Prepare to suffer, Matt Hancock: the brutal reality of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins
Matt Hancock can’t get enough of jungles. Last year it was New South Wales and 10 Bushtucker Trials in I’m A Celebrity: now it’s North Vietnam’s Thung Ui and Special Forces selection-inspired exercises in Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, which begins on Channel 4 later this month. “It’s one of the toughest physical and mental things I’ve ever done,” Hancock said. “It opens your eyes and makes you look into yourself.”
Suffering is high on the menu in every iteration of the Who Dares Wins franchise: gruelling marches, forced fighting with other contestants, relentless interrogations and injuries – Olympian Fatima Whitbread and actress Jennifer Ellison are among those who have suffered for TV glory. But how realistic is the programme? Is it a pale facsimile of the real thing, or does it give a genuine taste of what Special Forces selection is like? The answer is a lot of the first and a little of the second.
Certainly the TV version is substantially easier. The participants carry much lighter weights, they don’t have weapons, and they’re not required to do a fraction of the map-reading and orientation (compass bearing, distance, elevation, etc) that proper soldiers are. Civilian fitness and military fitness are very different things: the first involves training for sport and to look good, the second for combat conditions. It’s impossible simply to apply the first to the second and expect it to work.
Jay Morton, who spent 10 years in the SAS and has appeared on the regular Who Dares Wins series, says that “only when you actually experience combat do you realise what soldiering’s all about. There are so many facets to being a soldier, and only combat properly tests them and brings them out.”
"Welcome to your worst nightmare"
The first look at Matt Hancock in SAS: Who Dares Wins has been released.@PeterBoneUK says "MPs shouldn't do this, it's a full-time job to look after your constituents".
@Jacqui_Smith1 | @theJeremyVine | @StormHuntley | #JeremyVine pic.twitter.com/lEp6A3QVsL— Jeremy Vine On 5 (@JeremyVineOn5) September 14, 2023
In real life, one has to fulfil several exacting criteria even to attend Selection, let alone pass it. One has to have served for at least three years, preferably in either the Paras or the Marines, the elite units halfway between the regular army and the special forces. One needs to be among the best in one’s unit. And one needs to be personally recommended and released by one’s commanding officer.
Real Selection lasts six months: filming for the TV show is wrapped in two weeks. “Anybody can take hardship for two weeks,” former SAS operator Chris Ryan says. “But if it was six months you might say, ‘screw that, I’m not wasting half a year knocking my pan in’, and that’s what you can’t replicate.”
Nor, for good reasons, can the TV series replicate the dangers of real Selection. As many as 20 would-be Special Forces recruits have died on Selection in the past 40 years, including Cpl James Dunsby, L/Cpl Edward Maher and L/Cpl Craig Roberts in the Brecon Beacons during a 2013 heatwave. In contrast, no TV programme could, would or should risk even one death.
Ryan also points out that instructors shouting at recruits is very much for the cameras. “What we expect [in real life] is each student that comes on selection to be self-motivated. We only tell them once. There’s nobody going to the barracks screaming and shouting, there’s no marching or saluting. We just leave them to their own devices, but they’ve got to perform.”
The TV version is much less restrictive in terms of age and gender. There’s a reason that the upper age limit for real selection is 32: it’s a young man’s game, and with the best will in the world a 44-year-old former minister wouldn’t stand a chance. And whereas this series features eight men and eight women, positions in the SAS and SBS have only been open to women since 2018. To date, no woman has passed Selection: indeed, only two are known even to have tried. It’s a situation which many army sources hope will change soon, but for the time being Special Forces remain all-male zones.
Every reality show these days demands that the contestants go on an emotional journey, and this is very much part of the production process. Rebekah Randell, who appeared in series six of the regular show, says “the application asks you to go in great detail about your childhood, your upbringing, and the reasons why you’re applying to the show. It’s physically difficult, but also emotionally because you really reflect on your life. It makes you tap into your emotions far more than you realise.” In the real SAS, of course, the only journeys which matter are the ones into and out of combat zones.
It’s for all these reasons that Ryan says the series “may as well be called the Krypton Factor. It’s entertainment and it should come under entertainment. I’m not knocking any of the guys that do it, but it’s certainly not SAS selection.”
But there are some nods to realism too. Unlike many reality TV shows, there are no prescribed elimination points, just as there aren’t on the real Selection course. Participants can voluntarily withdraw or they can be removed by the instructors, but this is not set in stone.
And where this Celebrity series scores over its predecessors is its location. Previous series have been filmed in Scotland, the Andes and the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, all of which have posed varying challenges, but the jungle is a different beast altogether (the SAS goes to Brunei rather than North Vietnam). “Soldiering doesn’t get tougher than jungle training,” says Morton. “In terms of testing everything you need as a soldier, it’s the perfect environment. The conditions are brutal: not just pulverisingly hot but incredibly humid, so you’re always, always sweating.
“You’re under a canopy of trees, so the sunlight can only half get through, and often there’s no wind at all, not even a breeze. The heat and humidity fry your head, sometimes literally. Apart from the odd time you get to wash in a river, you never get the chance to cool down, not even for a second. Those dreary, chilly English autumn days you hate so much back at home? You’d kill for one of those after a week in the jungle.”
So perhaps it’s best to treat Who Dares Wins not as a serious military offering but as an endurance programme overlaid with the imprimatur of an iconic regiment. Public fascination with the SAS seems limitless, as seen most recently with the success of the BBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes drama, but that fascination isn’t necessarily linear or constrained. The SAS is something to be proud of even if you don’t personally aspire to join it: something which is world-leading at a time when we as a nation are questioning our place in that world.
“At heart,” says Morton, “the show isn’t really about the SAS at all. It’s about putting civilians under similar stressful scenarios that Special Forces guys go through, and bringing the narrative through in that. The show looks to inspire people to get out in every way: out of their homes into the great wide open, out of their routines, out of their comfort zones. So many of the recruits, even those who didn’t make it to the end, said it changed and inspired their lives. It’s a positive show which teaches positive qualities – discipline, fitness, health.”
It may also be a subtle but effective piece of political advertising. “The defence budget is always being cut,” Morton adds, “and the Ministry of Defence has to fight for funding just like every other government department does. Anything which can help show the value of our Special Forces, and by extension our armed forces, has to be a good thing.”
Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins is on Channel 4 from Tuesday September 26