When Grizzly Bear Suits Attack

Well, this should make people think hard about what they are watching on television. What you see may not be at all what you think you are seeing. Or being told you are seeing. The British Broadcasting Company and the American Discovery Channel have both shown "survival expert" fakery and passed it off as truth to their viewers. The latest revelation about the Discovery Channel series Man Vs Wild is just plain embarrassing. They used a guy in a bear suit to fake up a bear "attack" on host Bear Grylls.

To the viewers, it was the moment TV adventurer Bear Grylls narrowly escaped the attentions of a hungry wild bear.

Yet it seems he was not in quite as much danger as those watching might have thought.

Grylls was menaced by nothing more threatening than a colleague in a fancy-dress bear costume, according to a survival expert present at the filming.

Grylls, whose daredevil antics have entranced viewers of his Channel 4 series Born Survivor, had filmed a sequence for another show in which his makeshift camp seemed to be invaded by a grizzly bear in the middle of the night.

Apparently in great danger, he bravely filmed a black shape rustling around the embers of his campfire, before telling viewers of the dangers of wild bears and fleeing the camp.

Yet survival expert Ron Hood has claimed the black shape seen in the show was not a man-eating grizzly but actually a colleague in a costume.

The Discovery Channel, which aired the show, insisted that the pantomime bear outfit was hired "as a prank" by the crew and no footage which included the bear costume was broadcast.

But the programme does include a shot of a dark black shape, rustling in the camp a few feet away – something Discovery was unable to explain.

The Daily Mail also obtained the script for the show  – which clearly shows the "bear attack" was pre-planned. They initially tried to hire a trained bear but when they could not, they rented the bear suit instead. The Mail article contains photographs of the "bear". There have been a string of revelations about this show and fakery this week:

Last week it was revealed that episodes of Born Survivor screened on Channel 4 included faked or set-up scenes. One showed Grylls making his own raft while stuck on a desert island.

In fact it was built by a team led by a survival expert, and the island was in Hawaii – within close reach of a motel.

Grylls didn't sleep out in the wild, either. He slept in comfy hotels. Frankly, the Discovery Channel is not handling this the right way at all. They should not reedit the shows as they have announced they will do. They should pull the shows, fire the production company involved and apologize to viewers. It is their reputation that has been damaged by the fraud here and they need to fix that first.