Friday 7 October 2022 01:58 AM CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV trends now
Unbreakable
Rating: *
Jon Richardson: Take My Mother-In-Law
Rating: **
Blame the pandemic, blame the moral degeneration of the Western world, but some truly awful telly has been dumped on our screens this year.
In a schedule notable for low points, tractor racing on BBC3 in The Fast And The Farmer-ish was especially bad. At the other end of the budget, Amazon spent nearly a billion ruining Lord Of The Rings.
I thought no celebrity gameshow could possibly be worse than Freeze The Fear, where Holly Willoughby and Lee Mack stood watching TV personalities of microscopic fame take cold showers or jump into ice-cold lakes.
Serves me right for being complacent. Unbreakable (BBC1) is even more boring, meaningless, ill-conceived and excruciating — and has even less well-known ‘celebs’.
Just in case it wasn’t all terrible enough, host Rob Beckett is howling with fake laughter all the way through. The games are a cut-price It’s A Knockout tribute act. Rob’s young so he might not realise, but this isn’t high praise. The world has wiped its memory of that show for many good reasons
How could anyone imagine we want to see retired plumber Charlie Mullins, 69, and his girlfriend of eight months, 31-year-old Rara, recite the lyrics of a romantic ballad before bungee jumping off a crane?
Why has even the smallest fraction of the licence fee been wasted on making Denise Welch from Loose Women and her husband shuffle on their backsides along a floating pontoon?
Do you have a clue who Stephen Bailey is, or Shanaze Reade? One’s a stand-up comedian and the other (I’m not making this up) finished sixth in the BMX cycle event at the 2012 London Olympics. Stephen and Shanaze are both in same-sex relationships. Does that make you feel more interested in them, or do you not give the tiniest hoot?
This gameshow is so slow, it took 40 minutes
