, we didn’t know which way was going to be right and which was going to be wrong until after he did it. So then we’d say, “Okay, that worked, so this moves us on to the next obstacle.” Or, “Shoot, that really screwed up. This is a dead end for the viewer.” Abi Elphinstone’s stories are never less than thrilling, whether taking us dog-sledding in the Arctic or living with the Kazakh eagle hunters in Mongolia. She shares the real-life adventures behind these tales, showing us just how easy it is to leap into stories of our own. Jump with Abi into her latest book Saving Neverland – a modern, magical sequel to Peter Pan, complete with moonpaper maps, frostbears and a woolly mammoth called Armageddon.

Watching Bear Grylls as he jumps out of helicopters and crosses white-water rapids on tree trunks, you’d be forgiven for thinking the TV adventurer is superhuman. I think you always naturally worry about your kids and want them to learn from your mistakes, but generally I would say I’ve learned more from them than they’ve probably learned from me,” says Bear, who has just launched The Bear Grylls Adventure, an activity centre in Birmingham, where teens are encourage to have a go at everything from axe throwing to shark diving.It’s a combination of Bear and the medics’ judgment call. You could make this show as extreme as you want to, and it could be very dangerous for the host. You could kill the host if you wanted to. We just had to draw that line. When Bear told us, for instance, “If I was really out here, I would figure out a way to start a fire, and I would likely survive. But do we really want to film for the next three hours, me freezing and hopefully starting a fire?” Also, with Netflix, we didn’t want to depict Bear failing mortally. We didn’t want to scare kids. So rescue by helicopter was always an option. When we get to that line when we’d ask Bear if he had any options left, he’d say, “Not really, dude.” And we’d say, “cool, let’s film a rescue sequence.” We spent millions of years evolving to eat meat and our diets have changed in the last 50 years – I feel humans aren’t designed for that.