The Aussie SAS allows cameras in to record its brutal selection process, and a seasonal Blackadder that never gets old.
TV
SAS: The Search for Warriors
Prep & Landing 2 (TV2, 7.00pm). Slight change from our listing – this isn’t about retrieving a box from Santa’s secret workshop, it’s Prep & Landing Stocking Suffer: Operation: Secret Santa, in which the elves racing to recover classified North Pole technology that has fallen into the hands of a computer-hacking Naughty Kid. Glad we cleared that up.
SAS: The Search for Warriors (TV1, 9.30pm). The surprise of SAS: The Search for Warriors might not be just how tough it is to become an Australian SAS officer – that much we could already guess – but the mordant wit displayed during the process. One exercise, in which soldiers spend five days with just one hot meal and little sleep undergoing extreme mental and physical challenges, is named “Lucky Dip”. Another, in which the candidates have to navigate hundreds of kilometres of rugged Western Australia hill terrain, is called the “Happy Wanderer”. The SAS is usually a secretive bunch, but it seems the Australian military decided to let cameras onto the brutal 21-day selection course in the hopes of boosting recruitment – and to weed out the starstruck. The first challenge at the training camp north of Perth is carrying a 20kg pack 20km in under three hours and 15 minutes. That’s the least of it. Training sessions are brutal, no matter how fit a soldier, and then there’s the psychological testing and torture. The candidates may be repeatedly woken through the night by blaring music and they undergo gruelling psyche evaluation sessions. If they manage to survive the course, it’s just the beginning of 12 months of proper SAS training. No wonder only 26 out of 131 pass the initial evaluation, and another six don’t make it through to the end.
aimRenderAd(300, 250, '300X250','ContentRect','/POS=POS2'); if(!$.browser.msie){ ContentRect_frame = $("#ContentRect")[0]; ContentRect_frame.src = ContentRect_frame.src; }Twins (TV3, 9.40pm). Psychologists love twins, don’t they? Endless fun tests await siblings who are willing, and in Twins, identical twins who have grown up apart are put under the documentary microscope. Up first are Mia and Alexandra, sisters who were adopted separately and raised in different countries. Their parents in the US and Norway reunite them and are startled at how similar they are, despite their different upbringings. Then there are Paul and Iain. The former leads an unhealthy lifestyle of smoking, drinking and bad food choices, whereas the latter lives an active life in New Zealand, kayaking, walking and eating five fruit and veg a day. Unfortunately, Iain discovers he might not be as healthy as he thought when Paul has a heart attack.
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (Prime, 9.50pm). Forget Mr Bean, Rowan Atkinson will always be Blackadder to us. A classic in which Ebenezer Blackadder is “the nicest man in England” until the Spirit of Christmas (Robbie Coltrane) shows him visions of his ancestors and descendants and he decides that “bad guys have all the fun”.
FILM
Hot Tub Time Machine (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 8.30pm). Is it wrong that we like this silly time travel flick? It knows that it is silly, which is the key – travelling back in time to relive your 80s glory days is so absurd, why not make the time machine a hot tub? It “takes the universal human longing to reimagine and relive the past – which has fueled artists and poets from the Lascaux cave-painters through Proust and Fitzgerald – and reduces it to cheap, foul and thoroughly amoral humor,” says Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, and these are the things that make Hot Tub Time Machine awesome. (2010)
Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal (Four, 9.15pm). Given that being a cheerleader or a quarterback in the US is roughly equivalent in societal value to being a genius anywhere else, it’s not surprising they act up sometimes. This TV “drama” (and I use that word loosely) is based on the true story from 2006 of five pom-pom-thrusting brats from a Texas high school whose sense of entitlement went into overload. They bullied, drank and bad-mouthed their way to national notoriety, and it didn’t seem to occur to anyone that they’d been given permission to be revolting by their indulgent parents. A 21st-century fable dressed in a tiny skirt. With Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Ashley Benson and Tatum O’Neal – who knows a thing or three about being a handful. (2008) 5
RADIO
Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan (Radio New Zealand National, 9.06am). Today: Lou Sanson, Chief Executive of Antarctica New Zealand on the Polar centenary and the future of the Antarctic treaty; US correspondent Jack Hitt; Jon Macdonald, the chief executive of Trade Me; John King review Holidays in Heck, by PJ O’Rourke; business commentator Rod Oram; video game designer Pippin Barr on The Art of Computer Games; and media commentator Gavin Ellis. Info and audio here.
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