Obama visited Alaska earlier this year to observe the impact of climate change on the state.
Advertisement
Running Wild with Bear Grylls and President Barack Obama airs tonight at 6.30pm Qld, 7.30pm NSW on Foxtel’s Discovery Channel.
The highlight, such as it was, involved Grylls finding a half-eaten salmon and grilling it for the President, who started the fire on which the fish got cooked. “And I probably wouldn’t do it just for a TV show”. The list of previous examples includes Richard Nixon’s “sock it to me?” moment on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in”, and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s cameo on “Saturday Night Live”.
“They (the White House) approached us, saying would we consider taking the president on an adventure to Alaska”, Grylls said. About 50 Secret Service personnel, a food taster, snipers and helicopters were all on hand, but Grylls said Obama wanted it to be as authentic as possible. That followed Obama joking that, having some familiarity with Grylls’ eat-anything shtick, he was hoping to have the chance to chow down on “something you might see on a plate”.
Perhaps to offset any comparisons with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s swaggering wilderness photo-ops, Obama made several references to the invisible chaperones, including when he fumbled using a borrowed smartphone to take a selfie with Grylls. Bear’s a mediocre cook, but the fact that we ate something recognizable was encouraging.
“When you see this glacier it give you a sense of the magnitude of it, but it also gives you a sense of how far it’s already receded just since my presidency”, he said.
Advertisement
“There were times over the path I needed to pinch myself and believe, really, this can be the president of America”, Mr Grylls told reporters in The Big Apple, based on Reuters. Something meaningful. The simple act of ritual and time together – something that the President says is actually recharging for him.
