Ultimate Force is ultimate stereotype

ONE day Ross Kemp will play an old softie who helps grannies across the road. Ultimate Force isn't that day. As an SAS tough nut, he's more likely to rip off the old dear's arm than take it to guide her through the traffic.

"This isn't a game," he growls at the wild bunch of new recruits to an organisation in which men are butch and bank robbers, even teenage ones not intending to harm anyone, are shot dead.

Kemp's officer Henno Garvie lays down the rules early on - "the only things that come naturally are eating, fighting and shagging."

This being a cliched TV series, one of the new boys is different to the others. He's called Jamie. The way he rushes off to see his sick mum and throws up after his first kill, he might as well have the word SENSITIVE tattooed across his forehead.

Kemp's SAS lads-with-guns are called in after a gang, led by an ex-policeman, dishonourably discharged from the Flying Squad without a pension, robs a bank. The plans goes wrong, leaving them holding staff and customers hostage.

"Is this a robbery?" asks the little old lady (possibly the one that Kemp wouldn't help across the road) as the brutes whip out big guns and bundle everyone to the floor.

"It'll all be over in a second and everything will be fine," says the cashier, who has reckoned without Kemp's gung-ho antics.

Considering the global situation, I'd have thought the SAS would have more important things to do elsewhere in the world than reduce a bank to rubble and the robbers to bloody corpses in their rescue bid.

They send a helicopter to collect The Sensitive One from his home, where he's visiting his mum, although an army chopper landing in the middle of a council estate does rather draw attention to Jamie's participation in a supposedly top secret organisation.

The SAS has also, amazingly, found a well-made scale model of the bank within minutes of arriving on the scene to plan the storming of the building.

Kemp's officer justifies shooting a young robber, who barely looks old enough to shave, with the words: "Those hostages didn't ask to be there, he did. He's dead."

Then, he and his boys go off to the pub for "a quiet celebration", leaving the police to pick up the pieces, mop up the blood and counsel hostages more terrified by their rescuers' behaviour than anything the robbers did to them.