Watched it last night and thought it was OK but would have been miles better without the stupid narration trying to big the whole thing up though.
I’ve seen/said ‘hi’ to BG quite a few times over the last few years, as he spends the summer in the same place as us, and he comes across as a very nice guy.
I used to run hot and cold over SF but now settled on liking him 🙂

Don’t you?? They like to think they could do it better. It’s the way of the internet. Quite pathetic really.

Not as pathetic as spaffing over a TV ‘personality’ who consistently bullshits his way through every single bit of TV he takes part in. If he’s got the skills which I assume he has, why the need for all the BS?

I prefer not to have my intelligence insulted as a viewer in favour of ‘entertainment’, YMMV.

The ‘races’ on Top Gear are more entertaining as I think everyone (surely) knows they are totally staged. It’s different when you’re genuinely trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

Look at the others featured in the Masters of Movement series of adverts (as posted earlier in the thread). You’ve got athletes like Travis Rice and Darren Berrecloth who are genuinely some of the best in the world at what they do, just doing it. Whereas Bear Grylls is in there why exactly? And why is his video so staged?

Apologies DrJ I was driving most of yesterday. The forces that a fall on via ferrata can generate can be greater than the harness or the body can cope with, think catastrophic breakage of the webbing, metalwork or the body. It is possible to fall greater than the distance of the strops attaching you to the cable, the distance between the cable anchor points plus the length of the slings/strops. The worst that a climbing fall can allow is twice the length of rope in use, via ferrata can allow greater than this.
A via ferrata harness set will have a means of reducing the energy at the bottom of the fall usually a piece of rope threaded through a plate similar to one used for belaying which slips and reduces the forces on the rest of the system.

Sorry Sandwich, I don’t understand.
Unless the cable snaps or an eye pulls out, how is it possible to fall further from the via ferrata than the length of your attachment straps, assuming you’re on 2 of them?

Overall the programme was good fun for the tourism and personalities. It must have been very heavily edited and prepared – witness the state of Fry’s trousers after coming down the last bit of scree slope. We didn’t see any of that 2 mile stretch.

Not as pathetic as spaffing over a TV ‘personality’ who consistently bullshits his way through every single bit of TV he takes part in.

Hmm.. wonders if grum accuses me of such behaviour… I only had it on the telly cos my kid likes Bear Gryll’s “adventures”. I had a laptop in front of me and only looked at some of the nice views and listened to their religious discussion. Still think it’s pathetic that the internet warriors try so hard to show how great they are by slagging someone who is actually out there doing something. 😀

Unless the cable snaps or an eye pulls out, how is it possible to fall further from the via ferrata than the length of your attachment straps, assuming you’re on 2 of them?

Am not an expert but .. via ferrata is not necessarily horizontal, they can be vertical (e.g. up a ladder) or any angle in-between, so the fall doesn’t start to become arrested until the carabiner that’s on the safety cable actually strikes a point where the cable is fixed the the rock. That can be a distance below the fall point.

re Top Gear vs BG – Top Gear is nonsense presented as nonsense, it doesn’t take itself seriously. It felt like the BG/Fry film was meant to be taken ‘seriously’.

Just to clarify, the above comments relate to BG, not SF.

My guess is that someone other than BG decided that the only place SF was likely to fall was on his arse and therefore old school via ferrata methods were fine. BG didn’t bother clipping on for most of it and apart from the very start it was a traverse.

It’s also very likely that they’d have paid local guides to inspect cables/anchors and advise them on set.