Dear diary, today I watched Scarlett Moffatt from Gogglebox get dragged around a lube-filled paddling pool by a Jesus-haired wrestler with an eight-pack. Dear diary, today I watched Bobby Norris from Towie leap like a cat between two stacks of tyres while a grunting bodybuilder called Enormo tried to decapitate him with a soft-play wrecking ball. Dear diary, today I saw Chris Hughes from Love Island try and competitively pole dance only to be entirely outperformed by Kimberly from the Pussycat Dolls, and somehow all this was for charity. Dear diary, I watched Apocalypse Wow (Friday, 10pm, ITV2) and reality doesn’t feel real any more.
Honestly, I don’t know where to start. With the rough format, I suppose. So it is a physical gameshow where celebrities compete to earn money for charity. They compete by playing nominally fun but occasionally torturous games against wrestlers, pole dancers, and goths: climbing a pole to put glittered tokens in a basket, for instance; or trying to light candles being whipped out by a fire performer.
They do this in a dome-shaped cage while AJ Odudu (from ITV’s last fever-dream concept, Don’t Rock the Boat) and Donna Preston (Tracey from Hey Tracey!, another “I’m on acid and I invented a TV show!” show) alternatively berate and congratulate them. It’s sort of like if The Crystal Maze and Gladiators and Taskmaster and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Robot Wars and Get Your Own Back all clambered, pissed up, into a blender.
Bizarrely, impossibly, it works: this may be because, disorientated throughout, the celebrities drop a little of their gleam and, occasionally, display a facial expression I can only describe as “pure fear”. Odudu is the perfect host here: charming when she needs to be, teasing and knowing when the game is in full swing, playing the good cop (just about) to Preston’s bad cop/Immortan Joe hybrid. The best celebrity formats are when the participants hover more towards the DM-on-Instagram, get-drunk-in-the-green-room-together, possibly-shag-in-the-toilets reality they exist in when the cameras aren’t rolling, and Apocalypse Wow has this in spades. You truly feel the real entertainment happened at the wrap party afterwards: phone numbers being exchanged, gimps being sent out to the shops for more booze, the lube wrestler – finally out of the shower – trying to lift Moffatt over his head.
It’s fun, then, is what I’m saying. Very, very pure fun, but also very, very ITV2 fun. I often find I watch most ITV2 shows completely by accident, when I have fallen half asleep on the sofa during Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and found myself, bleary and confused, halfway through a rap battle on Don’t Hate the Playaz. Apocalypse Wow is absolutely not going to help me next time that happens. Take this preview as a warning, I suppose: ITV2 has finally pushed the boundaries of television far beyond what I ever thought possible. Next time you wake up with half a pizza on your lap, holding a can of lager with a cigarette in it, this is what you’re going to wake abruptly up to.
