Yahoo Finance Gladiators, BBC One, review: brash, tacky, fun – a revival worth waiting for
Never has a show said “ITV” like Gladiators. It was brash, unpretentious and good fun. It took the panto thrills of Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, added shiny Lycra and industrial amounts of hairspray, and delivered top entertainment on Saturday nights by letting the show’s resident beefcakes pummel members of the public with giant cotton buds.
It ended 23 years ago yet I can still remember Jet, Hunter, Wolf and co. In fact, I can still remember Eunice Huthart, a McDonald’s floor manager who won it in 1994. Happy days.
Now the show has been resurrected in all its tacky glory – by the BBC. This does somewhat make a mockery of the corporation’s claim to produce “distinctive content” because it still looks 100 per cent ITV, especially with ITV stalwart Bradley Walsh as presenter alongside his son, Barney.
Now, if you were a cynic, you would take this as a sign that the BBC’s entertainment division is so bereft of original ideas that it’s reduced to dredging up a 30-year-old ITV show.
But, you know what? Children are not cynics. Children are not familiar with the 1990s version. Children do not differentiate between the 1990s and the Stone Age. And it is those children who will love Gladiators, and you – parents, grandparents – will watch it with them, and will be glad to have a show that all generations of a family can watch together. Albeit without Ulrika Jonsson to perk up the viewing experience for the dads.
Even if you don’t have an eight-year-old, you may derive pleasure from watching a programme in which a man going by the name of Legend tries to keep a straight face while describing himself as “a cross between Gandhi and David Hasselhoff”.
Almost everything is the same as before. The action takes place in an arena (Sheffield this time), where a crowd high on fizzy drinks waves foam fingers to the tune of Another One Bites the Dust. The producers have preserved all the best games – Duel, Hang Tough, the Eliminator-complete-with-Travelator – plus the theme tune and the red/blue colour palette.
The new Gladiators, meanwhile, are a bunch of giants who look as if they breakfast on protein shakes and whole chickens (the men), and could get you in an arm lock before you’ve got time to say: “Contenders, ready?” (the women). There are a lot of them and the ones who stand out are the baddies: Legend, as previously mentioned, and Viper, who has elected to convey his villain status through the medium of glowering silence.
Former Premier League referee Mark Clattenburg is the man blowing the whistle, with Guy Mowbray as commentator. As for the presenters? Old pro Walsh is great. Next to him, Barney is a lightweight. He looks nervous, and so he should, because this is prime-time Saturday night and he’s been given the gig on account of his famous dad. But it shouldn’t matter too much; John Fashanu and Jeremy Guscott didn’t exactly set the screen alight when co-hosting with Ulrika.
Expect more 1990s revivals like this one. We’ve already had Changing Rooms (Channel 4), Blind Date and Challenge Anneka (Channel 5). Mr Blobby’s agent must jump every time the phone rings. But was it a golden era for entertainment shows, or did we just watch them because streaming services and social media hadn’t been invented yet?
There was nothing else like Gladiators when it was originally broadcast. Since then we’ve had Ninja Warrior, which used the obstacle course template. Love Island has normalised the sight of musclebound men with ice-white teeth. Yet Gladiators remains a strong format thanks to the David vs Goliath element.
And for those of a certain age, there’s a nostalgia attached. Or, as Bradley puts it in the launch episode: “This comes from an era when you were judged not on how well you could bake, or how you fared eating the private parts of a kangaroo, but how long you could stand on a podium whilst being battered around the bonce by a bloke called Rhino wielding a fluffy lollipop. Better times in many ways.”
Gladiators is on BBC One on Saturday 13 January at 5.50pm
