This week’s television, reviewed by people who prefer the theatre.
 

Sandhurst
BBC4
Monday, the 19th of September
9PM
(Watch it here)
A bunch of raw recruits turn up on the doorstep of Britain’s most elite military academy. Like in Police Academy, much hilarity ensues. If by ‘hilarity’ you mean people vomiting up the contents of the entire water bottle they’ve been forced to drink at 5AM, and attending the funeral of an old school friend who just got it from Johnny Taliban. Curiously, none of them starts a petition to have a pool table installed in the common room. A lot of people have talked about how crushing the basic training doled up here is, but to me, it always seems like there’s a lot of love being offered around in the army. You wouldn’t get that in the French army. Just a Gitane and an insouciant shrug with your white flag drills.
8
CORPORAL COCKMUNCHER
 

Downton Abbey
ITV
Sunday, the 18th of September
9PM
(Watch it here)
The world’s greatest Pears Soap ad returns, and yup, it’s WWI time, motherfuckers! “Downton feels like another world,” Dan Stevens announces from a trench dug in some Northern European mudpile. The incidental characters scratch at their acetate collars nervously. Something tells me not all of them are going to make it out of here alive. If I had a minor love interest with a servant girl back at Downton, I’d definitely be putting my Bible in my top-left shirt pocket about now. I’ve a soft spot for Downton, but expect the tally of ‘lions led by cowards’ cliches to have exceeded the number of actual war dead by season’s end.
8
UPTON O’GOOD
 

Rugby World Cup: South Africa Vs Fiji
ITV1
Saturday, the 17th of September
6.40AM
(Watch it here)
Lovely thighs on the South African team. Slightly better than the thighs on the Fijian team. Their thighs, I felt, lacked a certain fullness in the upper quadricep. Whereas the South Africans, especially the ones with higher numbers, have that fleshy overhang above their kneecap that is the sign of a truly scrumptious quad, for the Fijians, theirs tend to be more straight up and down – a slightly amorphous mass of tree-trunk leg that fails to live up to the hype of their well-defined calves. Am I doing this right?
7
ETHIGHSA POODRIBBLE

Big Brother 2011
Channel 5
Monday, the 19th of September
10PM
(Watch it here)
So apparently Celebrity Big Brother has finished already, which is news. A gypsy bareknuckle boxer won, and the fact that the Daily Mail didn’t make a peep about that should tell you what a ratings smash the show was. Kerry Katona came second, because she’s had some problems, but is really down to earth and stuff. Now, with all the national fanfare of Dominic Masters opening a crisp packet, the civvy street mongos have started already. There’s a woman called Heaven who keeps talking about how to ‘be true to yourself’, and a Geordie who’s quite plain-speaking, and the housemates are not getting any food this week, so it’s approximately the 144th week that these permutations have occurred in Big Brotherland. Only difference? Richard Desmond’s mob seem to have chucked out all the token middle-class/ugly/old people, in a pogrom on anything that isn’t pure-bred half-wit. While the CBBs still had a whiff of Channel 4 in the fiendish way it was plotted, this is pure C5 prole-o-vision.
5
STINKING FUCKING POVVO