Survival show faces 'fake' claim
Bear Grylls
Channel 4 calls Grylls "a cross between Ray Mears and Rambo"
Channel 4 is to investigate a claim that it misled viewers in a survival series, in the latest allegation of reality being manipulated on a TV show.

Born Survivor featured British adventurer Bear Grylls dealing with "perilous situations" in the wild.

But a crew member told the Sunday Times some nights were spent in hotels....

‘Coal tipped into volcano’ for fake Grylls film

IT was billed as one of Bear Grylls’s most audacious challenges yet. The Eton-educated television adventurer had to escape an active volcano in the Pacific by leaping across molten lava and avoiding clouds of “killer” gas.

However, the episode of Born Survivor set on the Mount Kilauea volcano in Hawaii has emerged as faked in a scandal that has embroiled the television industry - and now threatens Grylls’s future TV career.

The white clouds of poisonous “sulphur dioxide” that billowed around the former SAS explorer were, in fact, harmless vapour created by smoke machines. And according to insiders, the red glow of the molten magma which he warned could incinerate him “in seconds” was supplemented by burning hot coals brought in by members of the production team.

This weekend Discovery Channel, which produced the programme, said the trickery had been identified as part of a review of the show.
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In the volcano episode, which has not been broadcast on C4, he is filmed amid clouds of white gas seeping from the crust of the lava field. “Look at this, you can actually see the sulphur dioxide seeping out of these vents,” he says. “In high concentrations this gas is a killer.”

But this was “special effects” according to a safety adviser.

“Sulphur dioxide fumes are colourless and you can’t see it, so smoke generators were used off-screen to make the existing fumes seem visible,” he said.