Bear Grylls is a born survivor

Former SAS man Bear Grylls braves jungles and deserts for our entertainment. Andrew Billen finds out why, as Grylls discusses his new Channel 4 series Born Survivor...

At 21, Bear Grylls broke his back sky diving. Two years later, he climbed Everest. Since then he has crossed the North Atlantic in an inflatable raft, swum with sharks, and flown a paramotor over the Himalayas. He is the bravest man I will ever meet. Yet as I leave to interview him on his house boat in South London, the question ringing in my ears is one suggested by an irreverent colleague: “Ask him if he knows any good hotels.” He was referring to last summer's scandal over Grylls's Discovery Channel series Man v Wild, many of whose episodes are repackaged for Channel 4 as Born Survivor. A consultant to the show claimed that while viewers might have gathered he slept rough in the Sierra Nevada mountains, some nights he was actually tucked up in a hotel advertised as “a cosy getaway for families”. This was in fact the least of the allegations surrounding his show's production values; others included a smoke machine being brought in to add excitement to a volcano, the trucking in of wild mustang he said he lucked upon, and the hiring of a bear suit.

The storm has died down, Bear is back on the box and we are drinking tea below deck. I ask how it felt to be branded a fake. “I think you have to make sure the rock in your life isn't fame,” he says. “It was the number one cable show in America. You are going to get the odd Exocet sent your way and you need to take the rough with the smooth."

It is, itself, a smooth reply, worthy of an Old Etonian whose father was the Conservative MP Sir Michael Grylls. I suspect he may have had help with it. He later uses a line he has used in interviews abroad: his shows are now so open that he cannot “break wind without it being acknowledged”. In Namibia his cameraman went one better and filmed him evacuating his bowels as he climbed a 100-foot waterfall. But while Grylls may not be Brain of Britain, he must be savvy enough to appreciate that while the Exocets did not sink his reputation, they holed it. By Christmas, Bear (as in Teddy, as in Edward) Grylls was a panto punchline.

Channel 4 investigated and concluded that it had broadcast scenes that “while not in breach of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code in so far as they were not materially misleading, should have been more transparent”. Viewers accepted artifice, but “some of the decisions made by the producers crossed the line”. As a result, the programmes in the new series on Channel 4 will be preceded by captions acknowledging Bear receives “support” in life-threatening situations and that some “situations” are “presented” to him. This outbreak of candour leads to an amusing edit in the first of the season in which he treks through the Sahara. “Got a cobra!” Grylls exclaims to camera, assuming the combat position. In a voice over, added later, he then says the cobra “has been brought here from nearby to show you how to stay safe”.

I suggest that the TV people he works with told him how television was made and he went along with it. “Well, you do. I let them do all of that. I am there to show the skills.” So does he think it matters if he spends the odd night in a hotel rather on the dunes? He does. “I think it is really important for the show that everything people see is absolutely transparent.” I cite the planted cobra. “There is enough danger and drama inherent in what you are doing. The more you show of it the better. And I have felt this from day one.”

But if this former SAS soldier was simply following orders, he is also extremely loyal to his comrades. It took years to get the composition of this private army right. I assume that means the bear-suit guy has been court-martialled? “Well, that was never on TV or anything.” So he really thought the black shape outside his tent was a grizzly? “The shadow of the bear certainly wasn't a bear suit. I don't know what that was. I definitely thought there was a bear, but that bear suit was a prank at a wrap party and a prank that has come back to haunt me. And a real lesson too.”

Bringing hot coals and a smoke machine to a volcano shocked me almost as much. “Well, the mistake in production early on was trying to add any extra drama for the sake of two seconds of shooting. And it wasn't needed.” With such revelations, did he fear last summer the whole thing might collapse around his head? “Yes, I am always riddled with self-doubt as to whether it is about the expeditions or the programmes. But I think you should not be afraid of failing in these things. Ultimately, the programme is showing people how to survive in life-threatening emergencies. It is not all about me.”

In the great scale of things Grylls' collusion in some telly-fibbing hardly matters. The real question about his judgement asks not why he takes short cuts but why he takes so many chances. He is married with two sons, Jesse, almost 5, and Marmaduke, 2. Four weeks after Jesse was born he left for the Arctic in an inflatable boat leaving his wife, Shara, to track its signal by the internet. One night the bleep went dead. The navy told her there was a “black hole of weather” precisely where her husband had gone off the chart. Mercifully, the storm had killed only the boat's electronics. But what must it have been like to be Mrs Grylls that night?

“If I am honest, a real struggle in my life is balancing risk and family. I lost my dad a few years ago and suddenly you are a dad to the coolest of kids in the world and all that matters is staying alive for them.” But does it? When he heard that crocodile hunter Steve Irwin had been killed - he was filming in Ecuador - it was, he says, a terrible reminder that “TV guarantees nothing”. And yet, a few weeks ago, taking revenge on Irwin's nemesis, he himself chased and speared a stingray and cooked it over a camp fire.

Would he like his sons to have his job? “I do not want them to climb Everest or earn their living by eating raw snakes in the jungle. I think they are probably smarter than that.” Does he find what he does humiliating? “I do it, if I am honest, because it is the only thing I am good at in my life.”

On the coffee table lie two children's books about the Antarctic explorer Shackleton. They are there, I fear, to soften the blow for his sons when, his TV career glued back together, he departs next year for the South Pole. I ask Jesse, who has returned from school, what he wants to be when he grows up. “A life boat man,” he says. Perhaps this brave little chap thinks his father needs one.

Bear Grylls: Born Survivor, Sun, C4, 8pm; Discovery, Tues/Fri, 8pm