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SAS Who Is This Cunt?

Started by Norton Canes, January 15, 2019, 12:50:45 PM

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Norton Canes

This was going to be a nice little thread about the new series of Channel 4's SAS Who Dares Wins, the new series of which is currently into its second episode. I was going to say that I only tuned in for the first installment by mistake because I'd got it confused with the far more entertaining BBC's Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week, the one where they get a different psychotic bastard each week from another country's murdering bastards corps to dunk the recruits in pig's offal or whatever. I was going to express my surprise that they were making such a big deal about accepting female participants for the first time, when SF:UHW had been doing it for the past two seasons. I was going to express my sympathy for Recruit #11, who was slung off the course at the end of the last episode without having his 'journey' featured, or even his name mentioned. Sad to see you go mate! And I was especially going to talk about Ant 'Anthony' Middleton, SASWDW's newly hipster-bearded Chief Instructor who now looks and sounds like a sweary Adam Buxton. However it was when I Googled around to see if he was related to our own dear future queen that I discovered La Middleton doesn't just act that twat for the cameras, it really does go deep down.

Ah, you probably know all this anyway... he had a pop at a couple of cops a few years ago - one male, one female - in a 'nightclub incident', and got sent down for 14 months. No wonder he had no compunction about cajoling male recruits to lay into female sparring partners in the boxing ring this week. And he has a refreshingly enlightened view on Brexit: "It would force us into hardship and suffering which would unite and bring us together, bringing back British values of loyalty and a sense of community. Extreme change is needed." Yeah nice one Ant yeah, got it spot on there.

Oh yeah! And the cunt wasn't even in the SAS!

Anyone else watching this..?

Blue Jam

Is this as good as Bad Lad's Army?

Norton Canes

#2
Er, dunno, not seen it (Googles...)

Well, yeah, it's another forces training doc, but this one is shot very artily on the slopes of the Andes and the participants are all hard-bodied aspirants, though many have 'troubled' pasts so we can witness some emotional 'journeys'.

Funniest thing about it for me (although it's no laughing matter because as outlined above the main guy is a complete cunt) is that whenever participants are hauled off into the interview cell for a motivational chat or to have their psyches probed they don't see a specialist mental health counselor or psychologist or anything - Top Cunt and his cronies do all the caring, heart-to-heart stuff too. Mrs Canes, who is a psychiatric nurse and mental health advisor herself, always says to me there's nothing worse (i.e. more potentially damaging) than amateur psychiatry, and watching these arseholes talking to the emotionally-shredded subjects, I can see her point.

Quote from: Blue Jam on January 15, 2019, 03:42:49 PM
Is this as good as Bad Lad's Army?

Bad Lad's Army was ace. This is shite!! Yeah the beardy guy is a grade A plonker!

Lord Mandrake

Quote from: Norton Canes on January 15, 2019, 12:50:45 PM

Oh yeah! And the cunt wasn't even in the SAS!

Anyone else watching this..?

Bit harsh, he was SBS, Royal Marine & Para. He didn't attack the female police officer and as for cajoling the bloke to lay into the female recruit, well she chose the bloke and the whole point of the show is treating all recruits equally. Furthermore the interviews are not mental health sessions, they only give advice in the context of the show which is ostensibly a very watered down version of real SF selection.

bgmnts

So wait he or he didn't attack the female police officer?

Lord Mandrake

He was charged with common assault as although he didn't touch the female officer - 'she feared for her safety'.

bgmnts

There's this too.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11760250

I suppose there's an element of "ex-soldier is right wing, violent nutcase shocker!" but still.

Lord Mandrake

By the look of him, Jason Cundy deserves to be thrown around rooms, although it never happened.

Norton Canes

Quote from: Lord Mandrake on January 18, 2019, 10:47:52 AM
Bit harsh, he was SBS, Royal Marine & Para. He didn't attack the female police officer and as for cajoling the bloke to lay into the female recruit, well she chose the bloke and the whole point of the show is treating all recruits equally. Furthermore the interviews are not mental health sessions, they only give advice in the context of the show which is ostensibly a very watered down version of real SF selection

Yeah whatever, he's so last week, I'm all about ITV's The Paras: Men Of War now, not this shabby reality show ripoff. Proper soldiers, proper ardent 17-year-olds training to get their bayonets stuck into actual bad people.

The Paras thing is odd, last week I missed the first five minutes and thought it was a reality show like Bad Lads Army as you had this South African lad trying to launch a singing career. This week I realised, oh shit these lads are actually joining the forces. P Company looked brutal and that trainer with the Shark eyes and pointy nose seemed like a psychopath.

