TV review, Bear's Mission with Warwick Davis (ITV): 'In life, as a little person, you have to be quite resourceful'

I think that ITV missed a trick with Bear’s Mission with Warwick Davis, the latest in an occasional series where Bear Grylls takes celebs and forces them to rough it in the great outdoors. The Lake District served as a photogenic and demanding assault course for a couple of days.

All fine, but I think that “The Amazing Farting Dwarf” would have proved much better title for the show, both grabby and accurate. I mean, you’d be intrigued, wouldn’t you?

“Amazing” because Warwick Davis is just that. Throughout proceedings there were what I assume were moments of genuine trepidation (Davis is also an accomplished actor, but I think that, yes, he was terrified), yet he took every challenge in his stride. Ravine for ravine, dank night in a cave for dank night in a cave, cliff face for cliff face, Warwick matched Bear at every turn.

“Farting” because, as Warwick himself admitted, fear induces instability in his digestive system. The situation was exacerbated by the organic foraging diet that Bear subjected him to – ants (rich in vitamin C apparently), a fish baked in a damp moss, and, literally eye-popping this, scooping the eyeballs out of the fish as a makeshift pre-supper hors d’oeuvre.

So Warwick let rip. Even Bear, who’s used to some of the world’s most hostile environments, must have been glad that they each had their own sleeping bags.

Warwick joked that little people aren’t “built” for such adventures, but he proved that, to the contrary, when allowed to they can prove themselves the match of anyone. Even when Warwick was pelvically gyrating on some ropes to get across yet another 150ft drop, like a miniaturised Elvis under electroconvulsive therapy, his spirit, if not his dignity, was undiminished.

“In life, as a little person, you have to be quite resourceful”, Warwick explained.

Quite how many challenges cannot be easily comprehended by bigger people (if that’s the right expression). For example, I’d known that there are different types of dwarfism, including achondroplasia, which Warwick has, where the limbs are foreshortened. But if is combined with one of the other forms of dwarfism, then the result is that a baby cannot survive, and this, Warwick related, was what happened to his son Lloyd, who died at nine days old in 1991. In mental as well as physical resilience, Warwick plainly has the measure of the rest of the world.

So the show was much better than I thought it would be, as I had assumed it would be. We were laughing with Warwick rather than at him. He is a man armed with a sharp wit, which helped. He compared himself to a Hobbit, and happily sent-up his own performances in the Harry Potter films and as an Ewok in Return of the Jedi. When he was dangling from a helicopter or trying to spear a fish for his supper, the viewer empathised.

The only thing I did wonder about, as is common in formats such as this, is the conceit that Bear and Warwick were up there in the wilderness on their own, when in fact they were plainly surrounded by a camera crew and, for all we knew, a fleet of Range Rovers with Harrods hampers in the back. To be honest I wouldn’t mind, so fond have I grown of Warwick Davis.

If Bear’s Mission with Warwick Davis was, unexpectedly, actually about respecting little people as equals then I think we can judge it “mission accomplished”.

open image in gallery

There’s a place called Point Nemo down in the Southern Ocean, which is about as far away from civilisation as you can get (apart from an EDL rally, obvs). It’s in the Southern Ocean, which is vast wilderness between the Indian Ocean and Antarctica, and 1,700 miles from the nearest inhabited land. Indeed the closest human being to you will be on the International Space Station. But, thanks to Sky’s participation in the magnificent Volvo Ocean Race, and the important scientific studies they conducted, we also know that even here there are plastic bags floating around.

It was when Sky reporter Ian Woods pointed out a simple fact that the impact of plastics on the wild hit you like a 30-foot wave. Unlike beaches or polluted air, unlike even Chernobyl, the microscopic bits of plastic in the seas cannot be cleaned up or filtered out. All we can do is to try and stop it getting worse.