Michele Hewitson: Sweaty chicks with guns

I suppose, you have to admire the reality telly show SAS: Are You Tough Enough? for owning up early on to being totally removed from reality.

Unlike all of those other reality shows based on proving that you're really tough at playing gender politics while wearing a bikini, the SAS just isn't that real.

There were 29 contestants — a number have already had a big red cross drawn across their photographs to indicate they weren't tough enough. All are there to try to prove that they could make it in the SAS. That's if, and the emphasis is on the if, this was really a show in which the winners would make it into the SAS.

Don't be silly. There are chicks in the telly version and in the SAS there are, apparently, no chicks. But as everyone in tellyland who makes Survivor-style reality shows knows, you can't have a reality show without chicks.

You can't, either, have a drama about the SAS without chicks. It's all very confusing. Over on TV One on Tuesdays on Ultimate Force, a show about the SAS, you get to see the glam side of the SAS. The glam side is sweaty chicks with guns.

This is somebody's little fantasy. It's just like sweaty chicks with guitars, but more exciting because "Bang! Bang! You're dead!" the chicks could go, at any given moment. The girls are as hard as the men, only not quite. In Ultimate Force you can tell which ones are the chicks because they are more empathetic. Also, they are more sweaty around the chest area.

In Ultimate Force the blokes do spontaneous press-ups to prove, possibly, that they are not girls. The girls say things like "how about I take your balls off?" to blokes while holding a big machete. They then flick the lid off a bottle with said weapon to prove that they are not girls.

Nobody says "the tribe has spoken". This is because in the two versions of a fictional SAS one thing is real: the tribe does not speak; the bloke in charge speaks. It is hard to tell who the bloke in charge is because everyone looks the same in camo gear. Perhaps this is part of its elusive charm.

The contestants on SAS: Are You Tough Enough? are on the show because when somebody says "are you tough enough?" some people seem to feel an obligation to say, "Try me". On the other hand, if asked such a question I would feel an overwhelming obligation to have a little lie down on the couch.

Which is exactly what I was doing while watching those hard people make fools of themselves getting lost up quite small hills. In Are You ... being tough enough involves putting bloody heavy rocks inside an already heavy pack and walking for, I dunno, it seemed liked years.

One girl was kicked off because she removed her rocks. I would have thought this showed initiative. Nah, this was a girly thing to do and no doubt proved to the former tough guys that girls should never be allowed in the SAS.

I tend to agree with them. It's hard not to when they put forward such coherent arguments against letting girls run around the countryside in camo gear, carrying guns. They should never be allowed in the SAS "for a lot of anatomical reasons".

You can't argue with that. Well, I can't; I'm still trying to figure out what on earth it could mean.

Never mind, on an unreality show about the SAS, girls are definitely allowed, for anatomical reasons. There is just no point in having the contestants strip to their underwear if you don't then get to show gun-hefting girls in their knickers.