Entertaining and ludicrous in equal measure

gut-6

I very much enjoy this pseudo wilderness survival show, even though the situations that Bear puts himself in and the means he uses to survive them are completely absurd. With very little modification, the whole thing could have been filmed as a hilarious, Leo Wankeresque send-up of legitimate wilderness survival experts such as "The Bush Tucker Man", It is really a stunt and gross-out show in the guise of survival advice.

Bear gets sent "all alone" into the most remote and inhospitable places where no-one would ever need or want to go, surrounded by what seems to be a zillion cameramen and crew. There he uses over-complicated, energy-wasting and risky survival techniques for little marginal benefit, pretending to be roughing it in the wilderness, before retiring for the night to his luxury hotel. The premise is that he is equipped only with a knife, but when required always manages to have a suitable bit of equipment that can be tendentiously improvised in the style of the "A Team" or "MacGyver" into a survival tool. Nearly every episode shows him munching on some nauseating plant or bug or other animal, usually after introducing it as a local delicacy, then struggling to avoid vomiting. All the while he dispenses his over-complicated and obscure survival advice as if it is sincere and useful, when in actual fact you could only even attempt to use it if you were trapped in the wilderness with a DVD of the show and a laptop to play it.

While perhaps not the intent of the show, it really serves to corroborate my loathing of wilderness areas. Mother Nature is a truly loathsome, vindictive harpy that wants to kill you slowly and painfully after feeding you inedible food for your last supper. Watching this show makes me want to bulldoze every wilderness area on the planet and put up an air-conditioned shopping mall in its place. It really helps you understand why environmentalists generally prefer to live in the most densely populated areas of the world's largest and most developed cities.

score 7/10

gut-6 3 May 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2244502/