Television Review

FOR EVERY SIX people who will successfully reach the summit of Everest, one person will die. This is not a macabre kind of tourist tax, just the current ratio of triumph to disaster, and it doesn't really help you calculate your odds. You might hit a peaceful stretch rather than one of the banshee storms which do so much to maintain the mountain's batting figures. All the same, it's the sort of statistic which would give you pause for thought as you join the queue up through the Khumbu Icefall. Everest base camp now looks like Glastonbury with boulders, so, if the average is to be maintained, someone in that Goretexed crowd is for it. Unfortunately, pausing for thought isn't going to help your survival chances much once you're up there, because, as the Equinox (C4) film about high altitude physiology reminded you, the brain can become as sluggish as the limbs when it is starved of oxygen. The effects might even be permanent: "some work indicates that climbers who go to extreme altitude without oxygen do come back with smaller brains," said a Seattle white-coat, briefing the members of a special expedition set up to study the effects of hypoxia. Regular high-altitude climbers, he explained, suffer from subtle cognitive disfunction which can only be detected by psychometric testing.

As someone who becomes anxious if the cushions are plumped too high, I would have thought the cognitive disfunction was blindingly obvious from the fact that they want to climb Everest in the first place. Surely some error of precedence here - the smaller brains must be a cause not an effect. And if you think this is just a callow libel of brave men, even they agree: "It only makes me question my sanity as to why I climbed this mountain again," said one expedition member, returning from his fourth summit. Another man who had spent much of the climb cataloguing the exotic varieties of mucus he was expelling from his tortured lungs ("Last night I coughed up a lot of green hard chunks") and who very nearly died on the descent, made an open plea for his friends to intervene should he ever mention doing it again.

The science itself was distinctly underwhelming - at various altitudes they jumped cognitive hurdles (some of which I couldn't manage at sea- level), becoming more incompetent as exhaustion and oxygen starvation set in. This appeared to prove what everyone knew already - the brain needs oxygen and there's less of it up there. But the medical research was really just an alibi - partly for adventurers who wanted another crack at the mountain, partly for Equinox itself, which must occasionally haul its ratings well above the tree line. The death zone for climbers lies above 26,000 feet. Stay there too long and you will die. The death zone for science strands lies somewhere below the minimum safe average audience, so the occasional expedition like this is important for continued scheduling vigour. One could get sniffy about this, but the concentration on physiology did make for an unusually vivid account of the dangers. Among other things, the presence of medical men meant you got an accurate identification of the bones revealed by melting glacier ice near base camp, just one of the many corpses which dot the mountain. Another one, highlighted in a pixellated monstrance on the screen, lies only feet away from the Hillary step - a momento mori for those on the way to the top.

Watch This Or The Dog Dies (BBC2) was an entertaining history of youth TV - partly a requiem for past glories, partly a post-mortem of a genre killed by its own excesses. Janet Street-Porter made a half-way persuasive case for its influence on television at large (as she would), while Adam and Joe, ungrateful beneficiaries of its do-it-yourself culture, reminded you just how terrible it could be. The Network 7 report on capital punishment, which included a phone poll on whether a condemned man should be executed, was beyond the reach of satire in its combination of solemnity and studio frippery. When you were shown the parents of Yoof TV - the condescending Ishoo programmes in which young people discussed nuclear disarmament - it was impossible not to side with its anarchic energy. But when you saw its grandchildren - which included the unlamented Girlie Show and the maggot-eating challenges of The Word - you wondered again about the virtues of discipline.