Norton Canes

Quote from: confettiinmyhair on January 18, 2019, 12:36:58 PM
P Company looked brutal and that trainer with the Shark eyes and pointy nose seemed like a psychopath

Yeah, and he couldn't get his bantzy slang right either - he kept describing the log run as 'nails' but 'hard as nails' means either something physically solid or a tough guy, it doesn't mean hard as in difficult.


P Company through the ages...

1984: episode 4 /6 of BBC2's documentary series The Paras

1992: Channel 4's Cutting Edge

gilbertharding

Quote from: Norton Canes on January 18, 2019, 12:58:16 PM
Yeah, and he couldn't get his bantzy slang right either - he kept describing the log run as 'nails' but 'hard as nails' means either something physically solid or a tough guy, it doesn't mean hard as in difficult.


P Company through the ages...

1984: episode 4 /6 of BBC2's documentary series The Paras

1992: Channel 4's Cutting Edge

I'm not watching the current series, and not least because I (and everyone else in my 1980s Air Training Corps squadron) watched the 1984 version, and took to heart the Heating, with the result that every camp we went on ended with the ritualised (but very real) 'punishment' of some hapless sod - often yours truly.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

QuoteYeah, and he couldn't get his bantzy slang right either - he kept describing the log run as 'nails' but 'hard as nails' means either something physically solid or a tough guy, it doesn't mean hard as in difficult.

It is commonly used for either.

I've caught up on the first two episodes of SAS WITC and the sparring session was an uncomfortable watch. A woman picked out a man to fight and then gets smacked about. Then the remorse shown from the man after the bout, a man who it is later revealed was suicidal less than a year ago.

I'm wondering about the psychological vetting process in these shows. There's been two or three contestants who don't seem to be in the right place for such an arduous challenge.

Lord Mandrake

I reckon the psych profile of the contestants is probably vaguely similar to the real soldiers that go up for selection, i.e. batshit.

Norton Canes

Quote from: confettiinmyhair on January 21, 2019, 08:25:43 AM
I've caught up on the first two episodes of SAS WITC and the sparring session was an uncomfortable watch. A woman picked out a man to fight and then gets smacked about. Then the remorse shown from the man after the bout, a man who it is later revealed was suicidal less than a year ago.

I'm wondering about the psychological vetting process in these shows. There's been two or three contestants who don't seem to be in the right place for such an arduous challenge.

But hey, great telly!

This week's anonymous departee was number 4, summarily dismissed with nothing but the most cursory indication of why he didn't make the grade. No backstory, no journey, not even an appearance in the interview cell to his name - nothing to offer this increasingly X-Factor-esque reality contest. Chalk that one down as a fail by the production team's selection committee, I guess.

Anyway, as ever with this type of show I'm more interested in how it's put together then I am by the transient nonentities in front of the camera. I was thinking about last week's rock climb and forward abseil challenge, for instance. There were still about twenty contestants in the running at that stage, and it was a pretty big climb; so for each person to get rigged up, do the climb and come back down, that's got to be at the very least half an hour, that's a minimum of ten hours for everyone to do it, but I reckon probably more. That's a lot of standing around for those not climbing, for one thing. Could they really have got all the climbs done in one day, being out there for upwards of twelve hours Assuming of course that everyone did the climb, not just the interesting ones. Maybe the dull ones whose cards are already marked were told not to bother. 

Norton Canes

Quote from: Lord Mandrake on January 21, 2019, 11:14:01 AM
I reckon the psych profile of the contestants is probably vaguely similar to the real soldiers that go up for selection, i.e. batshit

The production team clearly want as many batshit ones on there as possible.

Oh, and also - Petra, the mole. For one thing, how slow must the other contestants have been not to spot she was a plant? She seemed to spend most of her time offering constructive advice in the calm, controlled kind of way that could only be gained by years of relevant experience. But mainly I love the fact that the instructors repeatedly hauled her in to ask how the contestants had been behaving in the barracks. I don't know if this is a good idea, instructors, but why didn't you use the hidden fucking cameras that are recording every second of the fucking contest? Just a thought.

Lord Mandrake

They almost certainly do study the camera footage as well but they would probably argue that her reports are nuanced/offer a different perspective.

Norton Canes

Oh yeah, of course, and she worked well as a dramatic device.

I was wondering if the letter from the depressed one was the production team's idea. I mean I'm sure it was written by the guy himself with absolute with sincerity but it would've been pretty heartless for him to have departed under the circumstances he did, halfway thorough the show, with no further mention. 

God I am such a cynic.

Bogbrainedmurphy

Quote from: Norton Canes on January 21, 2019, 12:22:36 PM
Oh yeah, of course, and she worked well as a dramatic device.

