UNLESS I was dreaming, last night Falklands veteran Simon Weston and his wife Lucy were gyrating to the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love underneath a bungee-jumping crane.
Over 140ft above them, Denise Welch and husband Lincoln Townley were singing along, between last words of encouragement.
Then, with a final “3-2-1”, they leapt into the void, where they twanged and wriggled for a deathly minute, until Denise asked plaintively: “How can anyone think that’s fun?”
How indeed.
The question that hangs over BBC1’s Unbreakable, a show which, if you can ever imagine such a thing needed to exist, is a six-part outward bound version of All Star Mr & Mrs.
That’s not how it’s sold to us, obviously.
According to host Rob Beckett, who’s chaperoned by relationship expert Maria McErlane and psychologist Anjula Mutanda, just in case fun breaks out: “This is the show that puts celebrity relationships under the microscope, via a series of challenges.”
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To this grisly end they’ve gathered, along with their plus ones: Simon, Denise, Shanaze Reade, Charlie Mullins and comedian Stephen Bailey, who’s the bloke you get if you can’t get Tom Allen, who’s the bloke you get if you can’t get Joe Lycett, who’s the bloke you get if you can’t get Alan Carr, who’s the bloke you get if . . .
You get the point. They didn’t get a lot of people. And you can understand the reluctance, given that if they really wanted to see who has the most solid relationship, they’d just check the biogs, where they’d find Simon and Lucy have been together 32 years, Charlie and his other half met eight months ago.
But that would be too logical and easy, so instead BBC1 devised a series of weird, Taskmaster-lite challenges, then mollycoddled the life out of them by declaring the bonus bungee-jumping points would go to Stephen and partner Rich, who were too scared to jump yet deserved them anyway: “As they hadn’t bowed to peer group pressure.”
If that wasn’t enough to kill the entertainment, however, someone has also ensured these challenges proceed at the glacial pace of two an hour, which means there’s so much down-time a bird actually s**t on Lincoln Townley’s head during the first episode and they left it in the final edit.
In terms of well-aimed criticism, that’s as good as it ever gets.
If you want to know why it was such a perfectly judged crap though, you must force yourself to watch the celebs declare undying love for their partner to a tinkling piano accompaniment, or spill their guts to Anjula about poverty, homophobia, mental illness, ADHD and a whole range of other important issues which, contrary to popular TV belief, are diluted, not enhanced, by their ceaseless repetition.
Just to grind the viewers’ gears a little more, these confessionals don’t take place inside a vast country mansion. Oh no no no.
It’s what Anjula and every other busybody in Britain calls “a safe space”. As you can probably imagine then, it’s hard to shine in such clinical circumstances.
The one surprising thing about Unbreakable though is that it seems to have unearthed a proper reality TV star in the unnaturally taut features of 69-year-old Charlie Mullins, who glories in his own description, “the world’s most famous plumber”.
Charlie’s in rather too much of a hurry to let us all know his own plumbing’s also still in working order and the “lucky” beneficiary is 32-year-old “recording artist” girlfriend RaRa, who treated us all to a song in episode one.
Man, the noise. If you heard groans like that coming from one of your supporting walls, you’d call out Charlie to tighten the pipe mounts.
In a heartbeat though, I’d probably have both of them on the next plane to the Australian jungle, or any other celeb- led format more impressive than Unbreakable, a series which confirms two depressing truths about television.
The first is the reason TV brings back so many old ideas, like Big Brother, Gladiators, The Big Breakfast, is that its new ones are mostly rubbish.
The second is the BBC is now so thoroughly compromised and poisoned by the cult of woke, it’s institutionally incapable of having fun, or anything even approaching the idea.
We all deserve better, as does Charlie Mullins. But in the meantime, Unbreakable’s format demands the world’s most famous plumber must bellow directions at his blindfolded girlfriend RaRa down a megaphone, while she attempts to find a flag inside “the Love Labyrinth”.
Unless I dreamed that bit as well.
TIPPING POINT, Ben Shephard: The Liverpudlian musician and Beatles member born James McCartney is better known by what first name?”
Freddie: “John.”
Ben Shephard: “A competition where only two teams have a chance of winning is called a two horse…?”
Alexandra: “Pony.”
Ben Shephard: “Often kept as a pet, the Tosa Inu is a large breed of what animal?”
Pam: “Bear.”
