Lads' Army (2002)

Genre

reality television

Country

United Kingdom

Length

4 seasons, 32 episodes

Rating

7.3 of 10 from 3 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This reality series took young men with a history of troublesome behavior and dropped them into a simulation of 1950s British Army National Service. It tested whether the strict military environment could change their attitudes and behavior over the course of filming.

retroexperimentalconfrontationaldisciplinarynostalgicrawunvarnished

What happens

Lads' Army (known in later series as Bad Lads' Army, Bad Lads' Army: Officer Class and Bad Lads' Army: Extreme) was a reality game show that constitutes a historically derived social experiment. Shown on ITV, the series is based on the premise of subjecting today's delinquent young men to the conditions of conscripts to British Army National Service of the 1950s to see if this could rehabilitate them. The narrator for the first series was Kevin Whately, then Dennis Waterman took over until the show ended in 2006. Within each series a small number of the recruits have either walked out (after a 24-hour cooling off period), or been ejected. The majority of the remaining recruits claimed some benefit from the experience, with some choosing to enlist in the real British Army following their time on the show. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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