Every child needs a dangerous dad!
A gloriously non-PC encounter with the action man Bear Grylls – whose hair-raising adventures with his sons would give elf’n’safety the vapours
EVERY night before bed — when he’s at home with his family rather than off in the wild wrestling alligators, or snacking on snake brains and deer droppings as part of his seemingly endless quest to be TV’s hardest hard man — Bear Grylls gets down on his knees next to his three young sons.
‘I pray for them every day,’ he says. ‘I kneel down on the floor next to their beds. We pray together.’ All lined up in a row, I ask, like the famous American Walton family?
‘Well, no, not exactly. They lie in bed and pretend to be asleep and I do the hard work.’ Next, he’ll pray for his wife Shara. ‘It’s quick and fast: “Goodnight. Sleep well. May God bless you. I love you. You are the best.”’ Bear also says grace before every meal. And starts the next day as he ends the one before — ‘on my knees’.
‘It’s a sign of humility,’ he explains. ‘Something I aspire to in today’s world.
‘My faith wavers every day. I get nervous talking about it. It’s personal, it’s a journey; but it’s the glue to my life.’
In the taut, muscular flesh, he is surprisingly small. Slight, even. Naturally, he’s ruggedly handsome, if ever-so-slightly reptilian-looking: thin-faced like a jockey, his eyes bright and intense, his nose sharp, his lips thin. And his chat is refreshingly unexpected.
We cover everything from his ambassadorship for the evangelistic Christian Alpha Course, to his family, to being the youngest ever Chief Scout, to how today’s health-and-safety mania is ruining our children’s lives.
He tells me how he proposed naked on a beach (but not with an engagement ring hidden in his clenched buttocks, as has been reported); how the death of his father Michael (a Commando who became a Tory MP) was the catalyst for all his derring-do and how he was picked on at Eton.
We keep meaning to discuss the Bear Grylls New Obstacle Zone — a sort of rope-based, monkey-barred, He-Man circuit based on his own incredibly rigorous training sessions, which is being rolled out across the country this year and is the reason we’re in a trampolining warehouse in a business park on the outskirts of Manchester.
But we keep getting distracted. Right now, by the topic of education.
‘School is a microcosm where the heroes are good-looking, sporty or clever, and if you’re not one of those, you don’t feel successful,’ he says. ‘But it doesn’t matter.
‘I wasn’t brilliant at anything. I wasn’t very clever. I wasn’t very sporty. I was bullied a bit. At the time, you think it really matters, but it wasn’t a disaster.’
The real disaster, he claims, is reserved for those for whom school represents the halcyon years — the best it gets.
‘In everyday life, no one cares if you’re good-looking or good at football — unless you play for your country or whatever.’
FOR the rest of us, he says, the important thing is to find something you really love — in his case, mountaineering (he set up the Eton mountaineering club) — being kind to people and doing your best, because, he says, all the rewards in life go to ‘the dogged and determined’.
‘I know it’s old-fashioned but the Scouts had it right with their dyb dyb dyb-ing [do your best].’
No one could fault Bear’s doggedness or determination. Aged 23, he became the youngest person in the world to climb Everest — and this just 18 months after crushing three vertebrae in an Army parachuting accident in Zambia and being told he might never walk again. Two years after conquering Everest, he was circumnavigating the British Isles on jet skis and rowing naked in a bathtub along the Thames for charity. He does a lot for charity, and is famous for getting naked at any opportunity.
‘I’m not naked so much these days,’ he says. ‘If we’re sailing as a family, I’ ll swim naked every morning with the boys, but I’m not really into gratuitous nudity.’
Next came a North Atlantic crossing through icebergs and Force-8 winds in an 11-ft inflatable dinghy; then the world’s highest dinner party — in a hot air balloon, with black tie and oxygen masks; lots of mountaineering and a controversial flight over Everest in a motorised paraglider, risking temperatures of minus 60c and dangerously low oxygen levels. And, of course, his epic survival TV shows and accompanying books, including Born Survivor: Bear Grylls, Bear’s Wild Weekend and Running Wild with Bear Grylls, featuring star guests who included Barack Obama and Kate Winslet.
All showed how tough and manly he was. How he could survive on juice squeezed from elephant dung. And, of course, how he could cheat death over and over again.
