I always thought that if you subjected people to psychological or physical torture, then you have to go to prison. Isn’t it sort of one of the rules of torture? Drastically illegal, right on the edges of being a war crime, no? Yet Channel 4 has created a psychological punishment hangar and locked Love Island’s Chloe Burrows in there with Chris Eubank, and apparently this isn’t in direct convention of international law, or anything. As long as Danny Dyer’s on board to do the hosting, you can do anything you want to a celebrity if their agent can get their fee up high enough. Join us next summer for ITV’s inevitable Celebrity Soup, where they boil Joey Essex in a big pot of aromatics and serve him to unsuspecting guests at a Towie reunion show.
Before that, though, Scared of the Dark (daily from Sunday 16 April, 9pm). Eight of your finest reality TV show celebrities are driven to an enormous aircraft hangar where all light has been completely blotted out, and they have to stay there for a week. There are challenges, obviously. They have to find their items in the dark without being too afraid of an air horn. There is a lot of sudden, terrified screaming. They are served their food cut into neat cubes so they don’t really know what they are eating (a genius move – whoever had the idea that led to me watching Max George eat a cube of chicken in pitch darkness while going “yeah it’s beef”, please pat yourself on the back).
But mostly, as with all of these reality concept shows that thrive on middle scenes of celebrities talking, there is boredom. There is nothing to look at and it is impossible to read. They all sleep on a big circular bed in the middle of the room. Privacy is mostly erased and Chris Eubank keeps trying to say things that sound like wisdom. At this point, what is the real torture: being in the dark? Not having access to your family, your friends, your phone? Or having to listen to Chris Eubank try to compose a poem out loud while he chews a burrito-sized cigar that went out many hours ago?
It has been a good season for presenter casting (see: Winkleman, Claudia on The Traitors), and the addition of Danny Dyer here is a masterstroke: he is as baffled and delighted as you are that they are allowed to get away with this. I think we’ve had close to enough of very glossy, composed, too-loud TV hosts – have you ever seen someone talk in big gestures and simple syllables to an old person they think is deaf? That is quite often how I feel when Phillip Schofield starts explaining to me what’s coming up after the break – and Dyer adds a really enjoyable texture to this whole thing. He’s cackling and rubbing his hands with glee. He’s turning to camera and breaking the fourth wall. And – as a 7ft monster chases Donna Preston around a key-and-lock type challenge in pitch darkness – he announces: “What a fucking show this is.” You don’t get that with Vernon Kay, do you?
But deep down, Scared of the Dark is just Celebrity Big Brother with the lights off, so putting Chris Eubank in there was another move of high genius. Britain is very good at producing eccentrics who make for great clip TV but would be absolutely unbearable to spend an hour of your life with, and Eubank is arguably one of our best. He’s on rare annoying form here: pontificating constantly, talking in verse, and with this incredibly strange bee in his bonnet about on-air swearing that would be irritating enough to deal with even if you could see your hands in front of your face. Everyone is sick of him within seconds and they need to spend a whole week here, feeling along the walls to get to the bathroom and being chided every time they say “shit”. There is no way this ends well. No way this ends well at all. Which, obviously, is exactly what I want to see.
Scared of the Dark feels like throwback TV, then, to a time maybe 20 years ago – those heady early 00s! – when someone in a production company could make up a method of torture and a TV channel could make Gazza submit himself to it, and there was only ever one season and that was that. Is Scared of the Dark a reliable, repeatable television format? No, absolutely not. But is it a very interesting look at the outer reaches of the human psyche that were formerly only available to experimental doctors working during a time of war? Very much so. And it’s worth a repeat watch just to see which one of them breaks first and tries to kill Chris Eubank.
