Men overboard
THIS Morning guest Vinny Ohh who spent surgery to £40,000 on plastic sexless alien”: “transform into a not wanting “I started my journey to be male or to have any label like people female. I just didn’t me all these labelling me, calling different names.” you They didn’t label by “attention seeker” any chance? YARRR, me hearties! Shiver me timbers with a cat o’ nine tails and call me Davy Jones, arrgh!
Or, to put it another way, C4’s Mutiny is recreating Captain Bligh’s epic 4,000- mile, open- boat voyage after Fletcher Christian seized The Bounty in 1789.
The skipper is Ant Middleton, chief instructor on SAS: Who Dares Wins, who I’d like to say is in charge of a motley crew.
Truth is, though, his second in command is a veteran round- the- world sailor named Conrad and there are two cameramen, leaving just five of the nine as ordinary civilians.
Four of them are likeable and have been pulling their weight since being cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific.
Thank Poseidon, then, for irritating, work- shy Chris Jacks who whinges constantly and has the lethal personality cocktail of an ego too big to obey orders while being uselessly disorganised, so rubs everyone up the wrong way.
So much so that Ant ended Tuesday’s second episode with a mutiny on his hands, ironically, with the crew demanding they leave their latest island stop without Scouser Chris.
Personally, for the sake of the show, I hope the fishy little twonk stays. Because Mutiny has bigger things to worry about.
It’s at its most compelling on dry land when it’s basically The Island with Bear Grylls. Much of the ocean footage, however, feels rushed – five episodes to cram in six weeks is a big ask.
Choppy
It’s hard to follow what’s happening when the sea gets choppy, and in the doldrums, dullness overwhelms.
Above all, though, Mutiny is at pains to stress the journey’s historical accuracy.
But unlike this crew, Bligh didn’t stop for supplies and rest i n Fiji or Vanuatu. For fear of cannibals and savages, he kept going. It might well be that for C4’s nine men “your face is only ever 2ft max away from another man’s bottom”, but there were actually 19 men on the original 23ft boat.
And, of course, they didn’t have batterypowered head torches, metal safety clips or a support vessel with medics via emergency radio.
Which makes a nonsense of Ant claiming: “The journey is going to be tougher for me than it was for Bligh.”
A statement unravelled by narrator Philip Glenister: “Ant is leaving Tofua with a bag of coconuts and one man isolated from the rest of the crew. But when Captain Bligh left in 1789, he had much worse to deal with.
“As the crew raced for the boat, the islanders bombarded them with rocks, killing one of Bligh’s men.”
No, but you worry about that bag of coconuts and the one isolated crew member, Ant. You have it much tougher.