Celebrity Squares has had a facelift, but do its star names deserve better?
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Version 0 of 1. A common social embarrassment in California, it’s reported, is meeting a former friend after a long gap and failing to recognise them because they’ve had so much cosmetic surgery. Such confusion is unlikely to happen when bumping into a revived and enhanced TV show from back in the day – such as Celebrity Squares (Wednesday, 8pm), returning to ITV after two decades – because, like most lifted old formats, it really hasn’t had very much work done. However, the risk of a terribly embarrassing encounter still remains, not because our old acquaintance doesn’t look like it used to, but because it does. Younger viewers have the possibility of meeting the series for the first time, unaware that it was adapted from an American format called Hollywood Squares – in which guessing whether a selected celebrity has answered a question correctly gains a contestant a nought or a cross on a grid – and ran on British TV from 1975-79 and 1993-97, presented by Bob Monkhouse. For the revival, the late comedian has been replaced as host by Warwick Davis, whose participation in what Dame Edna Everage (a guest in the second episode) cheekily calls a “comparatively downmarket show” makes his broadcasting portfolio unusually broad: Davis has previously played the lead in the Stephen Merchant-Ricky Gervais comedy Life’s Too Short and, later this autumn, adds to Celebrity Squares a second format-comeback, when the first film in the revived BBC2 documentary series Modern Times follows his attempts to set up a theatre group for short actors. Both that doc and the sitcom draw specific attention to Davis’s dwarfism and, as there is a long tradition in TV entertainment formats of teasing and ragging the presenter, there is clearly a dilemma for the guests and producers, especially in a culture in which being judged to have offended a sensitivity can induce media and social-media hysteria. Davis has a flight of spangled steps from which he sometimes addresses the audience, but the camera-angles are candid about the unusual height-differentials revealed during standing interviews with contestants. Characteristically, it is Barry Humphries, who is able to use the mask of Dame Edna, who stoops to height jokes, pretending to mistake Davis for her old friend “Ronnie” [Corbett]. Otherwise, it is Davis himself who raises the issue, saying, after a question about the Olympic motto “faster, higher, stronger”: “I’ll take two of those.” The nine celebrities in the grid include a one-off big star in the central square – James Corden and Dame Edna in the first two shows – and comedians Tim Vine and Joe Wilkinson as permanent fixtures. Vine, always a clever performer, has immediately understood that the trick is to use the question from the contestant as a cue for a gag from your repertoire (“You’ve done well to pick me on this because ...”). The other seats are shared between TV presenters (Charlotte Hawkins, Andi Peters), and younger comedian-actors, including Sara Pascoe and Tom Rosenthal. Unlike on University Challenge, where the bunk-bedding of the two teams is a visual trick, the nine celebrities really do sit in three banks of three on an elaborate scaffolding set, which allows male guests (James Corden and Tom Rosenthal in the opening show) some laddish banter about their angle of sight to the women guests. The return of Celebrity Squares has had some probably unwanted publicity from the comedian Bridget Christie, whose new show An Ungrateful Woman (an Edinburgh hit about to tour the UK) has possibly justified its title, in the eyes of ITV, by including a brilliant riff about her participation in a recording; she admits she only agreed to do it in order to raise quick money to make a film about female genital mutilation. Whether or not this motivation is acknowledged on the show we will have to wait to see because, coincidentally or not, the lists so far released by ITV reveal that the show featuring Christie is not among the first three to be screened. While Christie’s admirers will have to wait to see the facts behind her gags, Davis is revealed as a sharp and likable question-master, Vine a masterful second-banana, and the show has done well to attract guests with the star-wattage of Everage and Corden. You have to wonder, though, whether it might not have been more satisfying to find for these names a new format rather than Celebrity Squares with a facelift. |