What's on TV: sink your teeth into Nat Geo Wild's Extreme Shark Fest
Almost as worrying as the prospect of being attacked by a shark is the return to our TV screens of Cake Boss for its seventh season, writes Mark Peters
While filthy rich football prima donnas were enjoying their summer breaks, after an exhausting season of hammy amateur gymnastics, Australian surfer Mick Fanning was in South Africa, fighting off a shark.
A video went viral of the three-time world champion surfer being circled by the great white and then punching the beast in the back. Incredibly, the only injury he sustained was a tiny scratch on his knuckle, but it could have ended so differently.
The waters of Jeffreys Bay, in the Eastern Cape, are some of the most shark-infested in the world; a surfer died in an attack there just two years ago.
Whether the experience will dent Fanning's passion for catching tubes, who knows? But he may want to avoid Nat Geo Wild's "Extreme Shark Fest", which begins with the first instalment of the second season of (tomorrow at 7.45pm). The episode investigates a spate of attacks in 2012 in Maui that caused so much panic the Hawaiian island's fragile, tourism-based economy was threatened.
On Tuesday, we are investigating the calm seas of Virginia and North Carolina, before travelling to Florida on Wednesday in to meet those who have lost limbs or loved ones to sharp-toothed predators.
Almost as worrying as hanging 10, or five, in the ocean again, is how an American reality series about a family-run cake shop in New Jersey has managed to return for a seventh season.
(TLC, Wednesday at 9pm) continues to follow the trials and tribulations of a sugary soprano who takes crazy confectionary requests from clients. Have our lives really become so vacuous that we need to fill them with hour upon hour of this pointless tedium?
Thankfully, Hong Kong has yet to be subjected to the show's three spin-off series: , and the imaginatively titled , wherein - like a sweet-toothed Gordon Ramsay - our protagonist tries to reverse the fortunes of a struggling bakery.
On a less frivolous note, Thursday marks 70 years since an American B-29 bomber dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The atrocity immediately killed an estimated 80,000 people and ushered in the nuclear age. (TVB Pearl, Friday, 9.30pm) documents that fateful day and explains how the subsequent black rain and atomic plague affected local people for decades.
It's pretty tough viewing: survivors' recollections of the horrific explosion and the atomic radiation that swept over the city are spliced with footage of an American pilot describing the "awesome" feeling of having completed his mission.
It's a stark reminder of the devastation caused by war; one side celebrates victory, even holding a Miss Atomic Bomb beauty contest, while the other suffers unimaginable horror. The lost sense of humanity is difficult to comprehend and the documentary closes with a poignant caption: "Today there are enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet."
Unfortunately, it needs only one power-mad nutter to bring about the end of the Earth, and it seems there are plenty of those around.
I'd rather take my chances with the sharks.
