Eight celebrities join Bear Grylls

By Jacqueline Spendlove TV Media

If you’ve ever been camping, you know there’s more to the fun of it than getting out of the city and spending a few days surrounded by nature. There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from building a fire, sleeping on the ground and generally roughing it — even if roughing it involves an air mattress, bottled water and easy-toprepare canned goods warmed on a nifty little stove.

For many of us, that’s as close to living off the land as we plan to get, thank you very much. Others, of course, take it much farther, pursuing areas far off the grid with few supplies and surviving chiefly on what the land gives them.

Bear Grylls is no stranger to the wilderness, and as one of the world’s most renowned survivalists, he’s just about seen it all. In last year’s freshman season of “Running Wild with Bear Grylls,” the adventurous Brit took six celebrities from one extreme of the comfort spectrum to the other on a 48-hour stint in the true wilderness — no air mattresses allowed. Now, eight new A-listers are on the roster for the adventure of a lifetime when a new season of “Running Wild with Bear Grylls” begins Monday, July 13, on NBC.

It’s always fun for us to get a glimpse of the glitterati outside of their on-screen roles and lacquered red carpet looks. We barely blink if we see our friends or colleagues denuded of makeup and are seldom interested in how they spend their downtime, and yet magazine racks are filled with items on celebrities looking normal and doing mundane things — and readers eat it up. For whatever reason, it’s refreshing to be given a concrete reminder that, no matter how big their houses are or how many cars they have, celebrities are still only human.

In season 1 of “Running Wild,” we got to see some of Hollywood’s biggest names get down and dirty with a guy who, let’s face it, is far more accomplished than any of them. At age 23, he realized his childhood dream of climbing to the summit of Mount Everest, a