SAS Who Dares Wins – Jungle Hell review: Hilarious horror peppered with savage putdowns-Mike Rampton-Entertainment – Metro

The 20 SAS Who Dares Wins contestants try to survive Vietnam’s Thung Ui jungle (Picture: PA)

Thank god telly is an audio-visual medium because, if it could transmit odours, the new series of SAS: Who Dares Wins would make your whole house smell. It’s as sweaty, BO-ridden and bodily fluid-laden as TV gets: slow-motion globules of saliva artfully catch the light, litres of vomit appear as if from nowhere and contestants are casually shown having diarrhea, complete with soundtrack.

For this series, the show has moved to the jungles of Vietnam. It’s spectacularly beautiful, but the twenty recruits battling it out to see if they have the mettle of a Special Forces warrior don’t have time to appreciate it. It is, after all, hard to enjoy a lovely view while a man with arms the size of a phone box sprays you in the face with a hose and calls you mean names.

As Jason ‘Foxy’ Fox of the directing staff cheerily tells the recruits: ‘The jungle is a brutal environment to operate in. Everything wants to have a pop. Whether it’s a plant, an animal, an insect, it all wants to make sure that your life is s***.’

Relocation aside, it’s generally more of the same formula that has worked for five regular series and three celebrity ones – breathy narration, gym-fit go-getters being reduced to tears by huge dudes calling them maggots, and plenty of mud, blood and exhaustion. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It’s hard not to feel for the recruits, in over their heads, being yelled at while fifty feet in the air, or abseiling down a treacherous waterfall only to be insulted at the bottom. It must be tough, doing the most badass thing you’ve ever done and immediately being told, ‘You made that look like a bag of s***. Go over there and contemplate not being a bag of s***.’ Genuine quote.

While the DS team (Foxy, jungle veteran Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham, Rudy Reyes and new signing Chris Oliver) have an extraordinarily impressive CV taking in some of the most hostile situations on Earth, nobody seems to have explained to any of them that if you want someone to relax, a group of burly men bellowing ‘Relax!’ at them might not do it.

(L to R) Rudy Reyes, Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham, Jason ‘Foxy’ Fox and Chris Oliver (Picture: PA)

They also have an extremely odd, but quite compelling, habit of listening to the sob stories of the recruits, telling them not to worry about things they can’t control before ordering a guard to put a bag on their head and take them away. It’s tough love – perhaps without much of the ‘love’ part.

It’s not a huge spoiler to reveal that by the end of the first episode there are no longer twenty recruits. Over the coming weeks, more and more will quit or be sent home. How will a chef fare compared to a professional wrestler? Is a firefighter better equipped to handle a jungle full of leeches than a ballet dancer? They are questions we normally wouldn’t get an answer to but you will here

Compelling, occasionally moving and frequently horrifying, peppered with hilariously savage putdowns that the team must surely pre-prepare, this series is as muddy, bloody and brutal as ever. It’ll also make you want to visit Vietnam, just not with these guys.

SAS Who Dares Wins – Jungle Hell will be aired on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm

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