CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Bear Gryll’s extraordinary coup, and he made every question count
Bear Grylls Meets President Zelensky
Rating: *****
Murder In Mayfair
Rating: ****
Bear Grylls is being serious. He’s not munching insects, chewing on yak’s eye-balls or swallowing elephant dung this time.
We know he’s ditched the frivolous survival stunts for his latest mission because he has grown a moustache — the full special forces face hair, circa 1980. He looks like he’s about to storm the Iranian embassy.
In fact, he was in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, to interview the premier, in Bear Grylls Meets President Zelensky (Ch4). There’s not much point in challenging the fearless Ukrainian leader to abseil down a cliff or tackle white-water rapids on a raft, when he defiantly faces the constant threat of Russian missile attacks every day.
Instead, the two of them went for a walk through the city centre, stopping at a community centre under canvas in a park, where locals whose homes are without heating or electricity can go to warm up and recharge their phones.
A platoon of bodyguards surrounded them, scanning the skies for drones, while Zelensky chatted with his inimitable charm and cool self-deprecation.
Bear Grylls Meets President Zelensky aired on Channel 4
‘The two of them went for a walk through the city centre, stopping at a community centre under canvas in a park, where locals whose homes are without heating or electricity can go to warm up and recharge their phones’
Bear was visibly awed, as well he might be. Landing this interview was an extraordinary coup. Persuading President Obama to take a day off from the White House in 2015, to go hiking in the Alaskan wilderness, must have been a cinch by comparison.
Zelensky is an interviewer’s dream. Every time he opens his mouth, he coins a fresh soundbite. When Bear asked him if he was living day to day, the President replied, ‘We live for the future, not for today.’ And when asked to describe himself as a boy, he said, ‘I was always running — not to waste time!’
Bear has a gift for soundbites himself. Arriving on the outskirts of Kyiv after a two-day drive, he drew a long breath at the sight of ‘whole apartment blocks flattened. It’s like Ground Zero wherever you look.’
Though his interview with Zelensky amounted to only a few minutes of footage in the whole hour, he was able to make every question count. In particular, he did well to get the 45-year-old President talking about his family, whom he sees for a few hours on rare occasions.
His nine-year-old son was suffering, Zelensky said. ‘He needs father, he doesn’t have enough warm moments. This war changed our people and changed our children. They are not children, they are all adults, but you see wet eyes of your son and you understand this is a child.’
When he pledged that the Ukrainians’ love for their country and for their families will defeat Putin’s invaders, his conviction was inspirational.
Bear offered him some winter survival advice — just two words. ‘Stay together,’ he urged.
The BBC reporter Nawal Al-Maghafi also secured an interview in near impossible circumstances, as she persuaded fugitive murderer Farouk Abdulhak to talk to her, on Murder In Mayfair (BBC2).
BBC journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi speaking to Farouk Abdulhak in Murder In Mayfair
Abdulhak, the playboy son of a Yemeni arms dealer, fled Britain after killing fellow student Martine Vik Magnussen, from Norway, at his London apartment in 2008.
For nearly 15 years he has lived on the run in Yemen, which has no extradition treaty with the UK.
Tracking him down through social media, Nawal found him pathetically eager to talk, though he refused to appear on camera.
He claimed the murder was ‘just a sex accident, nothing nefarious’, and Nawal seemed sickened even to be talking to him.
It’s a pity she didn’t begin with more innocuous questions, about his life in hiding, because he was clearly desperate to talk.
Abdulhak’s slimy self-pity made the quiet, implacable quest for justice by Martine’s father seem all the more admirable.
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