![]() ![]() Over to BBC One for Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary, and the first of three hour-long specials before the 15th doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, takes over on Christmas Day. Move over The Traitors, there’s some wild new gameshow crack in town. It would have been nice to see more Korean players, and the drama’s sense of capitalist satire is muted here, but after banging through eight of the episodes, I have to declare myself hooked. The clawing desperation to win puts all of human nature on display: self-interest, venality and subterfuge, but also teamwork, loyalty and integrity. This is Squid Game: The Challenge’s main selling point: you don’t know what’s going to happen, or who’s going next. Contestants are generally eliminated in mass batches (each “death” adding $10,000 to a giant Perspex pig hung on the ceiling). As are many games (Red Light, Green Light with a giant doll honeycomb cookies, etc), only no one actually dies at the end of them. It’s filmed in the UK, and the striking decor and ambience are the same as the original (red-suited squids bunk beds orchestral music). Riffing off the cult show’s iconography, there are 456 tracksuit-clad, English-speaking real-life contestants (mostly from the US and Europe), battling to win an absurd, unprecedented $4.56m (£3.65m). Netflix’s 10-part Squid Game: The Challenge, the gameshow based on the mega-hit South Korean drama, could have been a tacky franchise cash-in, but it’s a beautifully executed blast. Squid Game: The Challenge: ‘all of human nature on display’. Is Britain finally getting over its toxic addiction to “big characters”? For those boycotting the show because of him, it’s karmic justice. Other campmates include Britney Spears’s shell-shocked sister, Jamie Lynn (“Holy s-word, what have I done?”), but it’s Farage who’s bombing the most, coming over as sly, controlled, even mildly depressing. In his pre-jungle spiel, Farage announced: “You’re going to find the real me,” but he could have added: “if you can be razzed to look.” Later, declaring himself “gutted” about the non-trial to the carefully civil Guardian restaurant critic Grace Dent, he observed: “If you do the challenges, it’s 25% of the air time”. What does a chap have to do to get some negative attention?Īnt and Dec now have panic fluttering in their eyes. All this after Farage spilled insipid political tea (Boris Johnson: “surprisingly introverted”), exposed his buttocks in a jungle shower, contemplated his chances of becoming Tory leader (“Never say never!”) and debated Brexit with an unimpressed Fred Sirieix from First Dates. While no one is nostalgic for last year’s antihero-signing – the pandemic health minister Matt “I fell in love” Hancock – he didn’t haemorrhage viewers.Īfter Farage participated in the first bush tucker trial (munching on camel anus pizza), viewers, tellingly, didn’t vote for him to do the second trial (star signings are usually made to do all the early trials). The first edition was 2.2 million down from the 2022 opener. ITV reportedly splurged a record £1.5m signing the GB News presenter, but viewing figures are not looking good.
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