Gary Lineker’s Saturday night TV schedule has had a rejig.
For a quarter of a century, he was the king of the BBC’s late evening slot as Match of the Day’s affable host. Then came the impartiality rows, a plan for a phased goodbye to the Beeb, and a MOTD exit that arrived earlier than anticipated last summer, after Lineker apologised “unreservedly” for re-sharing an Instagram post about Zionism that included a depiction of a rat, historically an anti-Semitic slur (he was unaware of those “offensive references” at the time, he said in a statement).
The end of his relationship with the BBC, though, has freed him up for ITV primetime, not to mention giving him more time to admire the spoils of his The Rest Is… podcast empire, the work of his production company Goalhanger. He’ll also be teaming up with Richard Osman, co-host of The Rest is Entertainment, to present the Netflix darts show Beat Luke Littler, in which optimistic amateurs will go up against the world number one.
Before that, his first big post-MOTD foray into British telly is The Box, a celeb-y Saturday night game show based on a Norwegian format. Inevitably, in the run up to release, it’s been framed in the press as Lineker’s big, shiny way of sticking two fingers up at the Beeb, showing that his star power hasn’t been diminished by all their wrangling.
But I can’t help but feel that he should have bided his time a little longer when seeking a comeback project. Lineker is a likeable host and a very steady pair of hands, but even he cannot confidently steer a show as scattershot and downright confounding as this one.
open image in galleryFirst, the concept. Ten celebrities – presumably the ones whose agents didn’t quite put in the groundwork to get them a spot on The Celebrity Traitors – have each been encased in a yellow box. Among them are JB Gill from JLS, Jenny Ryan, aka “the governess” from The Chase, Joey Essex, who regretfully is still persisting with his 2011 TOWIE catchphrase “reem” and former Commons speaker John Bercow, clearly bitten by the reality TV big during his stint on the US version of The Traitors.
Over the course of the competition, these boxes will be dropped into random settings and scenarios, and the celebs will be released. Once they’re out of their daffodil-hued prisons, they must complete a challenge based on minimal instruction. The celebs, Lineker tells us, have “no idea where they are or what they should be doing”.
open image in galleryIt’s a pretty apt summary of this existential crisis of a show. The first episode sees Essex smashing up wooden crates to find some hexagonal tokens, Graeme Souness helping Good Morning Britain’s Ranvir Singh to traverse a body of water, and Sara Davies from Dragons’ Den faffing around in a pseudo-egg and spoon race. To what purpose, exactly? After watching two episodes, I still couldn’t tell you.
Gary, meanwhile, looks on and shakes his head benevolently, while presumably thanking God that he has ascended to a tier of celebrity in which you don’t have to endure a high stakes game of rock, paper, scissors with a YouTuber, or listen to Bercow’s interminable anecdotes about Brexit.
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At the end of every episode, one of the celebs gets booted out, but the format is so convoluted that it is very difficult to know or care exactly what is going on. It’s as if someone watched The Traitors and thought that the tasks, rather than the skulduggery, were the reason to tune in. Or decided to give Taskmasker a sense of humour transplant.
There’s no real narrative here, no stakes and very little sense of momentum. It’s not even particularly fun watching the stars go through minor humiliations, as each challenge feels slight and forgettable. What was Gary thinking? I’m not sure, but I look forward to Richard Osman and Marina Hyde’s analysis on The Rest Is Entertainment…