While Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear hunker down in their respective corners to lick wounds and make plans, an uneasy tension has fallen across the country. Without a deliberately stupid male-orientated programme to keep them entertained on Sunday nights, there’s a chance that Britain’s blokes will soon be forced to make their own entertainment; blundering into the streets in their ugliest shirts to jostle lampposts and be disappointingly sexist to bins. This, obviously, would be a disaster.
Full marks to Channel 4, then, for attempting to fill the Top Gear slot with Experimental, a show that couldn’t be any more male, or knowingly dumb, if it was presented by Danny Dyer and a Crayola scribble of a willy. Experimental’s premise is simple enough – man watches dangerous-looking YouTube video, man replicates dangerous-looking YouTube video, repeat – but it’s giddy, gloriously moronic stuff.
And, based on the first episode, Experimental might have what it takes to be a Top Gear killer. Its hosts are the kind of agreeable jerks this sort of series requires. Tim Shaw is an engineer so well-versed in banter that his wife once sold his Lotus for 50p after hearing him chat up Jodie Marsh on the radio, and Buddy Munro is essentially Bear Grylls after a breathtaking succession of bad life choices. Tim’s job involves watching YouTube stunts – they included playing tennis on the wing of an airborne plane and wakeboarding on a barstool – and Buddy’s job involves being goaded into recreating them and muttering muffled swearwords underneath his crash helmet.
In this sense, the show is actually closer in form to something like Mythbusters or Bang Goes the Theory, but its heart is pure Top Gear. A nicely put-together greatest hits of Top Gear, in fact, full of fake bombast, off-colour humour and all the high-octane stunts that the hosts would still perform if they didn’t all look like they were riddled with the latter stages of gout.
That said, if last night’s episode suffered at all, it was due to a creeping sense of competency. Every stunt attempted more or less went off without a hitch, which made the hour feel a little one-note. Top Gear was a success because it was about people who were ambitious but rubbish. Experimental is a show about people who are ambitious but competent. If he was watching, Clarkson will have been spinning in his stonewash.
But Experimental deserves to do well, thanks to the charming chemistry between the hosts. Tim and Buddy have a weird master/dog relationship, thanks in part to Tim’s unfortunate resemblance to Piers Morgan, but they seem to absolutely adore each other. Whenever anything goes right, they hop about with joy before thundering in for bearhugs. The warmth seems completely genuine, too, in the same way that occasionally made Jackass so disarmingly sweet. I have a feeling that Experimental will be one to stick with. That’s unless Chris Evans snaps up Tim and Buddy for Top Gear, of course. It would be a shame if he did, because this has the potential to be so much better than that.
While Channel 4 tries to be Sunday night BBC2, BBC1 is desperate to become Sunday night ITV. Partners in Crime managed to muscle in on ITV’s two biggest strengths – Agatha Christie adaptations and chintzy, go-nowhere period dramas. Ostensibly this is a six-part drama series about a pair of amateur detectives out of their depth in postwar London, but episode one could just have easily functioned as a novelty Keep Calm and Carry On tea tray, or a Laura Ashley infomercial, or the sole inspiration for The Great British Bake Off. Labradors bounded around with their tongues flopped out. Married couples slept in separate beds. Children were sent away to boarding school with studiously unemotional shoulder-pats. If it had been any more repressed, it would have burst a blood vessel.
Episode one was tremendously slow in places, but it still had its bright points. It was nice to see a version of David Walliams that didn’t spend the bulk of his time doing hopeless Frankie Howerd impressions at Simon Cowell, for instance. And there’s a sly humour to it; on meeting an amputee who stayed in the same wartime hospital as her milquetoast husband, Jessica Raine’s Tuppence Beresford blithely asked, “Were you hit by the catering van as well?”
There are signs that the series will get darker as it continues. The shadows are getting longer, the trilbies more sinisterly angled – but it’s not enough to convince that this isn’t just Sunday night TV by numbers, the sort of thing designed to make people glad to return to work the next day.
