Five has come up with the keenest satire on reality television since The Year of the Sex Olympics 40 years ago. In Nigel Kneale's prophetic 1968 drama, the “high drives” controlled the proles through a diet of violent and pornographic television. One day, ratings soar after the accidental death of an actor is screened live and the high drives commission a reality-TV series in which eight volunteers are plonked on an island and filmed as they struggle to survive.

Unbreakable is essentially a remake of this, although we've lost the drama's context and are plunged straight into the “programme” in which eight fat-headed athletes are physically and mentally humiliated over “eight epic weeks and four continents” while being led thorough “scorching deserts, freezing ice, hellish jungles and steaming swamps teeming with terrifying creatures”. The prize is staying alive or, at least, not being “broken”.

In last night's hilarious opener, the testosterone-flushed gang was flown to the “hellish Amazon jungle” which, the brilliantly overheated commentary insisted, was the “biggest, wettest, dirtiest jungle on earth”. (Dirtiest?) Soon the martial artist Heather had “crashed to the jungle floor”. Sometimes described as “a model and a bouncer” and an “all-action bombshell”, she was pitched by the format against the only other woman competitor, Carla, who faint-heartedly passed out during a tribal initiation ritual in which she was repeatedly stung by Amazonian huntsman ants. Heather had no sympathy for Carla, whom she considered “an arrogant cow, to be honest”.

A little later Nathan, a body builder amusingly described as, at 5ft 8in, the “third largest of the group”, collapsed “in a broken heap of violent convulsions” and was declared “broken”. For me, the spectacle of a man suffering a fit pushed proceedings the wrong side of seemly but I guess that's satire for you. For the survivors, the tasks got weirder and weirder: they went piranha fishing with their mouths and hunted for jungle cabbages that grew on top of trees so rare that it was “like looking for a needle in a boiling, green haystack”.

In a piece of genius casting, Five somehow persuaded Benedict Allen to front this black comedy. Allen used to be the nicest and least pretentious of television explorers, going to weird places with only a camel and mini-camera for company. To see a man who once professed a genuine interest in tribal life using the ant-torture ritual as if it were a round in The Generation Game was truly disconcerting, although not as unsettling as watching him flagellating “Iron Man Frazer, 44” with a bamboo whip and then being flagellated back. This was cutting-edge TV and it hurt.

Just occasionally I worried, however. What if we were not in Epping Forest but really in a “billion boiling acres of savage jungle”? What if the eight were not out-of-work actors but the mesomorphic thickoes they claimed? What if this were not a satire on reality telly but actually reality telly and Allen, a new father, was doing this for the money? Well then, I would have to withdraw the stars from my rating. That's right. All of them.

“Every mind has its breaking point,” said the show's mad commentator, “Chook Sibtain”. Mine reached its about ten minutes into Marcus du Sautoy's dazzling The Story of Maths. I just could not follow the calculations made by the ancient Egyptians to discover the volume of a truncated pyramid, how the Babylonians came up with quadratic equations and why the square root of 2 was an irrational number. Plato's Academy apparently had a sign above its door that read “Let no one who is ignorant of geometry enter here”. I would have got no farther.

Indeed the only Axiom of Euclid's I fully grasped was that a line can be drawn between any two points. Hopping from the Nile to Athens to Damascus, Du Sautoy explained every sum at a breakneck speed and with no concessions to the slower members of the class. Where was he when the high drives decreed the dumbing down of television? Yet his incomprehensibility was reassuring. One day, perhaps when I have retired, I'll pause the preview disc, and get something out of this series.

The Sci-Fi channel a little while ago made a brilliant purchase with Heroes, an import any channel would have been pleased to show first. It has made a pretty duff buy with Eli Stone in which Jonny Lee Miller in the title role gets God and/or a brain aneurism and hallucinates that George Michael is singing about faith in his sitting room. Stone is a hard-nosed lawyer whose heart by the end of last night's pilot was pure goo.

This was Ally McBeal meets Touched by an Angel and was not just witless but dated. Everyone now knows it wasn't the lawyers who were so bad. It was the investment bankers. Someone will surely be working on a warm-hearted Miracle on Wall Street format even as you read this.

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