I have been given a time and a place to rendezvous with the world-famous adventurer Bear Grylls. Eleven hundred hours, at the arrow on the map, which turns out to be in the south-east corner of Hyde Park, London, at the huntress fountain. It may not be the Costa Rican rainforest, but the squawking of urban parakeets passing overhead helps. And the goddess Diana shooting her arrow is fitting.
Further fauna: a rat scuttles out from under a shrub, in search of lunch. Has it been planted there by Bear, I wonder? Will it be my lunch, boiled in my own urine? Where is he, and how will he arrive? From the air probably, dangling from a rope ladder; I’m listening for the sound of whirling rotor blades. Or perhaps he will jetski across the Serpentine…
Disappointingly, Grylls just strolls over casually, bearing takeaway cappuccinos. If indeed this is Bear Grylls, wearing a baseball cap and sporting a tache.
Did he grow it for Movember? Actually, he says, he was just filming in Fiji, stopped shaving and grew “a bit of rough”. But then he had a Royal Marines dinner last week. “I thought, ‘I can’t turn up in full mess kit with …’ like you,” he says, pointing at my own bit of rough. “So I shaved the rest of it off and kept the moustache.”
The baseball cap is so he can walk around town unbothered. (It seems to work: he goes largely unnoticed sitting on a bench, and it’s only when the cap comes off for photos that people stop and point and get their phones out.) He has just walked from his houseboat on the Thames. Bear, his wife, Shara, and boys – Jesse, Huckleberry and Marmaduke – also have a small island in north Wales and a home in Switzerland. To escape to the mountains, or to escape from HMRC? “No, it’s certainly not about getting away from British tax. I’m a proud, proud British taxpayer,” he says.
Yeah, I’m going in hard. I learned it from his new book. How to Stay Alive: The Ultimate Survival Guide for Any Situation, in the How To Handle Yourself In a Fight chapter. “Remember: you never win a defensive fight. Strike first, strike hard.” And never give up. NEVER.
He remains mostly good-humoured, only occasionally sighing at my questions. He also has an alarming habit of asking his own, trying to turn the tables. “Look, you’re as scruffy as me,” he points out. “Can you get away with that in the office? What do your kids say? ‘Dad, get a grip?’ How old are your kids?”
No, Bear. How old are yours? (Answer: 16, 13 and 10, while Bear himself is 45.) This isn’t about me, it’s about you. And surviving. At which point the rat appears again. “I’ve eaten a lot of rats in my time – they are not as bad as you might imagine,” he says. “I think the last one was with Prime Minister Modi … no, the last rat I ate was with David Walliams.”
Exactly, I think: he puts his celebrity guests through hell, so he can take a bit back. I’ve learned other things from the book, too, about preparation, not getting sidetracked. I’ve picked my subjects and my questions, and I’m sticking to them. Grilling Bear.
Rat or squirrel?
Actually this wasn’t a prepared question, but a squirrel has just appeared, so I wonder whether the former SAS man would go for this or the rat if he had to live off the land. And the answer is: squirrel. It’s bigger and easier to catch. “You could literally sit down, be quiet, put some crumbs at your feet, then stand on it. In the wild you’ve got to be a bit more savvy.” Surviving in Hyde Park, in some kind of nightmare post-Brexit Armageddon perhaps, would be a piece of cake, he says. As well as the rats, squirrels, pigeons and ducks, there’s water, and trees to build a shelter with.
And if a dog attacked?
Formidable hunters (I don’t think he’s talking about that bichon frise over there), he agrees, but he has tips. “Don’t make eye contact – that’s a threat. Don’t smile, because that’s showing your teeth. Turn sideways to protect your vital organs. Don’t run because they are chase animals…”
Suddenly, he’s up off the bench, acting it out, wrapping a coat around his arm to offer the dog because it’s better to be bitten on the arm than the neck. With the other hand he would be looking for something, even if it was just a phone or his bare hands. “BAM! Really aggressive, really hard, straight to the eye socket to blind it, and into the brain,” he says, jabbing at the imaginary canine.
In a second he’s gone from good-natured and mild-mannered, if occasionally a little exasperated, to Bear Grylls from the telly, the caricature, the brand, undeniably successful, but faintly ridiculous.
Who actually needs it, though?
All this survival stuff, who is it for? Knowing how to deal with a dog attack might be useful but I can’t see how lots of it fits in with my life. Will I even remember, next time I’m swimming with sharks and in need of a poo, to grab my faeces as they come out and hurl them towards the horizon? Or how to land a helicopter in an emergency?
It’s a loo book, he says, a little bit of information regularly going in. You don’t have to know it all, “but it is empowering for both men and women to know how to look after themselves in certain situations. Do you know how to deal with a tsunami and understand what to do if you’re in a car during an earthquake? Don’t stop by pylons, pylons fall down: little things like that.” Remember that, next time you’re in an earthquake, in a car: no parking by pylons.
Was he born in the wrong time?
He should have been a Victorian explorer, no? “No. The more civilised we get, the greater the wanderlust and adventure spirit inside. You can’t stamp out 100,000 years of DNA survival in two generations.”
He tells me about the Hollywood stars on Running Wild who have told him how good and natural it has felt to sit staring into a fire not saying very much. And a big tough rugby player who people think is a man’s man, but who is embarrassed because he doesn’t know how to tie something to his car’s roof rack.
Macho can-do masculinity – that’s what it’s about, isn’t it?
“It’s about can-do life,” he says. And he’s not going to feed me a headline about modern masculinity, he adds. “I’ve done things on The Island with just men and just women; I’ve taken out Hollywood celebrities. It’s not about gender, it’s about in here” – he points to his head – “it’s about skills and resilience, and always about attitude.”
