“The summits in our life are great but it’s the valleys that build us.” There’s plenty more trite wall art slogans – sorry, spiritual words of wisdom – to be found in The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls (out on Prime Video today), in which Grylls leads the cast of the Christian biblical drama The Chosen through the wilderness, which again indicates the expeditioner is fast developing a Messiah complex.
There was a time when Grylls was simply a likeable survivalist, blending the slightly OTT machoism of prime Ross Kemp with the “jolly good chap” enthusiasm of a wartime general. Even when he was exposed as misleading audiences – by staying in hotels while purporting to be roughing it in nature’s harshest terrain – he managed to weather the storm relatively unscathed.
But in the past few years, he has jumped from controversy to controversy. He drew criticism for a 2019 special with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, viewed by opponents as pure propaganda. Four years later, he spent much of his interview with President Zelensky, a man leading his country’s resistance against a superpower invasion, boasting about his own military experiences.
Elsewhere, Grylls also caused contention by delivering a Tory Conference speech in his Chief Scout uniform, a strict no-no for an organisation that prides itself on being apolitical (he later stepped down from the role). And he didn’t do himself any favours after moaning to one interviewer: “I find it demoralising to pay income tax at 40 per cent when I work really hard and spend a lot of time away from my family.” This from a man with a reported net worth of £25m.