I was wondering if the letter from the depressed one was the production team's idea. I mean I'm sure it was written by the guy himself with absolute with sincerity but it would've been pretty heartless for him to have departed under the circumstances he did, halfway thorough the show, with no further mention. 

God I am such a cynic.

I did wonder if that letter was aimed more at the viewer than the other contestants.

Feels like it's possibly beginning to jump the shark a little with having a mole in there and the backstories for some but others ignored. I know it is a reality show, but it's starting to feel like one in places.

Lord Mandrake

I just caught ep 3 and Nathaniels letter seemed to me an organic thing that happened which made the edit, not in an exploitative way but maybe in an effort to highlight that mental side of the task. I actually found it quite moving. As for the mole, rather than jumping the shark, its an element theyve resisted in previous series (or at least not revealed to the viewer) but one that is, I imagine intergral to these sort of  selection processes in reality.

Quote from: Lord Mandrake on January 22, 2019, 02:41:00 PM
I just caught ep 3 and Nathaniels letter seemed to me an organic thing that happened which made the edit, not in an exploitative way but maybe in an effort to highlight that mental side of the task. I actually found it quite moving. As for the mole, rather than jumping the shark, its an element theyve resisted in previous series (or at least not revealed to the viewer) but one that is, I imagine intergral to these sort of  selection processes in reality.

They had a mole in the first series - guy was a bit of a grey man but competently getting through it before seemingly randomly walking. I think someone else got so thrown by it that they walked pretty soon after.

Ray Travez

Stylish guy, yer man Ant. Realistic hair Action Man is such an underrated look.


Elderly Sumo Prophecy


Bogbrainedmurphy

Another collection of contestants last night I really don't remember seeing on previous episodes, but despite that it was quite a harrowing, brutal watch.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

Fucking Ant likes to fucking swear a lot doesn't he? Even when he's fucking talking about fucking trivial fucking things. I think he's going fucking bald as well.

Ray Travez

Paras in the Spring...

Seem to have my life overun with army stuff just recently. Watching three series of SAS, one about paras, plus gave Raw Recruits a spin on C5. Best of the bunch so far is SAS series II- the jungle.

Yesterday we went over to Catterick- there's a nature reserve that you have to drive through the barracks to get to. I've never been in a barracks before. I suppose it's much like I expected. Doesn't look very human, just functional and featureless apart from the Union Jacks flying.

Foxy's an interesting man. I mean, he's seen stuff hasn't he? I'd read his autobiography if he had one.

Paras- Men of War was an interesting show. Slightly conflicted, as some kind of a pacifist- I was pleased Kojo realised his one ambition of getting into the parachute regiment, whilst at the same time thinking it's absolutely the worst outcome for him. They don't tell them when they're signing up that the f-cking parachutes don't work properly, do they?!

I lost a bit of interest in the SAS programme after I realised that they weren't applying to join the SAS, they were just pretending to. Lowered the show's status from gritty documentary to some kind of reality gameshow. Still enjoy it though.

Raw Recruits kind of looked like pussies after watching the other two shows, so we sacked it. 'We' being me and chrissiebrmc.

Ray Travez

Quote from: Norton Canes on January 15, 2019, 12:50:45 PM
I'd got it confused with the far more entertaining BBC's Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week

We've missed one! Put it on the list

Norton Canes

A pretty tepid installment of the Ant Middeton Vanity Project, I thought, though the ten mile hike/freezing water combo made for some novel suffering. Main source of... not enjoyment, exactly, but grim fascination... is still the interview cell.

Beardy firefighter man, harbouring a tragic secret, is led to the chair. Ant and his sidekicks are all like mate how's it going mate see you're doing fucking well mate fucking good job mate fucking love it mate but why the long face? And beardy firefighter man is like wife hung herself depressed. And Ant &tc. are all like... nothing, they've got fucking nothing useful to offer this guy at all beyond ah mate that's tough mate yeah depressed wife hung herself tough one mate. They're laughably vacuous. Uncomfortable silence... and that's it, apart from the chuck-outs the episode's over, we've been kept in suspense over this guy's issues and they've got us watching till the end and that's it. Oh voiceover, "If you've been affected by any of the issues mentioned in this show, please call this number..." You know what, if the production team are so confident that Ant is handling these issues in a remotely competent way, they should get him to work that phoneline.

Anyway earlier on guy dropped on rock, bloke holding rope bawled out for being 'untrustworthy' even though he'd never had to hold a rope to stop a guy being dropped on a rock before. Yeah, that's what 'trust' is all about.

Oh yeah and that tantalizing hint of tit, very classy.