ALLY ROSS

Mission accomplished at the end of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins — the saving grace of lockdown with its box-office cast

CHANNEL 4 viewers witnessed one of the great ­military confrontations of the modern era last night.

The SAS versus Joey Essex, off Towie.

The immovable object versus the irresistible moron.

An interrogation that must rank as the most insanely frustrating task in the regiment’s glorious battle-scarred history as, over the course of 13 hours, the show’s team of Special Forces veterans had to establish, beyond all reasonable doubt, whether Joey’s a copper-bottomed moron or just playing the fool.

Not quite the Battle of Mirbat, admittedly, but it’s something I’ve not been able to do in almost ten years of watching him.

It was mission accomplished, though, at the end of an absorbing series of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, which has been the saving grace of lockdown thanks to its box-office cast.

The presence of Katie Price probably lured in a lot of us initially, unexploded human hand-grenade Tony Bellew gave it a sense of jeopardy throughout, and there were solid contributions also from John Fashanu, Brendan Cole and Paralympian Lauren Steadman.

The star, though, was Joey, from the moment he fretted about catching “limescale disease”, in the Scottish mountains, during episode one, to his defiant statement in the fourth: “People don’t know how hard I work. I’m good at what I do.”

Do? DO? I wasn’t aware, until this series started, that Joey DID anything, but it turns out he’s spent half a lifetime ­prepping for SAS: Who Dares Wins.

For as well as being surprisingly likeable, the guy’s also insanely fit — to an extent that clearly tormented professional athlete Lauren Steadman and suggested Joey could’ve had an amazing military career if he wasn’t, in the words of one SAS interrogator, “poncing about on TV telling everyone what he f***ing had for breakfast”.

Apart from “the naughtiest blisters ever”, Joey had breezed through every section of the C4 show, until the finale when “escape and evasion” gave way to the interrogation phase that’s designed to “prepare the recruits for enemy capture”.

Total dingwad

Who the hell was going to want to capture Joey Essex, outside of the Celebrity First Dates booking office, wasn’t explained, and it doesn’t even do to ask such questions of SAS: WDW as the whole thing will unravel if you start pulling at those threads.

It’s always best just to enjoy the entertainment, which involved giving Joey and the other five finalists the cover story that they were working for the Scottish Highland Mountain Rescue Board.

The trouble with giving Joey a cover story, it emerged, was that it dislodged every other piece of information he’d ever learned from his brain.

Key to surviving this task, as they’d all been instructed, was to drip-feed the truth back to “Dilksy”, the monstrous great slaphead who always appears at this point, and his fellow interrogators.

Whether they locked him in a cage, dunked him in water or threatened to kiss him, though, Joey just kept denying everything and repeating the story.

With the clock ticking, something had to give and eventually it did, after the entire SAS: WDW team had concluded, more in sorrow than anything else: “He’s not even playing the village idiot, he’s trying hard not to be.”

The end, when it finally came, was a bit of an anti-climax.

Joey just sloped off, in a bit of a huff.

Helen Skelton and Nikki Sanderson quickly followed and the winners were declared to be DJ Locksmith and Lauren Steadman.

A worthy choice, even though some of us were still probably trying to work out how she made it through the drown-proofing task if “no allowances are made”.

If you take this show too seriously, though, you’ll miss the joy and point of SAS: WDW.

It’s not offering contestants a fast-track into the SAS any more than Harry’s Heroes will form the spine of the next England squad.

The reasons the show deserves to be put on a pedestal are its extraordinary entertainment value and the fact it’s proved, to my complete satisfaction, that Joey Essex isn’t putting anything on. He really is a total dingwad.

Progress, people.

Judge's comedy grates

ACCORDING to the Gold channel, on Sunday night, “Some bright spark had the idea of asking Britain ‘who is Britain’s Greatest Comedy Character?’ ”

You responded to the question by “voting in your thousands”.

But Gold clearly disapproved of your choices, so Britain was overruled by a ten-strong “jury of comedy superbrains”, that included Marcus Brigstocke, Shappi Khorsandi and head judge Sally Phillips, who “couldn’t help noticing” the public’s shortlist was “predominantly white men”.

I also couldn’t help noticing Gold’s panel featured not one person who was Welsh, Northern Irish, Scottish or funny, but these omissions were lost on the ten who were too busy fretting about sexism and racism and denouncing Compo, from Last Of The Summer Wine, as “a pervert”.

Three hours of chin-stroking later, I’m Alan Partridge star Sally announced their winner was . . . Alan Partridge.

As a way of deciding Britain’s Greatest Comedy Character, it wasn’t ideal.

As a way of demonstrating exactly why British television comedy has gone down the toilet, though, it was damn near perfect.

'Arry-on up the Eiffel

ON ITV’s hit-and-miss three-part series Harry’s Heroes, a group of overweight former football internationals – some recovering alcoholics and others ex-gambling addicts – toured Europe trying to work out why they’d never won a major football tournament for England.

A total mystery to me as well, guys – and the anecdote about nearly severing Alan Shearer’s toe in a late-night drinking prank certainly shed no further light on the failure.

The likes of Neil “Razor” Ruddock, Paul Merson, Matt Le Tissier and manager Harry Redknapp, though, seemed particularly aggrieved and confused about losing to Germany in 1990, which was odd given hardly any of this squad were actually involved in the tournament.

So, in an attempt to heal these old wounds, they weaved and bantered their merry way round Europe, playing random games of pub football, in a manner that made The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour look like the 9:15 bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya.

Along the way, Razor had to leave, at the start of the second instalment, to have a pacemaker fitted, former Welsh international Vinnie Jones played in goal for one game, Michael Owen vanished completely from episode three, like he was still playing for Newcastle United, and David Seaman wisely opted out of the match against some French nudists whose goal celebration pile-up was the very stuff of nightmares.

There was also a confrontation between Merson and Razor about the latter’s drinking, and some clumsily staged discussions about addiction and mental health issues, which were robbed of their proper impact through TV’s endless, deadening, virtue-signalling obsession with these subjects.

Far more moving was the sight of Paul Merson, clean and sober for the first time in years, gazing with fresh-eyed wonder at the majesty of the Eiffel Tower while gasping: “What’s the difference between this and the one in Blackpool, then?”

Apart from the Eiffel Tower never hosting Aladdin, with Mooky and Mr Boo the clowns? Very little, Merse.

Lookalikes of the week

THIS week’s winner is The Real Marigold Hotel’s Britt Ekland and horror-film doll Annabelle.

Emailed in by “CDM”. Picture research: Amy Reading.

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