‘I suppose there have probably been a good 20 genuine near-death experiences,’ he says cheerily. ‘And a whole bunch of near-ish ones.’
And when he comes home safe and sound (if a bit bruised), does he give Shara, his wife of nearly 17 years, all the gory details?
‘Not so much — I just sort of move on and forget about them,’ he says. ‘But there are fewer now. I’m only 60 pc reckless these days. I used to be 100 pc reckless.’
When he’s at home (a houseboat on the Thames, an island off the North Wales coast and, in winter, a luxury chalet in the Alps), he’s a hands-on dad to their three sons, Jesse, 13, Marmaduke, 10, and Huckleberry, seven — but very much on his terms. ‘Going to soft play areas? That would be my idea of Hell, and they know that.’ Instead, he lets them play with his ‘toys’. ‘I’ll get them to help re-pack a mouldy paraglider, or help put the roof rack on, or refuel the boat and sort out my ropes. And they always help me pack for trips — playing with the fire-starter in the corner as I pack.’
He reels at the caution of some parents and launches with disbelief into a story about some family friends who wouldn’t let their son go skiing in case he broke his wrist before an exam.
‘I mean whaaaat?? If you try to strip risk out of kids’ lives, you’re doing them a total disservice.’ Chez Grylls, it’s a bit different. ‘I’ll say: “Right boys, we’re going to do x, y and z. It’s going to be incredibly dangerous but it’s going to be super fun and we’ll do it together, and we’ll have a few scrapes but we’ll all come back.”’
He takes them rock climbing and gully swimming and caving and abseiling, and, more recently, wakeboarding, which is impossibly difficult. ‘My son Huckleberry will try anything and we’ll both get a bit hurt,’ he beams.
And do the boys ever say: ‘Enough Dad! Let’s go and watch some telly.’ ‘Yes. They do sometimes say, “Dad, that’s really stupid”.’
And his wife? I suspect she might sometimes feel she has four sons. Though presumably she knew what she was getting into, given that when she met him one New Year in the Highlands, he was naked (again) in the sea, fishing around for a floating sock. He glows when he talks about Shara. ‘She’s kind, she’s wonderful, she’s patient.’ She’d need to be. Apparently she’s happiest all cosy and warm, flicking through interiors magazines at home in front of the fire, but has to spend ‘hours, days, weeks’ waiting beside mountains’ and trying not to watch while he and (often now) his sons jump off things. She also has no truck with fame. Bear says: ‘I used to get mega excited when I came back from a shoot, all “you won’t believe it, so Obama did this and some Hollywood star did that” and, well… I’ve learned to temper it now because unless it’s a really good story, it turns out she’s not really listening.’ But he adores her, and adores being married. ‘It’s the one thing I’ve really got right in my life. The more work I do, the more I earn, the more I realise the only real wealth we have in our lives comes from relationships.’
BEAR’S a great believer in the value of daily kindnesses over grand gestures — ‘Though I often try to rescue situations with grand gestures.’ Like any married couple, they bicker. Flashpoints surely include the time he left their youngest son, Jesse, on a rock in hostile conditions in the sea off North Wales, so that the local RNLI could practise rescuing him; and the odd dispute over money — not that there’s any shortage of it.
‘I waste a LOT of money on toys. I might buy a new jet ski for the island. Or another boat. And Shara’s always going on about all my paragliders.’
How many? ‘Ten. Maybe more. And I’ve just bought a new one. It weighs one kilogram and is waferthin. It’s amazing.’
The eternal fitness thing must get a bit wearing, too. And the healthy diet! There’s surely only so much quinoa and kale powershakes anyone can stomach.
While he tries to eat healthily, Bear doesn’t really like it. He far prefers burgers, sticky toffee pudding and the in-flight food served in the BA First Class Cabin as he jets off on new adventures.
‘I just love it. I can’t stop eating it,’ he confesses sheepishly, before adding: ‘Now, I must show you round this obstacle course or we’ll both get into trouble’. And then he scuttles off up a rope and across some bars like a wiry little monkey.
For some reason, I’d expected Bear Grylls to be a loud, alarmingly muscular, annoyingly competitive, privileged old Etonian to whom success came easily. How lovely to be so wrong on so many counts.