Churchill's Secret Agents: The New Recruits/Recap
Episode 1: Selection
This Includes:
- Observational drill: contestants were told to memorize a building plan where a hypothetical Op might take place. While they did this, two men ran through the building, one firing on the other. The questions turned out to be about the chase not the building.
- Mechanical Aptitude: Students are given a Meccano set (kind of like Legos with the play-engineering aspect but using different types of pieces) to build a chair, a bridge, or an airplane and test their ability to MacGyver.
- Morse: Preliminary acquaintance with Morse Code.
- Obstacle Course: An obstacle course rather like the training scene in Mulan. The toughest part is a ten-foot wall.
- Rope climb: Ropes were stretched between trees at 60ft and 30ft levels with an option of which to cross. Contestants are supposed to figure out that the top climb will gain the instructors' favor.
- The Pond: A MacGuffin is left anchored in the middle of a pond. Contestants are divided into teams to build a raft and get the MacGuffin.
- Buddy Rating: Peer Review. This is not really a "voting off the island" as the show is more premised about competing against the course than each other. But it has a similar format.
Episode 2: Paramilitary Training
This is the part of the course where the contestants are given the skills needed to be commandos.
Scenes will include unarmed combat training, pistol range, woodland tactical course, and various nasty things to do with IEDs. The end is a vague simulation of the practice for the assassination of Gestopo Chief Reinhard Heydritch.
Episode 3: Survival
This is about staying alive behind enemy lines. It includes stealth training and fieldcraft and some of the nastiest parts of the course including crossing one of the coldest lakes in Scotland and climbing the infamous "ladder" test. There was no safety harness in the Real Life version. You don't get one when crossing Spain to get back for debrief and no one asks if you are afraid of heights.
Episode 4: Finishing School
This is actual training in spy techniques. It includes lockpicking, and sending coded messages and introduces the students to the suitcase wireless (no they did not have the disposable radios of cop shows: it was the operators that were disposable back then). Also is given a preliminary sample of hostile interrogation by an instructor dressed like a Gestapo operative.
Episode 5: The Final Scheme
Remaining contestants carry out a simulation of a possible mission that might supposedly have taken place in support of the D-Day landings.