Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins – Channel 4
At ease, you men… dancer Louie Spence has declared that, in the event of World War III breaking out, he’s ready to serve.
‘I might just jump at it,’ he bragged, on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins. ‘I think I’d be in the Home Guard. We’d have a gay Dad’s Army, darling. Honestly, they wouldn’t want to mess with the gays.’
Shortly after that, he botched a hostage rescue exercise by hurling a grenade into a building where two civilians were waiting to be saved.
Private Godfrey could have done a better job. The show launched on Sunday night — small wonder that by yesterday’s second episode, Louie had already bailed out and gone home.
His big idea might not save the country from invasion, but surely the BBC would love an LGBT remake of its most successful comedy. Call it Fab Army.
Previous series of Celebrity SAS have been camp enough to merit their own float at a Pride festival.
The ex-special forces veterans in charge of each batch of hapless volunteers couldn’t help standing in a row with their thumbs tucked into their belts, like a Village People tribute act.
Former U.S. Marine Rudy Reyes was caught on camera, stripped to the waist and admiring his muscles in the mirror.
I worried that the next ordeal the celebs faced would be a choreographed Full Monty striptease, to a soundtrack of You Can Keep Your Hat On.
This time, the NCOs are less flamboyant but also less aggressive. They snarl, swear and belittle contestants for every mistake, but so far we’ve seen no ‘beastings’ — the punishing bouts of intensive exercise that end only when recruits pass out from exhaustion.
And these days, the mock interrogations are more like therapy sessions. They still begin with victims propelled into half-lit cells with bags over their heads, but the questions are sympathetic, even kindly.
‘Don’t be so nervous,’ chief instructor Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham told Michaella McCollum, one of the ‘Peru Two’ jailed in South America for drug smuggling.
They coaxed the story from her, beginning with teenage drug abuse in Northern Ireland, then working as a courier for an organised crime gang in Spain, followed by arrest at the airport in Lima. ‘So yeah, I ended up spending three years in prison,’ she said.
Billy asked the questions expected of all good psychotherapists: ‘How did that feel? Do you wanna talk about it?’
Back in the dorm, she was beaming: ‘I feel a bit better after that chat with them, really positive.’
The physical challenges involve lots of running up mountains with rucksacks, as ever, but I can’t help feeling that a lot of the tears and terror are manufactured for the cameras.
One test saw the celebs hanging from a zipwire over an abyss. If that same set-up were an attraction at a theme park, people would queue for hours to have a go.
