If the late great film-maker Sam Peckinpah had ever found himself on the Nepalese border, jacked up on Pepsi Max and hair metal, he might have made a documentary like Everest: Beyond the Limit (Discovery Channel). For here was a programme, ostensibly about modern-day mountaineering, that bore all the formal hallmarks and fetishised tics of a hyper-masculine action-fest — crash zoom camera moves, rapid-fire editing, rock soundtrack and a cast of bandana-wearing berks who high-fived each other a lot and said things like “Let’s get it on!” without irony. And yet, like the best Peckinpah westerns, it was also strangely beguiling, and somehow shot through with an elegiac tone that balanced every moment of macho posturing with ominous intimations of mortality. In short, it was The Wild Bunch go climbing, and all the better for it.

The Bunch in question were, according to the doc’s hyperbolic voiceover, “Eight determined men who made a risky wager: their own strength and endurance against a mountain called Everest!” (Note, grammar fans, that’s not actually a wager, it’s just an opposition). In other words, they were an octet of mostly premium grade midlife-crisis men from all over the planet who had shelled out $40,000 each for the privilege of dodging altitude sickness, pulmonary embolisms and cerebral oedemas. “Everest is the last great human adventure!” said pumped-up Hollywood native Tim Medvetz, a gnarly biker dude with metal plates in his head, spine and legs, who nonetheless decided to recuperate from a near-fatal road accident by climbing the highest mountain on earth. Radical!

Within minutes, however, Everest the mighty man-killing beast had reduced Tim to mush. We left him, as did his so-called “team”, somewhere around 8,000 metres, collapsed in a puddle of oxygen-lite exhaustion, rubbing his now crippling biker wounds. “Hey, no one said it was going to be easy!” sneered fellow climber Mogens Jensen as the remaining seven marched happily upwards.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that this same team on this same trip also passed, without helping, an ailing British climber, David Sharp. Sharp eventually died, which was, apparently, an outrage. And yet, if Team Peckinpah weren’t going to stop for their very own climbing buddy, as clearly demonstrated here, Sharp surely didn’t stand a chance?

And perhaps that’s the whole point. For at the end of episode one, all the gurning macho invincibility and phoney fraternal bonds had given way to a certain pulverising nihilism. These were just men, after all. Beaten down by their environment, they were wheezing shadows of their former selves, struggling with nausea, high blood pressure and swollen brains. At nearly 9,000 metres, all they had left was the desire to reach the summit. Not for the ineffable glory of Everest, for the sport, or for their fellow climbers. But solely, and crucially, for themselves alone.

Students of hollow gender archetypes will have also had plenty to chew on in Strictly Baby Ballroom (Channel 4). The documentary, a complete and shamefaced lift of a much finer film by the New Yorker Marilyn Agrelo called Mad Hot Ballroom , purported to describe a year in the life of three prepubescent ballroom dancers. Typically, it opened with an extreme close-up of a 9-year-old girl’s mouth getting smothered in lip gloss, and featured a lovingly photographed mid-section montage of soft juvenile limbs being lathered in fake tan. Yes! We know! It’s creepy! And so, it seemed, did the show’s mini protagonists, Ellie, Tabitha and Kelsey, who spent much of the doc grimacing sadly as they drifted past camera in garish make-up and bright fluorescent evening wear, like a forlorn procession of tiny Thai prostitutes on their way to the gallows.

The programme, unfortunately, had nothing much to say beyond this, or beyond the fact that stage parents are repugnant — the most telling scene featured Ellie’s Mum and Dad cruelly berating her across the kitchen table for her lack of Samurai-like composure during competitions. “You need to know inside!” they screamed. “You need to know you can win!” At the end of the abuse Ellie’s Dad barked, “You feel more confident now?!” “Yip,” came the meek reply, on the verge of tears.

Ultimately, however, whereas Agrelo’s film was bold and smart enough to make connections between Latin dancing and the renewal of pride in underprivileged Hispanic communities, Strictly Baby Ballroom was mostly content to point fingers and chuckle. At its best, while surveying a floor of 8-year-olds, all smouldering rhythmically to the sexy Salsa beats, it seemed to be exploring the inane pantomime at the heart of prescribed gender roles. But, then again, I wouldn’t bet on it.

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