TV: Contestants dig deep to flush out the mole

LOUISA CLEAVE previews a show where contestants have to watch their backs.

Double-crossing, extreme action and a saboteur might sound like the ingredients for a new James Bond movie.

But then again, with a title like The Mole it would be unlikely to attract thousands of people to the box office.

The Mole (TV2, 7.30 pm) is a small-screen reality series/gameshow where the game is to find the saboteur, or mole, among a group of 10 people.

On arrival at Queenstown airport tonight the contestants learn they will be set a range of team tasks, from extreme activities such as bungi jumping to mental tests, which they must complete to move forward with the game where one person will take home the $30,000 prize.

The catch?

Within the group the show's producers have planted a mole whose job is to hamper the team while not drawing suspicion to her or himself. At the end of each episode the group must fill out a questionnaire saying what they know about the mole.

The person who knows the least is swiftly eliminated by host Mark Ferguson.

This was one of his hardest jobs, insists the actor who played Shortland Street's worst villain, Darryl. He says The Mole gives him the opportunity to show "the slightly nasty side of my screen persona."

The show is based on an Australian format but, according to Ferguson, the local version gives contestants more support.

"We're definitely more on the side of the contestants. The Aussie one was quite nasty.

"It's good to see genuine people under real pressure. Very quickly they forget the camera is there. There's not a sense of us being unnecessarily cruel to people. There's more of a mind game going on and a sense of subterfuge."

Ferguson says the show has a "water-cooler" aspect - it will have people discussing the previous night's episode at work the next day.

"The audience will become very involved on a number of levels. There are certain characters we know will become real audience favourites and people will barrack for them," he says.

Even the host did not know who the saboteur was until the end, and the film crew who had run a sweep were all wrong.

"We had people deliberately sabotaging other people, trying to get them to think they were the mole. There were a lot of incredible games going on," Ferguson says.