Grylls Goes Urban

Bear Grylls, television presenter, survival expert and all round good egg was caught in a very hostile environment over the weekend when he got off a train he was travelling on at the wrong station. He was originally destined for a meeting with the BBC at a studio in Manchester but became disorientated by the endless rows of grim terraced houses, matchstick people and cotton mills and mistakenly disembarked in Salford instead.

On discovering his error he reverted to an old Special Forces trick and attempted to find a taxi rank by aligning his watch with the position of the sun but was foiled by thick yellow smog that blankets the city all year round.

Alone and lost, he roamed the streets looking for animal tracks and gross things to eat and trying to communicate with the natives but couldn't penetrate their incomprehensible dialect. In a further turn of bad luck a tribe of vicious 'hoodies' took offence to his accent and alleviated him of his wallet at knife point. Now with no means to eat, he drew on his bushman experience and headed toward a river where he would be most likely to find help, scoffing down a regurgitated doner kebab that was splashed on the pavement outside a tacky nightclub.

Bear finally reached the Manchester Ship Canal at nightfall and bivouaced utilising locally found natural materials. Unfortunately, with the onset of a heavy deluge of rain, the cardboard box rapidly disintegrated and he was forced to spend a miserable sleepless night sat on an old bucket with a carrier bag over his head.

The following morning an eye-witness reported to the police that Grylls had disembarked in Salford and a large search party spent several hours trawling through the city's Accident and Emergency Depts. and morgues. The plucky ex-Etonian was way ahead of them though. He was spotted by a man out walking his ferret who alerted local mental health workers that "some nutter was going down the canal on a raft".

The police search party were notified and by three in the afternoon, he was plucked from the water by a rescue helicopter and rushed to an expensive restaurant where he released the following statement- "I'm Bear Grylls. I've been in Special Forces, I've climbed Everest and I've crossed the Atlantic in a bathtub. This has just got to be one of my toughest tests yet. There was no camera crew, no celebrity canteen and nothing was staged. It was f*cking horrible. Now, if you don't mind I'd like to finish my pheasant".