Career climb

IT used to be enough for TV presenters to show they were jolly good sports by doing something ordinary like dancing. Remember how Angela Rippon surprised everyone by jumping from behind her newsreading desk to trip the light fantastic with Morecambe and Wise?

Nowadays, more than a bit of fancy footwork is required to prove a presenter can do more than read an autocue. They have to climb every mountain in the case of Watchdog's Julia Bradbury, to be followed next week by caving with Kate Humble and white water adventure with Kate Thornton.

You've got to hand it to Bradbury - though preferably not while she has her hands clinging to rocks on three of Britain's toughest climbs in Ultimate Rock Climb. Her mission seems madness because, although she's always wanted to know what it's like to rock climb, she's never actually done it.

"I want to be able to make it to the top," she says. This programme may well impress her BBC bosses and help her up the career ladder as well as a few mountains. Who can't admire her guts and determination when, after two days training - yes, just two - she and extreme athlete and nifty climber Tim Emmett are clinging to a very high cliff in Cornwall with the mightly Atlantic pounding below them.

Emmett is to be commended for urging and egging her on as she battles to overcome her fears. "Are you sure for a first timer it's recommendable," she asks him, surveying the sheer rock face.

Of course it is, replies Emmett, while admitting that his first time was just 40ft high, not 700ft.

"I've never felt so exposed or frightened as this," says Bradbury. The other two climbs - a towering rock face in Wales and a Scottish sea stack - provoke similar reactions. But she pluckily carries on climbing. I haven't heard so much stretching and straining, panting and ooh-ing since I watched Debbie Does Dallas.

The last one, billed as "one of the most terrifying climbs in Britain", is a challenge of both stamina and technical skill. "You are kidding," she says on seeing it.

Matters aren't helped when, during the ascent, a rock the size of a TV set tumbles off the stack and narrowly misses Emmett. You don't have to worry about that sort of thing when you're presenting Watchdog.

Bradley's exploits make the work of Real Men seems like a stroll in the park. This programme in the series follows those maintaining the lighthouses, lightships and buoys helping to keep our seas safe.

Banish any romantic notions of lighthouse keepers enduring weeks of isolation. All 72 lighthouses around the coast of England and Wales are unmanned. Workmen drop in from time to time to change a light bulb and tidy up the helicopter pad.

And in case you're wondering how many men it takes to change a lighthouse light bulb, the answer is one man about three minutes. They're very small. The bulbs, not the men. No bigger than bulbs used in car lights.

The vessel Patricia looks after buoys and light vessels. The public can go and watch as paying - up to £2,500 a voyage - guests. How did you spend your holiday? Watching men wash buoys (which sounds like something for which you could be locked up).

Getting a buoy out of the water is the hardest part. No new technology here, just two crewmen willing to leap from ship on to buoy to help lift it from the sea.

Back at the lighthouse, Mick is demonstrating the banana bunk, which sounds like something from the Kama Sutra but turns out to be a curved bed. He warns of the frustration of working in a lighthouse where, if you leave something you need down the bottom, you face having to go all the way downstairs to collect it. He should thank his lucky stars his climb involves stairs and not a precarious rock face.