WITH minimum effort but quite a lot of noise, the Thomas brothers appear to be taking over British television.
It started, innocently enough, with Ryan as Coronation Street’s Jason Grimshaw, but he has been followed by younger brothers Adam, via Emmerdale and Waterloo Road, and Scott, who finished in third place on the second series of Love Island with Kady McDermott.
Other reality shows, dramas, documentaries, the jungle and the last run of Love Island: All Stars, where Scott reprised his role as a spare part, have followed and it surely can’t be long before they’ve got their own chat show and are doing the ITV weather forecast.
Until then, the network has lumbered Ryan and Adam with their own prime-time game show, 99 To Beat, which is hard to watch without thinking British television is drowning in cheap, derivative, fame-chasing garbage.
The starting point for this one is Netflix’s Squid Game, minus the one crucial ingredient that might have kept me hooked until the end. Fatalities.
The principle is the same, though — 100 contestants must avoid coming last while performing a series of challenges, which, on the first show, included: hooking a £2 coin out of a piggy bank with a paperclip, balancing a half- empty can of pop on its side, keeping a ping-pong ball on a spoon balanced in your mouth and beating your head repeatedly against a wall until it brings down the entire studio.
Your only task here, if we accept that one of those is made up, is to give a f***.
A duty that was, I’m afraid, way beyond me.
It is certainly not an issue, though, for the Thomas brothers who are excited to the point of frenzy by everything they witness, without really having a capacity to do anything useful beyond reading the viewers’ minds with an accuracy that’s uncanny.
“Oh no, this is hard to watch,” yells Adam. “I can’t take much more of this,” screams back his brother.
“The desperation on their faces is killing me, Ry.”
It’s killing me as well because I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a huge number of game show competitors so desperate to get their faces on television, starting with a painfully familiar character called Edward.
It’s never a good sign when you recognise TV contestants, of course, but there’s no avoiding this nuisance, who was last seen styling himself as “Ted” on The 1% Club, where he was wearing a stupid hat to try to grab Lee Mack’s attention.
Before that, I saw him acting the ar*e and generally self-sabotaging on BBC quiz show Lightning, so I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when, with as much fanfare as he could muster, Edward was the first contestant eliminated from 99 To Beat.
I’m sure he isn’t the only one in that group with TV history either.
For it’s a sad fact of modern life that quiz and game shows, which used to be filled with shy, modest souls who just needed the money, are now overrun with semi-professional show-offs like Edward, who are driven by the belief we want to see more of their personality and that all this attention-seeking is actually leading somewhere.
On Channel 4’s Tempting Fortune, for instance, we currently have: Imani, who’s done Meet The Parents, Hugo (First Dates) and Tomasz, who’s on his eighth game show because he wants to: “Work in the entertainment industry.”
I blame Big Brother, obviously, but it has a knock-on effect.
It means I rarely want the contestants to win these days and so, ultimately, the whole point of watching these damn shows is completely destroyed in the process.
An entirely negative response to a relatively harmless enterprise, I realise, so I will say these seven significant words in defence of 99 To Beat and these seven words alone.
At least there aren’t any drag queens.
Random TV irritations
THIS City Is Ours – BBC One’s tribute to Netflix’s gangster series Kin – going off more like a cross between The Real Housewives Of Cheshire and Harry Enfield’s Scousers sketch.
Vanessa Feltz’s new Channel 5 daytime set, which appears to be sheltered accommodation for distressed Sindy dolls.
The Great Celebrity Bake Off featuring anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Maxine Peake.
And The Last Leg challenging itself to come up with a musicals-themed pun for the Labour Party and feebly offering us “Surprisingly Wicked” when We Will Rob You, Guys Are Dolls and The Book Of Moron were all freely available.
I’N SOLD ON SHOP COMEDY
PROOF arrived on BBC One that even the most forgettable series of The Apprentice can still be rescued by the home shopping channel challenge.
An annual delight that brings out the absolute worst in candidates, like gormless, stuttering, cack-handed Liam, who fancies himself as a great public speaker and TV presenter despite the fact his oratory skills make Harry Kane sound like Stephen Fry.
The fact his team still won was largely down to posh Max, on the other side, whose choice of products – facial spa, picnic blankets and an inflatable kayak – was a recipe for bankrupting the TJC channel.
And as for his gallery direction?
“Put it on your face, Amber-Rose. Come on, get it on your face. I’d really like you to put it to your face and just sniff it in, please.
“Please, put it on your face, Amber.”
His gallery direction will enter Apprentice folklore, alongside the unisex wolf jackets from series one, and you can savour every moment of it on BBC iPlayer.
Go on, sniff it in.
GREAT TV lies and delusions. Comic Relief, Davina McCall: “It’s been an amazing night, I’m sure you’ll all agree.”
The One Show, Clara Amfo: “With the Six Nations rugby well under way, excitement is building for the women’s World Cup.” (It’s really not.)
And Britain’s Got Talent, Simon Cowell to dancing German magician Jannick Holste: “You put on a great show, people in this country are really really gonna like you.”
Which was odd, because when I saw his act I thought Kirk from Coronation Street had started a sex trafficking operation out of Bremerhaven container port.
Unexpected morons in the bagging area
THE Finish Line, Roman Kemp: “What word links a sandwich chain and a New York train system?”
Marie: “Metro.”
Impossible, Rick Edwards: “Which mountaineer successfully climbed Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953?”
Flo: “Bear Grylls.”
And Impossible, where Rick Edwards offered B) T-Junction and C) G-String as possible answers to the question: “Which style of underwear shares its name with a component of a violin?”
But Kai still chose A): “Y-fronts.”
TV gold
THE Apprentice’s home shopping channel task.
Jaclyn, Laurie and Kate nailing the dynamics of every girls’ holiday, since package deals were invented, on The White Lotus.
Sky News confusing Scandinavian Airlines with an elite military regiment, in the wake of last week’s substation fire, when it announced “The Special Air Service has cancelled all 12 of its round trips to and from Heathrow.”
The final, moving episode of A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.
And actor Brian Cox, in Logan Roy mode, putting an end to three mirthless hours of a perfectly wretched Comic Relief with the two words every viewer had probably been muttering all night: “F*** off.”
Great sporting insights
TIM SHERWOOD: “A lot of managers are like Nathan Jones and that’s what sets him apart.”
Liam McLeod: “Scotland are forcing the Greeks into unforced errors.”
And Lee Hendrie: “In the window, United made the most least signings.”
(Compiled by Graham Wray and Peter Allan)
Lookalike of the week
Emailed in by Graham Cox and Trevor Jones.
