Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week

Men and women of all ages going through discomfort and extremes of exhaustion, for real. This gave me a real insight into how people discover that they can bypass what they thought were their physical boundaries - and eventually crash into their mental limits. Not just silly obstacle courses, but extreme physical exhaustion, hunger, cold, lack of sleep and of course, being 'mucked' about 24/7. I hope that the experience will be something they can use throughout their lives. It was fascinating to realize that some contestants were never getting to their limits while others were awesome for clearly being way beyond those limits and seemingly asking themselves the question, 'what can I not do?' I would like to talk to the finalists; they would be a study. I'm pleased to say, I guessed two of them right.

This show should be right up my street, I'm always a fan of the public trying military situations on TV, I loved "SAS: Who Dares Wins" and "Mutiny" but I'm afraid TV's campiest black man ruined the whole experience. The show itself is pretty good though fairly tame compared to the fore mentioned programs, the concept of having a different special forces instructor from countries around the world each week really works and keeps things fresh and interesting. All's going well until Reggie turns up in his overly metro-sexual outfit, looking like he's about to attend a Parisian fashion show and asks questions like "Are you feeling tired?" to contestants almost collapsing and fighting for breath after huge hikes or "Are you upset?" to contestants crying their eyes out with their head in their hands. The funniest thing is there is already a voice-over man presenting the program so there is absolutely no need for Mr Yates to be there anyway! Please stop using brain dead presenters to present semi-factual programs BBC!

So it is basically a reality show with 25 people that is eliminated after the boot camp goes forward. Each episode is lead by different instructors from different countries, and here is where the charm is of the whole show.

The show, unfortunately, has a stench of a political agenda. As a soldier myself i can say that the female winner of the first season would never have gone past week 2. The pattern that all male contestants need to be eliminated but the female ones quit and then actually win the whole ting, it becomes to unserious.

While the three first episodes of the second season start to show who the main participants is, the main star is the instructor of the week that you can feel really pushes the participants to their limit. Their criteria to dismiss people varies so never known when one of the contestants leaves,(except women, they never gets dismissed from the first reccondo instructor who dismiss two people the first 15 minutes to the Green Beret instructor that rather wants to get the participants to quit themselves.