Two danger men make their way on to our TV screens next week. Scot Kara talks to survival expert Bear Grylls from Man vs Wild and croc king Brady Barr of Dangerous Encounters
KEY POINTS:
Bear Grylls can turn elephant dung into a refreshing drink. Hey, when you're stranded in the middle of the Kenyan savannah with no water, as the man says, "It's pretty disgusting but it could save your life".
Following these words, on his show Man vs Wild, he picks up a fresh pile of pachyderm poo, holds it aloft, wrings it out, and lets the liquid and a few loose chunks fall into his mouth.
On the survival show, the former member of the British Special Forces is dropped into hostile, often remote, areas of places like Costa Rica, Alaska, and Australia, and attempts to make his way back to civilisation. It's not everyday survival advice, but it's riveting television.
A new series returns to the Discovery Channel in September. However repeats of his first adventures start on Prime this Tuesday at 7.30pm with the charismatic action man dropping into the middle of the Rocky Mountains. Watch out Bear, there's a grizzly over there.
So here's Grylls - real name Edward, which became Teddy, then Teddy Bear, so Bear for short - on various subjects like survival, tasty treats and being a reluctant TV star:
On the hardest place to survive on earth
I always find the swamp particularly hard. We were in Sumatra recently in these black swamps and it's where all the lowlands have dropped in the tsunami and it's now just swamp land. It's full of crocs that have the taste for human flesh from all the corpses that were there. It's a very tough place to work. The place is teeming with snakes, crocodiles and mosquitoes, and you're wet the whole time, and it's hot and humid. The water and mud is always black, so you can't see where the snakes are. I felt pretty vulnerable.
On things that gross him out
I'm certainly not a person who relishes eating yak eyeballs or goat testicles, but it is part of survival. And part of survival is leaving your prejudices behind and doing whatever you need to do to stay alive. I end up eating quite a lot of terrible stuff. But on the show, I think the raw goat testicles [a delicacy of the North African Berber people] was the first time I actually threw up after eating something. I've had frozen yak eyeballs after we killed this big yak in Siberia, a lot of live snakes, a lot of massive grubs the size of a child's hand, you name it: the intestines from a camel, the fluid from the intestines of a camel, camel fat from its hump, it's sort of a long list. But ultimately if you're going to self-rescue, you need movement and movement requires energy. You need to eat.
On eating snakes
I remember catching a big python in Australia and it was so hot, I thought, "Man, if I kill this, it's going to go off in a couple of hours". So I just carried it all day and kept it alive. [Then later I] whacked it and ate it. It was a nice dinner. Snake all taste pretty much the same. A few weeks ago, I caught a big one and ate that straight away, just raw. It's sort of blood and guts and meat. If I can cook them, it's much nicer, but sometimes you're on the move and you need to keep moving and eat on the go. Snakes are good. It's all energy. It's all food.
On his recovery after his adventures and lingering health issues
It's weird. Generally, I'm okay. I find if something has gone wrong, I normally know about it within a few hours. After the show, I'm always amazed how quickly one's body heals. When I get home I'm skinny and look exhausted with calloused and blistered hands but with lots of good home food and messing around with the boys, I recover quite quickly from these things. Filming in Mexico a couple of weeks ago I got stung by a load of bees when I was trying to get honey out of their nest. That one did take a while to recover from. I looked like the Elephant Man for half the show.
On allegations from last year that some episodes were not authentic
We do have to preplan. So yes, I have the knowledge that stuff is going to happen, like, "Let's try and do a big river crossing here", or "there's good cliffs there". I'll get two days beforehand with all the search and rescue guys and we'll go through a really detailed plan of the safety, and also what we're going to try to achieve. It needs to have a vague outline otherwise it would be a boring show.
On Bear the action man versus Bear the actor
I'm the worst actor in the world and I never aspired to be a TV presenter but I've been trained in [survival] from a young age. It's what I did all through my time in the Special Forces. Discovery very much said to me, "Listen, can we just drop you in these places and film what you do to get out of it?".
They just wanted me to do what I do - the good, the bad, the ugly, the successes, the failures. I can be covered in dirt and it can all be going wrong and that's fine. That really gave me confidence, I suppose. I remember Simon [Reay], the cameraman, saying to me very early on: "Just talk to me. Tell me what you're doing." That's exactly how I think it about. I'm telling him, "Hey, watch out for this snake. This is quite a nasty one".
A DATE WITH DOC CROC
Dr Brady Barr describes himself as lucky. Watching his TV show, Dangerous Encounters With Brady Barr, he's more than a little crazy too. This is the guy who dons a 90kg hippo suit so he can get up close and personal with Africa's most deadly animal to get a sample of sacred hippopotamus sweat. This sticky elixir, which has never been "scraped" from a wild hippo before, is a natural sunscreen and has strong antiseptic qualities.
To see whether Barr succeeds and manages to dodge the hippo's gaping jaw, which he jokes is "commonly mistaken for a sleepy yawn", you'll have to wait for the Hippo Stakeout episode which is on the National Geographic Channel on July 21.
The first show in the series is on Monday at 7.30pm, with Barr heading to some remote caves in Indonesia to study a reticulated python, one of the longest, rarest snake species. This trip, to what he calls "Snake Palace", has special significance because during filming he was bitten.
"We're going back there in August. It's the return to Snake Palace. "I've got mixed feelings about that one," he says during a fleeting visit to Auckland earlier this week.
While the python bite didn't kill him, danger is at the core of his show and despite "I'm scared" being one of his favourite lines, you can tell he thrives on it.
Plus, Barr, who has a PhD in Biology from the University of Miami, does it all in the name of scientific research. Primarily he's a crocodile and snake expert but also researches other reptiles and animals. He's America's Steve Irwin perhaps. But Barr boasts some fearsome croc credentials that rival the late great Crocodile Hunter.
He's the only person in the world to catch all 23 species of crocodile in the wild - a fact he points out proudly. "I am the croc ambassador and I spend most of my free time trying to raise awareness of the plight of crocodilians because people don't line up to protect the cold scaly animals of the world. Hell, if it's pandas or something, people are throwing money at you. But with crocs and snakes people just stare," he laughs.
To be honest, he has a bit of an ego. Then again, you have to have one if you're doing the things he's doing - and that word crazy springs to mind again.
"We were in the Congo and we had a group of pygmies guiding us," he deadpans, "and they just thought we were a bunch of folks from the States who didn't know what we were doing. But then we came across a gaboon viper, a really deadly snake, the longest of any deadly snake, and these guys [the pygmies] were terrified of it and I just ran up there and grabbed it. Man, they just thought I was the toughest man on the planet and I was their best friend."
You can tell Boston, a local ranger during the hippo episode, thinks Barr is slightly nuts when he jokes about him being the "American hippo".
When you see Barr trying to get a "bite reading" from a hippo in the zoo you can't help but think, 'Crikey mate, leave the poor thing alone'.
He realises some people might see it as intrusive but he counters that most of the animals he researches are endangered.
"So if we don't find out more about them to survive, all we're going to do as a scientific community is document their extinction. That's why you've got to get your hands on these animals and find out more about them."
Just leave it to Dr Brady Barr.
LOWDOWN
Who: Bear Grylls
What: Man Vs Wild
Where & when: Prime, Tuesdays 7.30pm. New episodes on Discovery Channel in September.
Who: Dr Brady Barr
What: Dangerous Encounters With Brady Barr
Where & when: National Geographic Channel, Mondays 7.30pm
