‘Oh dear, you look like an old person,’ said Girl, greeting me in the interval of the Bach choir’s St Matthew Passion at the Royal Festival Hall. I took her point. Moments earlier I had been lamenting to the Fawn: ‘It seems like only yesterday when I had lovely long hair and you rode pillion to rock gigs on my Guzzi.’ And now here we were surrounded by music lovers of a noticeably certain age and not feeling at all out of place.
Still, it could be worse. At least I’m not Jonathan Ross. In my youth Wossie was a sort of role model. I coveted his fame, his cheeky chappy banter, his Jean Paul Gaultier suits. What could possibly be more delightful a career than being on TV, talking to movie stars and being paid lots of money for it? What I hadn’t realised then, as I do now, is that there’s a terrible price to be paid for signing that TV-celebrity pact. You are never permitted a dignified retreat from the limelight. As Exhibit A, I present: Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing.
Ross didn’t need to do it. He still – though you may not be aware of it – has his own chat show on ITV. But perhaps he liked the concept or he liked the money or Mephistopheles yet again called in his debts. Whatever, Handcuffed is a dog and in one fell swoop Ross (what has he done to his hair by the way?) has squandered any late-career credibility that he may have gained after his allegedly (I didn’t watch it) brilliantly Machiavellian performance on Celebrity Traitors.
The show is billed as a ‘social experiment’ but really it’s just another crass reality game show doing the usual crass reality-show thing of yoking together disparate individuals in the hope that they will be entertainingly horrible to one another. Here the yoking is taken literally with a pair of handcuffs that the bickering pairs must keep on longer than their rivals if they are to win the £100,000 endurance prize.
But how do they go to the loo? How do they sleep at night? These are the questions we are of course encouraged to ask. And the programme satisfies this prurience by showing one awkward couple – a gay millionaire Rolls-Royce collector fed by a private chef and an East End cleaning lady-cum-barmaid – entering a shower together naked. In another scene an annoying woman who can’t stop talking has her ‘number two’ by having her handcuffs fitted by the TV crew with an extra long chain that apparently is the concession that contestants have been granted to preserve their modesty.
But I don’t believe any of it. Just because they showed it happening in those two scenes doesn’t mean it happened throughout. Perhaps I am wrong – and we will never know for certain because the contestants will all have signed NDAs and TV people never tell the truth – but I suspect that the handcuff rules were far laxer than the programme pretends.
Almost all TV involves relentless fakery but nothing (apart from maybe the news) is quite so mendacious as reality TV. You could see this in the painfully contrived spats between Jo (lesbian owner of a fashion brand for the grossly overweight) and Reuben, a lean, aggressively heterosexual fitness freak. OK, so they were chalk and cheese but I still suspect that a lot of the clashes were script-directed because projects of this kind can’t afford the luxury of hanging around waiting for the amateur talent to say something interesting. When Jo’s fat colleague says, ‘We did go to the gym once’, and Reuben replies, ‘A vending machine?’, it doesn’t ring true. Strained politeness not rudeness is the English way.
Nor did I buy the encounter between Sir Benjamin Slade, Bt and a former prison officer called George. Slade, it is true, is a media-tart shock jock who specialises in playing eccentric toffs, and working-class George clearly has a massive chip on his shoulder. But when George chose to lecture Slade about how wrong it was to have a picture painted by the young Adolf Hitler on his walls, it felt to me less like an honest response than an objection he had been asked to make by the director. Ditto the scene at dinner where George upsets everyone by outrageously declaring that the NHS is Britain’s greatest achievement. No one actually believes this in real life, surely?
That particular pairing came to an abrupt end not long after dinner when a possibly over-refreshed Sir Ben decided to get shirty about people in his own house telling him what he could and couldn’t do. Rather than use the key provided by the show, Sir Ben got one of his staff to sever the cuffs with a bolt cutter. The impression given was that this was a genuinely unscripted moment. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
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