Barack Obama eats bear-gnawed salmon with Bear Grylls in Channel 4 special

Viewers are promised 'a side of the Commander In Chief that they’ve never seen' in Bear Goes Wild with Barack Obama

Bear Grylls and Barack Obama go wild in Alaska (Instagram/Whitehouse)

President Obama will be taught survival techniques when he joins Bear Grylls on an adventure into the Alaskan Wilderness for a Channel 4 special to be screened this month.

Viewers are promised “a side of the Commander In Chief that they’ve never seen before” during Bear Goes Wild with Barack Obama.

The intrepid duo journey across a glacial outwash and travel through a dense forest on their way to Alaska’s Exit Glacier, where they see the effects of climate change first hand.

Grylls offers the President a unique taste of the Alaskan wilderness, when the two men cook bear-gnawed, half-eaten salmon and chat around their campfire.

“This has got to be one of the best days of my Presidency,” Obama tells the camera shortly before Bear Grylls feeds him piece of the bear’s rejected dinner.

“Why wouldn’t the bear finish this sucker? This looks like a nice lookin’ piece of fish,” asked Obama, who declared the cooked dish “tasty” but said he would have preferred it served with a cracker.

Channel 4 said: “From family, fears and faith, to his overwhelming duties as Commander In Chief - even Bear’s penchant for drinking his own urine - no subject is off limits.”

The “inspiring, heartwarming and insightful” film, which premieres on December 20, was hatched when Obama reached out to the adventurer to ask him if they could explore the Alaskan wilderness together. The pair hiked along the Exit Glacier, a south Alaskan river of ice that has shrunk by 1.25 miles in recent decades.

“Every once in a while if I do something unexpected the phrase we use is ‘the bear is loose’ so to be with Bear in the woods, it doesn’t get any better than that,” the President said.

The film, which will also be screened by the NBC network, is a coup of Grylls, 41, the old Etonian former SAS reservist, who has become a major television star in the United States.

Obama flouted Secret Service protocols to take part in the challenge, said Grylls, who has set up his own Survival Academy teaching self-rescue techniques.

Channel 4 secured the UK rights to the documentary, co-produced by Grylls, which is being sold to international broadcasters.

Earlier this year the President invited Sir David Attenborough to the White House to discuss the broadcaster’s career and threats to the natural world. That conversation was screened by the BBC.