MONDAY VIEWING
It's a white-knuckle exercise in tension, best viewed from the safety of the family couch, and makes for a nifty diversion on an otherwise lazy TV summer night.
If you can get past the loud background music (the kind that says you're too dumb to get what's happening on the screen without prompting) to get into Bomb Hunters, you'll meet the guys, and occasional gal, who make it their life's work to find, disarm and/or detonate thousands of unexploded bombs and other ordinance at abandoned military facilities and testing grounds across remote regions of Canada.
And, in some cases, not so remote.
"It's a bloody mess, is what it is," one bomb disposal expert says, at Bomb Hunters' outset.
Tonight's opener cuts back and forth between two elite teams of retired and still active explosives experts as they take on a day's work where, quite literally, every day on the job could be their last.
Not every bomb has to be disarmed. As former Canadian Forces combat engineer Ray Tremblay, owner and team leader of Quebec-based Mine/EOD Inc. - the EOD stands for "explosive ordinance disposal" - explained in an interview last week with Postmedia News, "There is no defusing process. We just blow 'em up."
Tremblay, former soldier, combat diver and munitions expert, is shown scouring Quebec's Lac Saint-Pierre, northeast of Montreal, where more than 300,000 munitions were dropped, tested and detonated during the Cold War. The mathematical calculus of the 1950s and '60s has created an unfortunate side effect today: For every 25 explosives fired, one failed, which means - theoretically - that 3,000 unexploded devices are just sitting there, waiting to go off. It's not a job for people with short fuses.
Also featured in the opener are bomb disposal experts from a New Brunswick firm of consulting engineers and scientists, as they scour a construction site just metres away from a busy road, a kids' play area and a motel.
Bomb Hunters is like The English Patient for the MTV generation.
10 p.m., History
Three to see
- The work may not be as life-threatening but it's no less difficult in Great Lake Warriors, another homegrown docuseries about blue-collar folks with hazardous jobs.
9 p.m., History
- San Diego's Keating Hotel, a 35-room boutique in the city's heritage district, has a character and atmosphere all its own - until Gordon Ramsay checks in on Hotel Hell.
8 p.m., Global, Fox
- Chef Ramsay is back an hour later on Hell's Kitchen, giving the remaining four contestants a chance to shine - or not.
9 p.m., Citytv, Fox
