In the past, Bear Grylls has taken President Obama up an Alaskan glacier and trekked through the Swiss Alps with Roger Federer. This jaunt with David Walliams (ITV) was on a more modest scale, merely requiring the Britain’s Got Talent judge to be dragged across rivers and down rock faces in wildest Devon.
Grylls believes that everybody has a little bit of Bear in them, if they can just screw up their courage and face their worst fears. By the end of this, Bear and Walliams also had a little bit of rat in them, after Bear had barbecued a dead one for lunch. Walliams, togged up in comically brand-new boots, anorak and woolly hat, obligingly played the role of the effete thespian who can barely stand the thought of getting mud on his shoes, let alone rappelling down a 200-foot cliff into an inflatable dinghy. “I know he doesn’t want to kill me,” he confided, as Bear leapt over the precipice, “but he knows it would make good television.”
But Walliams is a canny showbiz veteran who also knows exactly how television works, and you can imagine he’d scripted his role down to the last throwaway line and exaggerated gasp of horror. His true confessions round the campfire about battling depression and wearing women’s clothes for a school play squeezed the icing onto the human-interest cake. And let’s not forget that he also swam the English Channel for Sport Relief (even if it was 13 years ago), a feat which took him 10 and a half hours, so the idea of putting yourself through a bit of physical grief isn’t entirely alien to him.
Though Bear shamelessly piled on the melodrama with comments like “the temperature’s dropping and the sky is looking ever darker”, the only really dangerous bit was when Walliams almost scalded himself trying to pour tea while crashing across country in Bear’s Land Rover (he claimed he’d never driven off-road before). I think we should hear Simon Cowell’s verdict on this show.
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