Bear Grylls Über Alles!

There can be few greater pleasures in life - if we take life to mean when you don't have anything better to do and/or are putting something off - than lying on a sofa with friends and bitching relentlessly about what you're watching, while making no attempt to grasp the remote (which is four inches away) with your obviously bloated and arthritis-raddled fingers to change the channel.

I, for example, would quite like to twat Bear Grylls. You know, the overgrown boy scout? Brick jaw, close-set eyes (A sign of an unstable mind in Phrenology apparently, take note). He leapt off a helicopter into the ocean the other day to get to Namibia, into the freezing Atlantic waters just off the Skeleton Coast - "What I'm about to do is really dangerous; this is one of the most violent stretches of water... (Dramatic emphasis, hushed voice, drop an octave like Jeremy Clarkson)... in the world."

Really? Why do it then?

He was plodding - no, sorry, he never plods, he sprints unnecessarily - through the Bornean jungle a bit later. Busy, busy little man. He saw a placid green tree snake, squealed a boyish squeal of delight, launched into a lecture on its many fascinating habits, extolled its beauty, and lapsed into admiring silence. Then, he looked at it thoughtfully for a bit. Then he bit its head off. I don't know why. It seemed a bit strong really, just to show how hard he was.

A bit later on, he was above the snowline in Patagonia, shivering hypothermically in a dug-out shelter, with his hat on, and his ear-flaps up. Now, I'm not a hard bastard really - despite appearances to the contrary, obviously - and I've never been in the SAS, but it seems to me that you if you lose most of the heat in your body through your head, covering up your ears might be wise. Dappy doesn't cover his ears, and who'd listen to Dappy? Anyway, he was clearly a bit chilly, and he said, "This is dangerously cold. I could die up here quite easily", in the same harmonics that you or me might use to say, "I could be given a really nice present!". Truly, there is no understanding some people's conception of fun. Some people find pleasure in masochism. Some find it in really hard crosswords. Some people even derive enjoyment from jazz. Bear Grylls derives his from the possibility of contracting a flesh-eating virus in Sumatra.

It follows then that Bear Grylls is dangerous, and you should not let him near your children, lest he take them on a trip to your suburban playpark, liberally scatter landmines about the footie pitch, dig a bloody great trench, fill it with Solenopsis Invicta - the Red Fire Ant to you and me - and lob your nippers in. This is what Bear Grylls does to relax of an afternoon, incidentally. Goes swimming in ants.

Which brings me on to part two. I tread trembling and unsettled ground here - the televisual equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Because I'd like to slag off the One Show. I have a lot of friends - the bulk, I suppose - who are students, and for some of them, Angry Adrian and Chirpy Christina are Godheads of a kind, second only to Schofield and Britton. There are other Illuminati - Ben Fogle, That Bastard from Bargain Hunt (The one who's not David Dickinson, who I harbour a paticular hatred for), the Top Gear crew on endless Dave re-runs, but The One Show has a vice-like grip, a full-nelson if you will, on evening TV.

And it's like having your brain massaged with big, pink, beautifully moisturised hands. Or a swift lobotomy. As I watched it, I could feel my jaw slackening, my tensile neck muscles relaxing as my lower pate sunk down to somewhere around chest level. A little bit of dribble came out. This is what I normally get when I watch, say, an Arnold Schwarznegger vehicle, not middle-Britain de jour TV.

I am using my valuble time - I could be eating a cake - to watch a bubbly Irish woman tolerate grumpy Adrian as he clandestinely gets to grips with the great and good. David Attenborough was on the other day, the great David Attenborough, and they asked him if he watched Britain's Got Talent. I'm sorry, what? He didn't, as it happens, but he did know about it. Simon Cowell already heads up the broken remains of the Weimar Republic and controls the world through a secret organization using the shattered stock market, political insinuation and Jedward (Come on, keep up), so it's only right that he's burrowed into the minds of learned types too, like the little cultural Tick he is.

There's nothing wrong with The One Show, as such. But it's a bit like my mobile phone, or on-line banking: theoretically, they exist to help, ease, and calm me, but actually, they all make me a little bit more tense and worried than I was before. My phone allows unsavoury types to plague me, reminds me to reply swiftly to friends, lest I spark offence and outrage, and bequeaths me with a bill that I can't pay at the end of each month. My on-line NatWest account allows me to quickly and effortlessly access and assess the extent of my abject poverty and plunge me further into worry. And The One Show, as a light, informative mode of entertainment, is there to remind me that my wit, guile, and funtional intelligence - my tools for tax evasion and exam blagging and all sorts - are slowly but surely being drained away by Adrian droning on about self-heating meals.

He really was, you know.