Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing is, says presenter Jonathan Ross, a “survival show – where you have to survive someone else”. Taking its cues, perhaps, from the classic prisoners-on-the-run movie The Defiant Ones, Channel 4’s new series sees people tethered to their ideological opposites in a feat of endurance: the pair who stay cuffed together the longest win £100,000.
If the premise has the shape of a social experiment, then the execution renders Handcuffed little more than an exercise in unedifying provocation. The pairings make Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau’s Odd Couple look like a match made in heaven: we have a fusty right-wing aristocrat cuffed to a working-class ex-prison warden; a self-described “traditional homemaker” and “massive prude” cuffed to a towering, tattooed gay porn star; a Green Party councillor and a Reform supporter; a bar worker and a multimillionaire; a queer feminist and a manosphere-immersed “alpha male” – the sort of man for whom “gym” is a verb.
