“The summits in our life are great but it’s the valleys that build us.” There’s plenty more trite wall art slogans sorry, spiritual words of wisdom to be found in The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls (out on Prime Video today), in which Grylls leads the cast of the Christian biblical drama through the wilderness, which again indicates the expeditioner is fast developing a Messiah complex.  

There was a time when Grylls was simply a likeable survivalist, blending the slightly OTT machoism of prime Ross Kemp with the “jolly good chap” enthusiasm of a wartime general. Even when he was exposed as misleading audiences – by staying in hotels while purporting to be roughing it in nature’s harshest terrain – he managed to weather the storm relatively unscathed. 

But in the past few years, he has jumped from controversy to controversy. He drew criticism for a 2019 special with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, viewed by opponents as pure propaganda. Four years later, he spent much of his interview with President Zelensky, a man leading his country’s resistance against a superpower invasion, boasting about his own military experiences.  

Elsewhere, Grylls also caused contention by delivering a Tory Conference speech in his Chief Scout uniform, a strict no-no for an organisation that prides itself on being apolitical (he later stepped down from the role). And he didn’t do himself any favours after moaning to one interviewer: “I find it demoralising to pay income tax at 40 per cent when I work really hard and spend a lot of time away from my family.” This from a man with a reported net worth of £25m.  

Last year, Bear Grylls claimed with an entirely straight face that his gospel retelling, The Greatest Story Ever Told: An Eyewitness Account, would place just behind the Bible and the Qur’an as the furthest-reaching book of all time. It’s yet to grace The New York Times Bestseller list.  

Then there’s the infamous moment he “baptised” Russell Brand in the Thames shortly after the comedian had been publicly accused of various historic sexual offences. “It is a privilege to stand beside anyone when they express a humble need for forgiveness and strength from above,” Grylls explained at the time. 

In The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls, he occasionally seems to allude to this controversy while subjecting six cast members from The Chosen – aka the biggest show no one you know watches (280 million viewers!) to his usual explorer shtick. “It’s love your neighbour, not love somebody who thinks the same way as you,” he tells second participant Paras Patel, rather pointedly, in a discussion on differing beliefs.

Grylls is perhaps more interested in presenting himself as the model Christian than showing a bunch of actors how to navigate the peaks and troughs of Utah’s Mojave Desert. He finishes one arduous trek with a clumsily shoehorned prayer and often tenuously links his survival tips to the Bible (John the Baptist also liked eating locusts for sustenance, apparently). At one point, he claims this is the closest he’s come to achieving his dream show… “Running Wild with Jesus.” 

The fact that most of his shows over the last decade – even the star-studded Netflix original – have failed to last beyond a single season also implies audiences are growing tired of his over-excitable, and contrary to his “anything can happen” spiel, heavily choreographed formula.  

Ignoring all this questionable baggage, The Chosen in the Wild is still the opposite of must-see TV, the kind of lazy filler that suggests Grylls is fine with committing the deadly sin of sloth. It desperately tries to inject some tension into proceedings with the usual sweeping landscape shots and booming cinematic strings (“This is where the John Williams score comes in,” Dimyan quips in an unintentionally meta moment). But there’s only so many times you can watch a semi-reluctant celeb tentatively abseil down a cliff before the appeal wears off. 

It’s never in doubt whether Grylls and his guest will reach their self-imposed extraction point by their self-imposed time either, while the opener’s biggest source of drama derives from catching sight of a mouse (which, ultimately, turns out to be a frog). As always, this is low-stakes reality fluff masquerading as high-octane thriller. 

Grylls has insisted the wilderness is the perfect location for talking “about the real stuff of life”. But his line of questioning here is so rudimentary – “Tell me about your ancestors” is a common query – that the actors themselves must work hard to say anything of note.  

There’s also something slightly manipulative about how each physical journey is capped off with an outpouring of tears, as though Grylls’s banal platitudes have helped unlocked some repressed emotion when they’re no doubt simply exhausted from all the glorified Go Aping and drinking water filtered through sweaty socks.

The self-appointed wilderness warrior has been at it for a good 20 years now. Perhaps it’s time he starts preaching away from our screens.