One television trend that hasn't really made its way to Australia yet (unless you count The Bush Tucker Man) is the whole extreme survival movement. The Brits eat it right up, what with their endless supply of Super Army Soldiers and landscape full of bogs, rivers, snow and wild beasts ready to be turned into edge-of-your-seat Sunday evening viewing.

Well, both BBC and Channel Four have their own takes on the theme, and now the Beeb's survival bloke, Ray Mears, has called Channel Four's - the excellently named former SAS action man Bear Grylls; that's him eating the fish with what appears to be extra t-sauce - nothing more than a pretender.

This was my favourite bit of the slanging match:

Last summer, 33- year- old Grylls was criticised over revelations that his existence during filming his series Born Survivor had been more comfortable than the programme suggested.

 

The Old Etonian's escapades attracted 1.4million viewers as he demonstrated gruesome survival tips which included sucking the fluid from fish eyeballs and squeezing water from animal dung. But an adviser to the programme claimed that much was not as it seemed on television.

Viewers were not told that, far from roughing it, Grylls was spending some nights in the Pines Resort hotel at Bass Lake, California, where the rooms have Internet access and it is advertised as 'a cosy getaway for families' complete with blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

In another episode when Grylls declared he was a ' reallife Robinson Crusoe' stuck on a desert island, he was actually on an outlying part of the Hawaiian archipelago and retired to a motel at nightfall.

The blueberry pancakes bit is particularly wonderful; I can think of no better way to attack the action-manhood of a bloke who claims to eat fish eyeballs than to say he likes sitting in bed tucking into some piping hot blueberry pancakes, no doubt with lashings of maple syrup and a big cup of tea. What larks, eh!

Anyway, I hope they take this feud to its natural crescendo, i.e. one of them dying, on-screen, while attempting to perform a mid-air appendectomy on a bald eagle so he can eat the offal to survive another night on top of a glacier with only his underwear to separate his skin from the subzero temperatures.

Tags: au | bbc | boring celebrity feuds | channel four | stupidity | survivors