Fitness enthusiast Glenn dares to take on TV SAS challenge
Blue Peter is named best children’s show of all time
IT’S the tough-as-nails reality show that makes the Bushtucker trials on I’m A Celebrity look like a walk in the park.
SAS: Who Dares Wins - in which exSpecial Forces soldiers recreate the elite troops’ secret selection process has just returned to Channel Four for its third series and among the gluttons for punishment enlisting for physical and mental torture is a 30-year-old man from the Rhondda.
But Glenn Mainwaring, from Porth, has revealed he has some deeply personal reasons for wanting to be pushed to his very limits before a viewing audience of millions.
“I didn’t have an easy time of it in school - other than being short I was quite feminine and didn’t really have many male friends,” he says.
“It took me until I was 18 to actually come out and I struggled to really be myself living in the Valleys.
“It wasn’t until I later moved to London - I now live in Clapham - that I felt comfortable, you know?
“So I applied for this show to try busting the myth that gay men aren’t capable of doing certain things, like joining the Forces.”
That said, even fitness enthusiast Glenn is quick to admit the challenges the hardcore team of specialists prepared for him and the others were tough. Challenges at the show’s Moroccan base were both back-breaking and soul-sapping - including running up the Atlas mountains (fourth highest range in the world) with a 30 kilo weight on their backs, a 10-mile run in the Sahara Desert in 40C heat, jumping out of a helicopter into open water and abseiling off a huge dam.
There were also regular “beastings” - gruelling sessions of press-ups, burpees, squat thrusts and other such exertions.
“You’d be up at 6am and doing strenuous stuff all day long - so, when it came to lights out at midnight you’d be utterly exhausted.
“Sometimes, though, they’d come into the bunkhouse an hour after we’d gone to sleep to wake us with airhorns and make us do a workout.
“So you’d constantly have to be on your toes because you never knew what was going to happen.”
Then came the interrogations, where Glenn would be taken to a room and disorientated by being blindfolded and a bag placed over his head - he’d then be subjected to mind games over the course of 24 hours to test his resilience.
“As well as being given physical aptitude tests before going on the show we had to undergo lengthy psychological ones to, so they look at the results of those to discern your weaknesses and use them against you,” he says.
“You know deep down it’s only a TV programme but, combined with the food and sleep deprivation and the fact you’re missing home by now, it can be really hard not to crack.
“They try their best to break you down and toward the end I was struggling to put sentences together.”
However, despite the punishing nine-day regime, Glenn says he has great memories from his time on the show.
“I was in with blokes from all walks of life, and I wasn’t sure if being around me in those circumstances would make them uneasy.
“Similarly I wondered how intimidated I’d be made to feel - but neither of those things could have been further from the truth.
“In fact, I’ve been far more uncomfortable on a Friday night down the pub growing up.
“I proved to myself, and to others, what I’m capable of and it was honestly one of the best experiences of my life.”
SAS: Who Dares Wins is on Channel 4 on Sundays at 9pm. BLUE Peter, Grange Hill and Newsround have been named the best children’s TV shows of all time.
The world’s longestrunning children’s TV show, Blue Peter, which celebrates its 60th anniversary later this year, tops the list.
Gritty show Grange Hill, which caused shockwaves with its storylines about drugs and teenage pregnancies, is second in the poll, voted for by children’s presenters and experts on the genre.
Newsround, associated with its host of many years John Craven and which was praised last year for its coverage of the Manchester bombing, is third.
A total of 16 of the top 20 shows were broadcast in the 1980s - making it the most popular decade for kids’ TV.
The top 10 also includes famous Saturdaymorning shows Tiswas and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, in fourth and fifth place. Vision On, which bagged a huge audience and broke new ground in the way it catered for deaf children, and Live And Kicking, whose hosts included Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston, took sixth and seventh place.
The top 10 is completed by Going Live!, with Sarah Greene, Phillip Schofield and Gordon the Gopher, long-running show Play School, and teatime show Crackerjack.