Royal Navy School, Channel 4: can the new recruits of HMS Raleigh survive their training?

Fixed-camera documentary series goes inside a military training facility
Ben Travis8 February 2016

While Britain waits for the next instalment of Channel 4’s Educating series to come around, here’s a similar take on a different setting.

Royal Navy School is a fixed-camera documentary series that follows a group of Royal Navy recruits as they take on ten weeks of intensive training at HMS Raleigh.

Across six episodes, viewers will get to see the process that applicants have to go through if they want to make it into the armed forces – and it’s not guaranteed that every candidate will make the grade.

As well as being a fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary, it’s difficult not to get sucked into the personal stories here too.

Some of the recruits are especially young, straight out of school and college. It’s a case of being thrown into the deep end for 18 year-old Recruit Harland, who has never lived away from his parents before.

“My heart had been ripped out, all my Angel Slices had been thrown in the bin,” he laments as he’s forced to remove all his treats from his bag.

As well as having to take on the Navy’s teamwork and disciplinary expectations, Hardland has to work through his homesickness (the emotions further intensified by his parents’ divorce) as well as learning about living independently.

It’s not just teenagers though, with the Navy taking on people aged up to 37.

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32 year-old Recruit Rowan is looking for a fresh start – and a career that he hopes will mean he can take his family to Disneyland twice a year, even if it means working away from home.

While his fatherly instincts help some of the younger recruits settle in, will he be able to make it through the training while only being able to talk to his young kids over the phone?

Another insightful and surprisingly compelling documentary series from Channel 4.

Channel 4, 9pm

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