Bear Grylls. Crazy name, crazy guy. Abandon this big-jawed old Etonian in the Sierra Nevada mountains and, within no time, he'll be biting the heads off snakes and baking the edible bits over a flint-struck fire. Wash him up on a desert island and before you can say Robinson Crusoe he’ll have whacked together a Polynesian-style raft from bamboo and palm leaves. Later he may lasso a wild mustang. Why? Because he can.

Or can he? Born Survivor, the chronicle of Bear’s fearless exposure to the wild and screened by Channel 4, is the latest in an stream of television programmes to stand accused of “fabrication”. Which is like accusing ice-cream of being cold, perhaps.

But anyway. Allegedly, the horse that Bear so recklessly tamed was brought in ready-broken on a trailer from a nearby ranch. The Polynesian raft is said to have been preassembled off-location and then deconstructed on site ready for Bear to put it together again – survivalism via Ikea. Altogether the suggestion is that Born Survivor practised levels of deception that make, say, muddling up the order in which the Queen entered and left a room look like the work of an innocent age, long ago.

In addition, we are asked to be scandalised by the rumour that, far from sleeping rough under a rock, Bear was occasionally repairing to a nearby bed and breakfast offering homemade blueberry pancakes. In fact, on this charge, my admiration for him only grows. Have you stayed in an American B&B? It takes a cast-iron stomach, not only for blueberries, but also for chintz.

At a B&B in Santa Fe I once received, by way of formal welcome, a “bunny hug” from the husband and wife proprietors. The bunny theme continued in the form of stuffed toys, distributed liberally throughout the building and in an especially generous concentration on the bed. Somehow I got out alive. If Bear was exposing himself to this sort of physical and mental challenge on anything like a regular basis, then his credentials as a born survivor are without question.

In any case, many of us watching would have worked out for ourselves that Bear wasn’t entirely alone out there. Someone must have been filming him, after all, and, in a supposedly media-savvy age, we probably ought not to be shocked to realise that. What is interesting is that the more television is drawn to reality programmes, the more openly fictitious it becomes, and the more frequently it requires us to go in for good old-fashioned suspension of disbelief.

Some are arguing that this augurs badly for television’s “bond of trust” with the viewer. But that supposes the bond was firm in the first place, and ignores the long and noble history of viewer-scepticism, dating back at least as far as my grandfather, who insisted that all televised news footage from the world’s trouble spots was created in a studio in Shepperton. At the time we credited him only with bewilderment in one of its more aggressive forms, but it turns out he was on to something.

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