And it transfers over into normal life, he says, because survival is about attitude, positivity, resourcefulness, kindness, courage, determination … “Those things apply whether you are in an earthquake here, or you’re a single mum bringing up kids in Tennessee, fighting a few battles there or a scout helping in a refugee camp in Syria. The qualities and values are the same, – all that’s different is the terrain.”
What did Eton teach him?
“I’m not going talk about it – let’s not go there.” But he did go there. And he does talk about it – a bit. What did he learn? “I think first of all I learned fear, which isn’t a good emotion. I really missed home and my parents – it was an age where you were sent off to boarding school and didn’t see them for months.”
He is grateful for the friends he made, though. And that he survived, “through the fear, through the fight and trying to stay afloat, because I spent a lot of time madly flapping, trying to stay above water and not always succeeding”.
Academically? “In everything. I was not a superhero at school. I think through that I developed resilience and a little bit of backbone. All these sporting and academic and good-looking heroes left as heroes, but five years later they scratched their heads and thought: ‘Hold on – I thought life was going to be easy.’ Their effort muscles inside were pretty weak even though their outer muscles were pretty strong. I was the opposite: my outer muscles might not have been brilliant, I didn’t have the A-grades and trophies, but inside I spent so much time swimming like a ninja, I was pretty resilient.”
Any more calls from the White House?
Grylls ran wild in Alaska with Barack Obama towards the end of Obama’s presidency. They shared a salmon carcass, they talked about flatulence and stared into the fire together. Has the incumbent rung to book in a wild weekend? “No, but we did reach out when he was president-elect and he said no, he was busy.”
How would Trump be in the wild? “You know, everyone is different. I think Obama especially liked being out of his comfort zone and was curious. A lot of people when they get to positions of power like to stay in their comfort zone. They like to be the main guy, they like to be in charge. I think Trump is more that character: he’s not the sort of person to say: ‘Tell me what I do here’, where Obama was like that.”
Johnson v Corbyn, in the wild: who wins?
“You cannot judge a book by its cover – you never know until you are in it. You could look for indicators – not physical, it’s all about attitude. So you could possibly say: from what I’ve seen in the newspapers, somebody is potentially more positive and determined, and maybe that person … I’m not saying who I think is more positive.”
Nor will he tell me who he’s going to vote for. “As chief scout” – he’s been in the role since 2009 – “I would never tell you my political persuasions.”
What about that frog?
I ask him about the controversy over the frog he killed and ate while filming in Bulgaria. “Oh my God, you’re unbelievable. If you write a crappy headline, I’ll come round and set the dogs on you.” But a) I don’t write the headlines and b) no problem because he’s just told me how to survive a dog attack. I’ll jab them through their eye sockets into their brains.
What about the frog, though? What happened? “Found a frog, killed frog, ate frog.”
A rare frog. “It was certainly not a rare species of frog. I could see thousands of frogs; it was totally permitted as well. It was a classic bit of fake news. I have eaten a lot of frogs over the years – speak to the French.”
Speaking of fake news, what about the time in 2007 when he made out he was sleeping in the wild for the series Born Survivor, when he actually spent some nights in a hotel? “Wow, you really are digging. What, do you want to sit here for half an hour and go through every bit of bad press? I just think if you want to influence nobody positively, have no criticism in life, do nothing … If I didn’t want any criticism I wouldn’t ever do anything.”
There’s a bit in the book about how to hotwire a car, in a survival situation, obviously. But it could be used in other situations. Bear Grylls encourages criminality: what do you say about that? “You know what? At this point I say: ‘Go fuck yourself,’” he says, laughing. Just.
Who are his heroes?
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Robin Hood, George Mallory, Tarzan, John the Baptist …
John the Baptist? “I’d say No 1. Never went to church, but loved Christ, lived in the wild, loved locusts and honey, cared about people.”
Does God help you survive? “Yeah, unashamedly. I see it in relationships, and in my children, I see it in nature, I see it in great things, quiet kindnesses, in little gestures, I see the beauty of God when I see someone who is caring with their grandmother with dementia. Look at the Scouts: there are now 22,000 scouts in this country – our Dementia Friends – every week going into senior citizens’ homes holding hands with dementia patients.”
Why do the Scouts matter?
More passing fauna, not wild: a procession of well-groomed horses ridden by men in dressy uniform. “Isn’t it beautiful? Lifeguards – wonderful. Look at that – service.”
The Scouts are all about service, he says. “In 1907, Baden-Powell said: ‘I want to bring people from different backgrounds, I want to give them a common set of values and experiences of adventure and send them out into the world to make a difference in their communities.’ It is now the biggest youth organisation on the planet, 50 million strong, growing faster than ever before.”
He is dead proud of being chief scout, tells me I should sign my children up. “But more importantly, you should volunteer because then it’s something you are doing with your kids. You are teaching them how to write, or how to interview someone, how to dress like a tramp, hahaha.”
He wears a Scouts wristband on his right hand, along with ones for the Royal Marines and the SAS Regimental Association, and a bracelet given to him by a nice Berber lady in the Sahara. On his left wrist he’s wearing a Bear Grylls Luminox watch, out next year, inscribed Never Give Up. Will he ever give up? “I hope not,” he says, then tells me a story about trying to persuade his 18-year-old nephew to stop smoking. “I said: ‘Maybe it’s time to ease back on the smokes.’ And he goes: ‘You’ve always told me, ever since I was a baby, never to give up’. At which point I held my head in my hands and go: ‘I love you.’”
There you go, another headline: Bear Grylls encourages children to smoke. “I knew it was a bad idea doing an interview with the Guardian,” he says. I still get a hug.
• How to Stay Alive: The Ultimate Survival Guide for Any Situation by Bear Grylls is published by Corgi (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com
