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.
The chaining together of these polar-opposite personalities is ostensibly a sort of test of empathy – maybe, the series posits, they can find some shared humanity underneath their differences. You know the shtick: “Sure, I’m the reason that you can’t afford to own a home, but didn’t you know we have a mutual love of folk music and fettuccine?” Alas, in most cases, this is a non-starter. It becomes clear quite early on that the show offers nothing more than flimsy rope bridges to reconcile the yawning schisms of British politics and culture wars. One pair doesn’t even reach the 13-hour mark: Sir Benjamin Slade, referred to faux-chummily as “Sir Ben”, strops and takes bolt-cutters to the cuffs after his combative partner quarrels with him and his wealthy, Nigel Farage-loving friends. Several other pairings end just as inauspiciously – nothing is learnt, or achieved. (Sometimes, the handcuffs are unlocked out of spite: the only thing sweeter than winning thousands of pounds may be your enemy not winning it.)
The spectre of Reform hangs over Handcuffed, in ways both serious and throwaway (one of Sir Ben’s pets is named Nigel; others are named things like Boris and Kwasi). One woman describes herself as the “female Nigel Farage” – a horrifying hypothetical, even if the comparison seems ultimately ill-earned. I suppose there’s something admirable in this series’ willingness to admit just how inextricable the political and personal really are. But it creates a dynamic that’s fatally lopsided. In some of the pairings, we have one party who is entirely relatable and unobjectionable, tethered to someone who harbours a deep disrespect for their entire moral framework. It becomes less a case of “meeting in the middle” than one person vainly trying to coax the other towards compassion.
Given the inherent comedy of its premise – the dysfunctional handcuffing conceit has been used in everything from M*A*S*H to The Simpsons toI Love Lucy – it’s criminal just how unamusing this series manages to be. If nothing else, Handcuffed is an instructive look at the fallacies of modern British politics: the sight of a room full of upper-class relics loudly extolling the charisma of Farage ought to rubbish any notion that Reform is a party for working people. But it’s not telling us anything we don’t already know. More often than not, biases are ossified, and the gulfs between people have seldom seemed starker. If Handcuffed is indeed an experiment – and not just a cheap excuse for TV sensationalism – then it is surely a failed one.
