Who is Bear Grylls - Man vs. Wild

Grylls hosted an 8-part documentary series known in the U.S. on Discovery Channel as Man vs. Wild. The series features Grylls being dropped into some of the most inhospitable places on earth and showing viewers how to survive. Season 2 premiered in the US on June 15th, 2007. His brand of TV includes sheer cliff climbs, wading massive rapids, and even wrapping his urine-soaked boxers around his head to help stave off the desert heat. Bear has eaten live snakes, rubbed ice on his body to warm up after jumping into an icy lake, squeezed elephant dung into his mouth for water, ripped raw chunks of meat off a dead zebra with his teeth, drank his own urine, and spent hours constructing a bamboo bridge in attempt to cross a river. Intermittently, Bear also regales the viewer with tales of other adventurers stranded in the wilderness.

These stories inevitably end in one of two ways: someone gets "lucky" and survives or someone struggles to remain alive for weeks on end but eventually dies. The Discovery Channel and Channel 4 are reviewing the Man vs. Wild program following allegations that the show deceived viewers of outside influence.

With little more than the clothes on his back, survival expert Bear Grylls goes toe-to-toe with some of Earth's toughest, most remote environments in each edge-of-your-seat episode of MAN VS. WILD. Grylls faces sweltering desert temperatures, icy, raging rivers and hungry predators as he fights for survival using techniques he learned as a British Special Forces soldier. You'll never look at the great outdoors the same way again!

Grylls first entered the record books in 1997 by being the youngest Briton to summit Ama Dablam in the Himalayas.

In 1998, Grylls announced to have broken another record of becoming the youngest Briton, at 23, to summit Mount Everest. On a recent interview with David Letterman (June 2007) Letterman calls him "The youngest Briton to summit Everest" and Bear corrects him by saying another man (Michael Matthews) did it the following year but died on the way down, and regardless of his death it has become this man's record.

In 2000 Grylls led the first team to circumnavigate the UK on personal watercraft, to raise money for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) Lifeboats.

In 2005 Grylls led the first team ever to attempt to paramotor over the remote jungle plateaux of the Angel Falls in Venezuela. The team was attempting to reach the highest, most remote high tepuis, made famous by Conan Doyle's Lost World.

In 2007 Grylls announced he had broken a new world record by flying a petrol-powered paraglider over the Himalayas, higher than Mount Everest, having to cope with temperatures of -60C and dangerously low oxygen levels to reach 29,500 feet, almost 10,000 feet higher than the previous record of 20,019 feet. The expedition raised $1 million for the charity Global Angels.

Bear Grylls created a world record for the highest ever open-air formal dinner party, which they did under a hot air balloon at 25,000 feet, dressed in full mess kit and oxygen masks. This was in aid of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Charity.