Guy Martin: Arctic Warrior - This military recruiting ad hides interesting theme beneath the blokey banter

On TV shows in the last 12 or 13 years, the truck mechanic from Grimsby has already built boats and tractors, done various things with a Lancaster bomber and visited countries across the world, including China, Colombia and Russia.

His latest mission Guy Martin: Arctic Warrior (Channel 4, Weds/Thurs, 9pm) was also concerned with the Russian bear, albeit indirectly.

Guy joined a detachment of Royal Marines at their arctic warfare training camp in the snowy vastness of the far north of Norway, Camp Viking.

There he joined in with all sorts of stuff – from full immersion in icy water to calling in an airstrike to driving a load of different vehicles.

There was a sense that he quite enjoyed all the marching and the shooting and the general camaraderie of being out in the field, but the biggest smile on his face came when he joined Royal Marine mechanics in the garage to replace a gearbox.

There he could – literally – get his hands dirty and muck about with an engine, something he has been doing all his life; so happy was he that you feel he has Castrol GTX running through his veins instead of the blood most of us make do with.

Much of Guy Martin: Arctic Warrior came across as a recruiting ad for a Royal Marine, showing off all the hardware they use, the laughs you can have with your fellow Green Berets – it even went to great pains to show us the bar at Camp Viking.

There – despite being well inside the Arctic circle – you can slump on a sofa and watch a match on the big screen, with beer at just £2 a pint.

Narrated by Shaun Dooley, the same gravel-gargling actor who does the voiceover for SAS: Who Dares Wins, we were told that “Guy came to Norway to see if he had what it takes to be an Arctic Marine”, but you had to wonder what the viewer got out of it.

Beyond a sudden feeling of cold and a desire to stand in front of a roaring fire, there were some interesting nuggets hidden behind the hardware and assault rifles.

Looming large across the Marines and their camp was the shadow of Russia, a mere 200 miles away and all too keen to make its presence felt in the region.

For a start, it seems the Camp Viking is acquired its name because a camp is temporary. Calling it a base would have indicated permanence, which would have had Russia beginning to twitch.

Then there's the rich resources hidden beneath the ice, which Guy told us amounted to an estimated £30 trillion worth of gold, gas and more.

And then there's the trade routes. With the help of a blow-up globe, Guy told us how shipping containers from China to Europe via the Arctic has all sorts of benefits, compared to the conventional route past Malaysia, India and through the Suez Canal.

Did you know, for example, that the canal carries a £300,000 toll? It makes the furore over Runcorn's Mersey Gateway look a bit puny in comparison.

And it takes two weeks off the travel time and saves three million litres of fuel per boat.

These precision strikes of information made you wish there was more on the situation in the Arctic Circle, because much of it painted a terrifying picture of how close we might actually be to war in the permanent winter.

As it was, Guy soon went back to doing power-slides in a tracked vehicle, the tablespoon full of sugar to make the drops of geo-political medicine go down.