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The week ahead: Space Cadets could be joke for years...
Conrad Astley2/12/2005
From Johnny Vaughan proving there's no intelligent life up in space - and not much down here on Earth - to Kenneth Branagh's lessons on giant prehistoric insects, Conrad Astley looks at what's on the box over the next week.
TELEVISION has been crying out for something like this for
years.
Tabloid newspapers have previously poked fun at those who felt the
need to appear on reality TV.
Fake shows in which contestants had to try untested drugs, or which
were set at the bottom of mines, both had Z-list nonebrities and
brain-dead wannabes queueing around the block to appear in
them.
But TV has been slow to catch on to the huge potential for mirth in
the hoax reality TV show - until now.
Fortunately,
Space Cadets (Wednesday, Channel 4)
promises to be worth waiting for - a ridiculously expensive and
elaborate confidence trick which is mind-blowing in its sheer
audacity.
The group of fame-hungry hopefuls believe they're going to spend
five days orbiting the Earth in a spaceship.
In fact, they'll be in a Hollywood film set, in a huge hangar in a
disused airbase, looking out onto a view of space projected onto a
screen.
The take-off will be simulated by a series of hydraulic arms and
speakers, and the contestants will even think they're leaving Earth
from a former Soviet air-base - eating food like pig knuckle and
smoking Russian fags - while they'll really be somewhere in the
home counties.
Those cheeky TV executives will never pull this one off... will
they?
Walking With Dinosaurs gave us a fresh perspective on stars already
made famous by Steven Spielberg, Walking With Beasts showed us some
more recent favourites like the sabre-toothed tiger.
Surely there's no other chapter of pre-history left to
plunder.
Oh no?
Walking With Monsters - Life Before Dinosaurs
(Thursday, BBC1) is the latest instalment.
With cameras focused on previously unknown creatures like 3mtr long
centipedes, giant spiders and the gorgonops - a 5mtr long hunter -
it promises to be interesting at least.
As we're talking about stuff that was around 530m years ago,
no-one's going to be able to say whether they've got it right, but
this will no doubt still be a fascinating piece of entertainment,
even if it does mean having to listen to Kenneth Branagh.
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