Want to get a feel for the most challenging military entrance exam on the planet? According to ex-special forces operative Mark “Billy” Billingham … put a house on your back (either that or it was a horse), go into a sauna, walk up and down stairs and get someone to smash you in the face. Don’t fancy it? Or don’t know of any house-sized saunas with stairs? Then here’s a marginally less painful option. Watch Billingham, Angelina Jolie’s former bodyboard, and three other former special forces soldiers shout at lots of beefed-up, broken men on SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, 9pm). It will really test your reality TV survival skills.
It’s 17.55 on day one of the SAS selection process. Which makes I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! look like The Jungle Book. Our 25 mavericks-in-the-making – all of whom have “a roguish, misfit-ish element” – are running, crawling and crying thhhrough the Ecuadorian rainforest in the dark. The Directing Staff (DS), who make Bear Grylls look like, well, a posh Christian scout, are shouting at them. Again. As chief instructor and speaker of cliches Ant Middleton puts it: “It will chew you up and spit you out.” The jungle, with its 95% humidity and insects, is the toughest one of all, the Craig Revel Horwood of the brigade. One recruit soon has a panic attack. “I’ve trained so fucking hard, man,” he weeps. Fourteen hours in – or, to us armchair civilians, 20 minutes into the first episode of the second series – he is the first to withdraw.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/18/sas-who-dares-wins-review-andrew-marr
Any one else watch this? The first episode was brilliant.
