In Plato’s allegory of the cave, a group of people find themselves bound to the walls of a subterranean hangout. Ahead of them they see flickering shadows, caused by the distant fires of the sunlit world, but all else, for them, is darkness. Are these shadows reality, or just a pale facsimile? That was the question of two millennia ago: now it’s Channel 4’s turn to use darkness as an allegory for reality (or reality TV), with Scared in the Dark, a new five-part celebrity reality show told, not by Plato, but by Danny Dyer.
Scared of the Dark follows a group of eight celebrities – boxers Chris Eubank and Nicola Adams, singer Max George, Love Islander Chloe Burrows, ubiquitous TV person Scarlett Moffatt, actor Donna Preston, stand-up Chris McCausland and, well, Gazza – as they spend a week or so in the pitch black. “Located deep within a 146,000 sq ft hangar,” chummy host Danny Dyer observes with his trademark moon-eyed wonder, “this specially built living space is designed to shut out all light.” And it does. Immediately they are discombobulated, Eubanks swinging a walking stick like a divining rod, Burrows shrieking like she’s being tickled by Mr Blobby. Only McCausland – who is sight impaired – is relatively unconcerned by his surroundings.
I’m not sure the show’s creators had Plato in mind when they conceived of Scared of the Dark but it does have a primal, almost metaphorical, appeal. There are all the expected observations about the subversions of normal social structures, about overcoming phobias (“You have to put yourself in your fear to get over your fear,” Burrows announces, with a gulp) and learning to live a less materialistic life. But then there’s also the appeal for the viewers of seeing a group of celebrities slowly descending into madness. Eubank – a merchant of pseudo-philosophical nonsense like few others – becomes a far greater adversary than the darkness. “I feel like my sense of humour has been pummelled into submission by Chris Eubank,” McCausland observes dryly, as his insistence that the group refrain from swearing becomes an increasing source of friction.
Where Scared in the Dark is let down is, in fact, its follow through. The premise is terrific, the experiment original, but the bloated hour-long episodes require a strained itinerary. The use of tasks to unlock food and other treats becomes a distraction from the interpersonal dynamics – and the psychological torture of being locked in a room with Chris Eubank. BBC One’s hit The Traitors also suffered from this lack of courage: the nail-biting tension of the core deception was offset by needless GoApe-style chores that cannibalised half the runtime. And a week might’ve been quite a long time to keep Gazza in one place, but it doesn’t give you a huge amount of fat to trim in the edit.
But the casting is good: Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne teeters on the brink of leaving the show but rallies in a way that will leave viewers crying like it’s Italia 90, and effervescent (almost glow-in-the-dark) Burrows is surely bound for her own, lightly deranged, chat show. McCausland, meanwhile, proves a valiant adversary to Eubank who, even if he would be a nightmare to live with, is TV gold. Presumably casting executives in some darkened room at Channel 4 HQ are wondering now whether the format could be extended to a civilian version, perhaps over a whole summer. Whether that would violate their human rights is not clear – but the show does have celebrity psychologist Dr T (Tharaka Gunarathne) to make confident statements about how this is all positive immersion therapy, in a reassuring Scottish brogue.
With Scared of the Dark, Channel 4 may just have stumbled (like searching, through the darkness, for a toilet in a hotel room) on a winning formula. Here, the shadows on the wall don’t speak to the bondage of empiricism but tell of the beautiful world beyond rational television programming. Or, to put it in the less Platonic words of Mr Dyer: “What a f***ed show this is!”
