If you're in the former camp, you can vicariously share the thrills as the Canadian adman-cum Gruen regular-cum adventurer learns to become a Mixed Martial Arts fighter, to stalk prey with a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Africa, to struggle through boot camp with the French Foreign Legion in the Amazon and to climb the Himalayas like a local.

And if you're a member of the Anti Todd Sampson Brigade, things might be even better, because you also get to see him being pummelled mercilessly in pursuit of said experiences.

Is there a German word for revelling in the misery of our host? Toddenfreude, perhaps?

In last week's first of six episodes, Sampson – who claims never to have been in a fight in his life – immersed himself in the world of Mixed Martial Arts (aka cage fighting). He went deep into Walter White territory, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he spent two weeks at a specialist gym in preparation for his first challenge: to survive one round in a professional bout.

"Before I teach you how to strike and throw punches, I want to first find out how well you can take punches," his trainer, Mike Winkeljohn, said.

"From him," a terrified Sampson asked, looking at the hulking form of middleweight fighter Phil Hawes.

"Ah, yes. Yes, from him."

It was round one to the Anti-Todds, as our hero cowered in the corner, flinching at every half-hearted blow from Hawes. Not so much Breaking Bad as breaking out in a cold sweat. 

Todd Sampson's foray into extreme adventure keeps us abreast of ... well, mostly Todd Sampson.

Of course, this show is all about the journey from no-hoper to … well, not-quite-no-hoper, and eventually Sampson found his way to the MMA version of manliness. "I'm not an aggressive or violent person," he confided after landing his first punch, "but it feels good to hit something." Make of that what you will.

This week, he's in Tanzania, in the Rift Valley with the Hadza people, several hundred of whom still live the traditional hunter-gatherer lives of their (and our) ancient ancestors.

He spends a week with them, learning to hunt for food with a bow and arrows, the tips of which have been coated in a poisonous paste, and he's terrified he will accidentally stab himself in the leg. "There's no cure for this," he says, "so it would just be a matter of time before I die."

Hunting with the Hadza tribe, Sampson is terrified of feeling a prick. 

Sorry to disappoint you, Anti-Todds. He doesn't. But after 26 years without meat, he does look decidedly queasy when it comes time to eat the prey he's helped  to catch and kill (if tagging along with a noisy camera crew in tow counts as helping, that is).

There's a wafer-thin academic veneer to all this: the anatomical graphics and rapid-fire explanatory text; the quest to see what we can "learn" from these extremes of behaviour so that we might apply them in everyday life (you too can kickbox your way through the supermarket, yah!). But none of that can hide the fact this is really just a Boys Own Adventure dressed up as science.

Still, mingling with the scent of Bear Grylls is a faint whiff of An Idiot Abroad, with Sampson cast as the bumbling naif. But where Karl Pilkington's masochism knows no bounds – he is willing to make himself not just the butt of the joke, but the enormous oversized flapping-in-the-wind backside of it – Sampson has way too much self-regard (or dignity) for that.

Karl Pilkington, centre, suffers yet another indignity at the hands of Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais in An Idiot Abroad.

In the end it doesn't feel like what's at stake here is what we might gain from these experiences, but rather what Todd Sampson can. He remains torn between letting us see how little he knows and proving how much he has learnt.

As an exercise in personal growth that's great for him. But I suspect it might just leave some viewers feeling a little hacked off.

Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin