Is there no format that can’t be made to work by hiring Mel Giedroyc to host it? With or without Sue Perkins alongside her, the presence of Giedroyc makes any kind of chat/quiz/contest caper watchable. You can hand her virtually nothing and she’ll turn it into something welcoming and cheekily funny. To demonstrate this beyond dispute, E4 has come up with No Strings Attached, a profoundly silly piece of flim-flam that is objectively awful, and with any other presenter would be unbearable.
The result of a commissioning process that can only be explained by severe staff/budget cuts, a complex blackmail situation or a rogue shipment of hallucinogenic cocaine, No Strings Attached proceeds as follows. A celebrity sits in an armchair opposite La Droyc. Each of them clutches a sheaf of paper, upon which is printed a piece of erotic fiction – written specially for the show by amateur writers who have previously churned out weird fanfic on the internet – where the celeb is the protagonist. As the famous-ish person reads aloud the story of their imaginary sexual escapades, Mel follows the text and reacts, encourages and guides. Lest this become visually stale, we cut regularly to puppets that are performing the actions described, in explicit furry detail.
