Mission of madness?

I've just watched Bear Grylls:Mission Everest which I recorded from yesterday and I don't think I've seen such a couple of slightly posh daft sods in my life. Many of Bear Grylls' films are quite entertaining -this was, but for the wrong reasons.

The idea - for exactly what reason was never clear - was to try to fly over Everest using paramotors. Imagine a person with a parachute and a massive fan on their back and you get the sort of idea. Bear's companion in this folly was Gilo Cardozo whose job was to design the motors and who seemed to have modelled himself on the Harry Enfield 'Tim-nice-but-dim' character.

Firstly, one engine froze prior to testing in an industrial cold wind tunnel - a fairly major design you might have thought given they needed to operate in extreme cold. This meant that they eventually turned up in Nepal with one engine that hadn't been tested... or run... at all.

Then their dry run in the Alps failed due to strong winds - though these were winds that were lower that they expected to find at Everest. Bear realised that the wind might actually be a problem so instead of flying over Everest, they decided they'd fly at a greater height, but a few miles to the south. Didn't that negate the original idea?

Finally they take off - that's after,

• having had trouble with the weather balloons they were using to assess the weather and find a suitable 'window'. Again, surely another fairly fundamental problem??
• having had Gilo make last minute adjustments to one engine whilst it was on Bear's back as he was about to take off - talk about at the 11th hour!
• Gilo's wife - who for some reason had come along on the trip - had a nosebleed just as Gilo was about to take off.

Having taken off their radio communication then began to break up and they had to do '3 clicks for yes and 2 for no'. Now most Everest expeditions manage to have radio communications so why did their's fail? A little later Gilo's engine - the one which had to be rebuilt and hadn't been tested or even flown since it froze at the wind tunnel - packed up and he had to descend early. Oh, yes the altimeters also froze and stopped working at 19,000 feet - so they had no idea how high they were and wouldn't know if they'd achieved their target height until after they landed!

The final 'irony' was that having landed when they looked at the equipment to try to see how high Bear had gone.... they discovered the altimeter had stopped working completely at around 25,000 feet - we'd never know if he'd done it or not!

Absolutely unbelievable - the overall impression the programme left me was that 2 slightly barmy posh blokes had gone off on some under prepared jolly jape. Harry Hill's TV Burp - consistently one of the funniest things on television - had got huge laughs from Bear Grylls previous series. Can't wait to see this weekend's edition - he should have a field day!