Bear Grylls: 'Now I'm only 90 per cent reckless'

Judith Woods February 17, 2011

Bear Grylls is mulling over the prospect of a wild weekend with the Duchess of Cambridge. It would, he concludes, be fabulous! Awesome! There's nothing he'd like better than to parachute her on to a mountain summit. There would have to be fire, of course, and snakes, oh, and danger. Lots of danger!

When I point out that Prince William's willowy bride looks as though an ill-mannered Anglesey gust would knock her off her elegantly shod feet, he immediately launches into a commendably stout defence.

"One thing big mountains have taught me is never to judge a book by its cover; fragile-looking girls can be as tough as anyone," he says. "Surviving in the wilderness isn't about being the strongest or the biggest, it's about spirit and character and commitment."

Anyone marrying into the Windsors has arguably already demonstrated all three qualities in spadefuls. But can-do Grylls, 37, is Chief Scout (to 28 million young people worldwide) and has nothing but admiration for the movement's new royal volunteer. An ex-Brownie herself, the Duchess has announced that she intends not to be a figurehead, but to get stuck in to scouting at grassroots level.

And although it seems unlikely the Duchess will follow in the footsteps of comedian Miranda Hart and Jonathan Ross, who have both endured - and indeed, enjoyed - Bear's Wild Weekends, he senses that she would cope very well. "I've met her and she's a very vivacious person, and I think it's truly inspirational that someone as busy and as high-profile can spare the time to volunteer," says Grylls.

In truth, she's more likely to find herself potholing or sea-kayaking than mastering double overhand knots, such is the gung-ho ethos of modern scouting.

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And indeed, the ethos of Grylls, our Eton-educated, buccaneering national hero, who broke his back in a free-fall parachute in Zambia in 1996, yet 18 months later become one of the youngest climbers to conquer Mount Everest, aged 23, a feat that springboarded him to ever greater feats of derring-do.

I have an immense fondness for Grylls, as I was the first journalist ever to interview him. It was, I recall, like trying to pin down a boundlessly, exhaustingly, energetic springer spaniel and I was bowled over (almost literally) by his irrepressible zeal.

Fifteen years on, and a great many record-breaking expeditions later, he is a best-selling author and global television star - an estimated 1.2 billion viewers have tuned in to Born Survivor, which is screened on the Discovery Channel as Man vs Wild - he's written books and survived the Foreign Legion and quicksand and rapids, pitted himself against the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans in an open boat and led an expedition through the Northwest Passage.

There he is on YouTube, fashioning a dead seal into a cosy wetsuit. Here he is again, eating a giant, twitching larva as big as a crayfish. Anyone for a film of him rowing naked for 22 miles along the Thames in a home-made bathtub? Our little boy really is all grown up.

These days he's more of a Great Dane of a chap; streamlined and solid, battle-scarred and unflappable but still more than capable of sending ornaments flying when he starts wagging his tail.

"My crew say that I used to be 120 per cent reckless but I've calmed down quite a bit and I'm now only 90 per cent reckless," he says breezily. "Shara wants me to nudge that down to 60 per cent, but I'm not so sure that's possible."

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Shara is his wife, with whom he has three sons; Jesse, Marmaduke and Huckleberry. There's something very sweet, very Bear, about the fact that she was his "lovely" first girlfriend way back at the beginning and they have stayed together, living in the singular cosiness of a houseboat.

"You know, since we met I have had so many near-escapes," he says, quietly, running his hands through his cropped hair. "I've fallen down crevasses, been bitten by snakes, been knocked unconscious, had various limbs broken and once, a heavy camera came plunging down which very nearly decapitated me. It's odd, but it's only when I see old friends that I'm struck by the preciousness of life and how one false move and I might not be here talking to you."

Bear, christened Edward, but felicitously renamed by his sister, is the son of the late Tory MP Sir Michael Grylls, who instilled in him a passion for the outdoors. After leaving school he served in the SAS reserve, specialising in combat survival.

It gave him a taste for adventure that has seen him eat every unmentionable on the planet. He's dutifully knocked back raw testicles, chewed meat off the corpse of a zebra and, most memorably, once drank his own urine - conveniently stored in the skin of a snake he'd dispatched.

Grylls came in for a bit of flak a few years ago when it was revealed he didn't just drink his own pee and sleep on a bed of rocks, but had the temerity to slope off to a hotel and hydrate himself properly once the cameras stopped rolling. This was viewed by some as cheating; presumably the same purists who committed lese-majeste against Sir David Attenborough for including footage of polar bear cubs filmed in a zoo in his epic documentary Frozen Planet.

"Once you're in the public eye, you're almost guaranteed to have the odd Exocet missile directed at you, and there's a temptation to fight back," says Grylls. "As far as I'm concerned, checking into a Holiday Inn and opening a beer is a sign of a job well done and a chance to relax without worrying that something is going to try to kill us."

The critics have subsequently been silenced by the filming of behind-the-scenes programmes, which, oddly, have garnered an even greater following than the originals.

His next outing is his live show A Wild Night with Bear Grylls, which was a sell-out in Australia and is coming to Britain in March before decamping to the US, where he's still known as "the kid that climbed Everest".