SAS: Who Dares Wins – the TV equivalent of a sadistic PE lesson

In the olden days, back at school, when you were being punished for some minor infraction by a PE teacher with an intellectual inferiority complex, making you run a lap of the track in a vest and your underwear, the rain whipping cold against your face, did you ever think: wouldn’t it be good if this were a TV show? Because someone at Channel 4 did, once, and now, five seasons in, we love SAS: Who Dares Wins (Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4) and its crew of shouting men: Guy With Beard And The Voice Of A Child, Grizzled Northerner, That One Who Can’t Relax Any More Because He Had Too Many Grenades Thrown At Him, and That Sinister Wiry Lad With The Demeanour Of An Extremely Nasty Drug Dealer. We love our horrible soldier boys and would go to war for them the way they would for us.

And what we love most of all is the way they go right up to the line of – but never actually flop over into fully – torturing 25 candidates from across Britain, most of whom are just That Person From Your Gym Who Takes Gym Too Seriously, but some of whom are Just Hard Builders. You feel like the UN is unaware that this show is happening, because surely it would have a summit about it if it did.

This is the thing with SAS: Who Dares Wins, which – spoiler – is exactly the same as the last four series just with an undercover SAS agent in there this time. It is sort of hideous, in every possible way, but utterly engrossing. You see daytime footage of 25 miserable, rain-lashed personal trainers, sprinting up a slippery hill on a bleak Scottish island, sprinting back down again, then up, again and again, until they cry or quit or puke, then you judder back to a talking head with Ant Middleton, grinning ear-to-ear and saying: “Mentally, you have to break them,” and you go: well, yeah, that just makes sense.

You see them get barked awake at 3am and jump to alertness in the middle of a mud-strewn bunker; you see them crash through bramble in pitch-black darkness; you see them panic when they are handed a weapon and shouted at to fire. You see real people, cold and shivering and pushed to a breaking point beyond the limit of their humanity, and you have two dual thoughts: this is horrible, absolutely horrible, how is this possibly allowed? And: with a bit of training I could probably do that.

What a ludicrous show. You sit there in cosy socks with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits and you watch displays of unnecessary endurance that could, in the wrong circumstances, kill most viewers (last week, they climbed on to a boat via a ladder while the SAS threw buckets of sea water over them); and, one by one, the contestants drop out, until the final episode, when the person who has passed by unnoticed the whole series long has their balaclava snatched off in the middle of a concrete bunker and Ant Middleton extends his grizzled hand to shake it.

“You did it,” Ant Middleton will say. “You suffered for weeks for no reason at all, and now you have my respect. There is no other prize.” Then they walk out, dazed, into the Scottish countryside. You can’t do this. You would fall off the boat and die. Have another biscuit and forget this ever happened.