CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Bear Gryll’s extraordinary coup, and he made every question count

Bear Grylls meets with President Zelensky

Rating: *****

Murder in Mayfair

Classification: ****

Bear Grylls is serious. This time he’s not chewing on bugs, munching on yak eyeballs, or swallowing elephant dung.

We know he’s ditched the frivolous survival stunts for his latest mission because he’s grown his mustache: full-length special forces facial hair, circa 1980. It looks like he’s about to storm the Iranian embassy.

In fact, he was in kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, to interview the prime minister, at Bear Grylls Meets President Zelensky (Ch4). It makes little sense for him to challenge the intrepid Ukrainian leader to rappel down a cliff or tackle whitewater rapids on a raft, when he defiantly faces the constant threat of Russian missile attacks every day.

Instead, the two took a walk downtown, stopping at a community center under a tarp in a park, where locals whose homes have no heat or electricity can go to warm up and recharge their phones.

A platoon of bodyguards surrounded them, scanning the skies for drones, while Zelensky chattered away with his inimitable charm and quiet self-contempt.

“The two went for a walk downtown, stopping at a community center under a tarp in a park, where locals whose homes have no heat or electricity can go to warm up and recharge their phones.”

Bear was visibly shocked, as he might well be. Getting this interview was an extraordinary coup. By comparison, persuading President Obama to take a day off from the White House in 2015 to go hiking in the Alaskan wilderness must have been a piece of cake.

Zelensky is an interviewer’s dream. Every time he opens his mouth, he coins a new sound fragment. Asked by Bear if he lived from day to day, the president replied, “We live for the future, not the present.” And when asked to describe himself as a child, he said: ‘I was always running, so as not to waste time!’

Bear has a gift for sound bites. Arriving on the outskirts of kyiv after a two-day trip, he took a deep breath to see ‘entire apartment blocks razed’. It’s like Ground Zero everywhere you look.

Although her interview with Zelensky accounted for only a few minutes of footage in the entire hour, she was able to make every question count. In particular, she was right to get the 45-year-old president to talk about his family, whom he rarely sees for a few hours.

Her nine-year-old son was suffering, Zelensky said. He needs his father, he doesn’t have enough warm moments. This war changed our people and it changed our children. They are not children, they are all adults, but you see the wet eyes of your child and you understand that he is a child.

When he vowed that Ukrainians’ love for their country and their families will defeat Putin’s invaders, his conviction was inspiring.

Bear offered some winter survival tips, just two words. “Stay together,” he urged.

BBC reporter Nawal Al-Maghafi also landed an interview under almost impossible circumstances, while persuading fugitive killer Farouk Abdulhak to speak to her, on Murder In Mayfair (BBC2).

BBC journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi talking to Farouk Abdulhak at Murder In Mayfair

Abdulhak, the playboy son of a Yemeni arms dealer, fled Britain after killing fellow student Martine Vik Magnussen, from Norway, in her London apartment in 2008.

For almost 15 years he has lived as a fugitive in Yemen, which has no extradition treaty with the UK.

Tracking him through social media, Nawal found him pathetically eager to talk, though he refused to appear on camera.

He claimed the murder was “just a sexual accident, nothing nefarious”, and Nawal seemed disgusted to even be talking to him.

Too bad he didn’t start with more innocuous questions, about his life in hiding, because he was clearly desperate to talk.

Abdulhak’s slimy self-pity made Martine’s father’s quiet and relentless pursuit of justice seem all the more admirable.