KEY POINTS:
"Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you." It's one of those lines I've always wanted to throw into a column. Now is just that moment.
Because in the past few weeks I have developed a strange addiction. One that goes against all my better instincts and one that, like most obsessions, relies on a delusion.
It is this: I have become an ardent viewer of Man vs Wild.
It's been on the Discovery Channel every night of the week of late and I've been up past my bedtime thrilling, in my own not very outdoorsy way, to the adventures of host Bear Grylls.
Bear is a man whose real name is Edward, who is so tough they called him Bear instead of Teddy, probably.
He's an Eton College-educated former SAS soldier who now parachutes into, then runs around trying to get out of, the world's more inhospitable spots - with a camera crew in tow. It's all to show the couch-bound how we might survive if we got ourselves stranded in the backblocks of Iceland or the jungles of Ecuador or the swamps of the Florida Everglades.
He is a ball of energy. He is inspiring. He is full of useful tips. And occasionally very interesting recipes.
Like the other night when, with some rhinos looming into shot, he instructed how best to deal with a couple of them charging you: "Stand your ground till the last second, get out of the way then run for cover." Such advice is far more entertaining than anything the locals who have to deal with rhinos in their back paddock could come up with. No, they'd probably say something boring and patronising like "Stay away from the rhinos, you stupid tourist."
That's why I like Bear. He assumes his viewers will some day need to know just how to play possum with a charging rhino. I feel more manly just watching him. Man vs Wild makes up for a distinct lack of testosterone in one's television diet.
Of course, like all "reality" TV, Man vs Wild is too good to be true.
Recently, the Discovery Channel had to put disclaimers on the episodes after it was found Bear wasn't always sleeping as rough as the show depicted, that he was getting help to build rafts or bridges, and what he was eating wasn't always caught in the traps he had MacGyvered out of his bootlaces.
But I don't care. The highlight isn't Bear building snowcaves or treehuts or canoes or climbing down frozen waterfalls. It's Bear becoming part of the foodchain. He might be tough and fit and smart, but his truly superhuman ability is where it comes to eating dead stuff.
In Iceland he came upon a dead mountain sheep at the bottom of a crevasse and before his crew could whip him back to the Reykjavik Hilton for dinner, he had carved off a leg and cooked it in a volcanic pool complete with eyeball entree.
In the Scottish Highlands, he struck it lucky on the dead fauna front again. A red deer had taken a wrong turn down a cliff. Bear found it a bit whiffy for a venison'n'thistle casserole but figured its hide would make a nice duvet for the night, even if it ponged.
And after his rhino encounter in North Kenya, Bear's magic touch with expired wildlife hadn't left him. He was able to extract his daily protein from a zebra which had already been dinner for the local lion pride and flock of vultures.
Along the way, he's cooked a turtle, a rabbit, a snow chicken, and lots of fish.
Yes, Discovery may have had to put disclaimers about the veracity of the show. But you won't see "No animals were harmed in the making of this show." Because in Man Vs Wild, you don't get to eat the Bear, the Bear always eats you.