ITV’s Masked Dancer reaching the end of its useful existence with the revelation Candlestick is: “Bake Off star . . . Liam Charles”. (WHO?)
Soccer Saturday’s four virtue-signalling experts wearing a total of 12 issue-driven badges.
Martin Lewis adopting his “tortured genius at work” pose on Good Morning Britain.
Married At First Sight pox Thomas achieving the very rare distinction of being too toxic for reality television.
And the equally malignant Alastair Campbell admonishing C4’s Make Me Prime Minister contestants, at the end of their crisis management task, for being “snarky and snide” and “landing a missile in another country”. ’Cos that’s Alastair’s job.
ON Saturday night’s Strictly Come Dancing, BBC1’s woke cult collided head-on with the show’s viewers and the resulting thud could be heard all over Britain.
Eventual casualties were the horribly mismatched pairing of Richie Anderson and Giovanni Pernice, who would have been much better suited to one of the women and clearly wasn’t too distraught at being eliminated.
And why would he be?
The show, after all, spent the first decade and a half of its life reminding us that “Dance is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire”, before deciding it was actually about “diversity”, “inclusion” and all sorts of other issues already covered by a thousand different BBC shows.
Fortunately enough for non-voters, Strictly’s viewers are a lot more honest than all those precious souls who claimed they were “shocked” by the decision and they hate right-on political manipulation almost as much as they love the honest endeavour and comedy of Tony Adams, whose third-round samba managed to be technically useless and artistically brilliant at exactly the same time.
If you saw it from the start, you’ll have known this was a movie week Full Monty tribute.
If you joined it half way through his striptease, you probably thought Abel Ferrara had recast Officer Dibble from Top Cat as Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant.
But it was, as Anton du Beke suggested, the very essence of Strictly, although a knackered Tony admitted afterwards: “I’ve gone from kind of ‘What the hell’s kind of going on?’ then, second week, kind of ‘How do I get out of it?’
“Then I kind of, kind of, just kind of went for it.”
And you know what? I really kind of like him.
A SUBJECT now that requires empathy, understanding, a nuanced response and an overwhelming sense of humanity from us ALL.
Jacqueline Jossa: Me And Periods: “Maybe I’m just really dramatic about it, need to pull myself together and get a grip?”
Yes. Next?
THIS week’s winner is Liz Truss and the mad, shouty woman who does the interrogations on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins.
Sent in by Gareth R via email.
DION DUBLIN: “Haaland went one-on-one with two players either side of him.”
Clinton Morrison: “Gerrard threw his hands in his head.”
Tim Sherwood: “The manager’s staying, whether he is or he isn’t.”
(Compiled by Graham Wray)
THE Abbott and Costello charm of Paul Whitehouse’s relationship with Bob Mortimer on BBC2’s Gone Fishing.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s outstanding performance as Richie on The Bear (Disney+).
Dianne Buswell’s irresistible Flash Bang Wallop choreography.
And brilliant Bill Maher’s Unified Theory Of Wokeness, on Real Time, pointing out: “Throughout history, slavery’s been the rule, not the exception.
“From the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, British, early Americans, all the way through to R Kelly.”
Do yourself a favour and watch it on YouTube.
GREAT TV lies and delusions of the month. Married At First Sight: “Hi MAFS fans, Kwame here. Miss me? Of course you do.”
Strictly Come Dancing, Claudia Winkleman: “Coming up, Matt Goss does a samba dressed as John Travolta and it’s really good.”
Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, Ferne McCann, left: “People see me as a reality star and it bugs me when they say I have no talent.”
Then you try saying “The multi-talented Ferne McCann” with a straight face.
TV quiz. What was Frozen Planet II narrator Sir David Attenborough talking about on Sunday night when he said: “They’ve remained in a state of suspended animation ever since last autumn. Their hearts have stopped beating, only their brains remain active, and then only very, very faintly”?
A) The Painted Turtle.
B) The Lapland Bumble Bee.
C) The 1922 Committee of the Conservative Party.
GREAT TV mysteries: Why hasn’t Injury Lawyers 4 U moved its headquarters to Walford?
Where is the secret army of Naga Munchetty fans hiding?
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How come Married At First Sight participants are always bloody ironing?
And, more to the point, how many senior BBC executives and producers have been sacked for destroying A Question Of Sport?
My guess is none.
