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After his brilliantly machiavellian performance on The Celebrity Traitors, Jonathan Ross was destined to pop up on our screens again soon. Cue his big post-Traitors gig, hosting Channel 4’s new six-part “social experiment”. It is, explains Ross, a show about whether “a divided Britain [can] settle its differences”, by handcuffing two strangers from different walks of life together for 24 hours a day (including in the shower – ooh-er!) and seeing who can last the longest for a shot at a £100,000 prize. Really, though, it’s a show that manipulates those differences for views – a cheap throwback to Wife Swap at best and The Jeremy Kyle Show at worst.
Each pair has clearly been selected for maximum mutual discomfort. Jo is the owner of a plus-size fashion brand and Reuben thinks fat people are lazy; Tilly spends her spare time helping homeless people while millionaire Anthony reckons he’s an expert ’cos he’s been camping before; George is a former prison officer who believes learning is the best way to empower himself while Sir Ben is an aristocrat who – despite having an expensive education – still chooses to own a painting by Adolf Hitler.
After being introduced to one another on stage in awkward, Blind Date-style segments, the cuffs are slapped on, only to be removed – or rather extended with a chain, Ross explains – if they need to do a “number two”. How demeaning for everyone involved, not least Wossy.
Over the four episodes released for review, Ross isn’t really given much to do – he is a disembodied voice, introducing Handcuffed’s victims with trite labels like “a cleaner who can’t stop swearing” (Tilly) and “an alpha male” (Reuben). Not that they aren’t already judging each other – one handcuffee looks at their mate and announces: “I just knew he was a vegan.” It’s clear that the programme-makers are looking to manufacture drama – hence an extremely 00s sequence where George is led around Sir Ben’s country pile and shown, among other things, his Hitler painting, statues that appear to depict enslaved African people and pet dogs named after Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng.
Perhaps it would all be a bit more shocking if Sir Ben (full name Benjamin Slade) wasn’t already a tabloid mainstay who describes himself on Instagram as a self-publicist and put out a rather unforgettable casting call for a wife last year, barring “Guardian readers, Scorpios, drug users, alcoholics, Scots, under 5’6”, people from countries beginning with ‘I’ who have green in their flag and people from countries where they don’t wear overcoats in the winter”. (Bonus points, too, for anyone playing TV Toff Bingo who spotted Francis Fulford of The F***ing Fulfords around Sir Ben’s dinner table.) Surely, if you were looking to make a show about “settling differences”, you wouldn’t cast somebody this intolerant – but then was that ever really the point here? Once George declares “you upper classes are fucking barmy”, you know it won’t be long before one – or both – of them are smashing that safety glass for the key that opens their cuffs.
Maybe, deep down, there was an idea for a TV show that wasn’t completely abysmal, and one that had more respect for its participants. (“Fuck!” Reuben exclaims immediately on meeting Jo, who is, luckily, wearing ear defenders. “Training’s out the window, lifestyle out the window, healthy habits out the window … euurgh!”) But you get the sense that Handcuffed was designed to be a horrific experience, like a dramatised version of the Daily Mail comments section. Where, once, Channel 4’s edgy remit might have felt like enough to warrant airing horrible views from horrible people, we’re at a point in time where it doesn’t feel sufficient to point and gawp, and certainly not to platform racism and classism even further. It reminds me of another apparently revolutionary Channel 4 “social experiment”, Go Back to Where You Came From, from last year, where a bunch of people with “strong opinions” on immigration were taken to Syria and Somalia – one half to slag off the local population, the other half to get angry that people in their group were doing so.
There is, very occasionally, the sense that some of the participants have listened to one another long enough to get something out of it, and that all the shouting and eye-rolling might not have been entirely in vain. For the most part, though, Handcuffed is a crass show at a time when we deserve better. Not so much machiavellian, then, as just plain nasty.
